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Updates to the Joel?

donaldross said:
Duke, with Cameron, did more in the 2 decades before K then we have in 100 years. Yes, build small, give student preferred seating and hire 30 year old coaches. If they don’t work, hire another one.
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Serious question- other than Duke with K, where has the "build small, give students preferred seating and hire 30 year old coaches" worked?
 
Wouldn’t an on campus arena be a mess if we wanted to uphold our on campus security standards?
 
LilburnDeac said:
Serious question- other than Duke with K, where has the "build small, give students preferred seating and hire 30 year old coaches" worked?
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Gonzaga, Villanova, Florida, Michigan State.

Before that UNC, Kansas, Butler, should I keep going?
 
Arsene Wenger said:
Currie is right on the NIL era so far and Forbes is the perfect coach for it. Could you imagine Wellman trying to maneuver in this landscape? Dook and UNC will be down for the next five years. NOW is the time for Wake Forest.
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Interest in college bb is at historically-low levels, to the point no one pays it much attention until after the Super Bowl, which makes it roughly a 5-6 week season. The whole future of college athletics and in particular men's basketball is in a precarious, unknown place, in particular basketball where teenagers of a certain skill level have numerous options to monetize themselves beyond a DI scholarship. If I had billions sitting around I might take a flyer and help front a new arena for Wake, but as a mere multimillionaire I'd sit it out for a while just to see where this whole thing is going.
 
DownEastDeac said:
Interest in college bb is at historically-low levels, to the point no one pays it much attention until after the Super Bowl, which makes it roughly a 5-6 week season. The whole future of college athletics and in particular men's basketball is in a precarious, unknown place, in particular basketball where teenagers of a certain skill level have numerous options to monetize themselves beyond a DI scholarship. If I had billions sitting around I might take a flyer and help front a new arena for Wake, but as a mere multimillionaire I'd sit it out for a while just to see where this whole thing is going.
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This is a good post.

Is a $20M donation to football or a basketball arena going to have more bang for the buck? Or putting it in NIL for hoops recruits?
 
donaldross said:
Gonzaga, Villanova, Florida, Michigan State.

Before that UNC, Kansas, Butler, should I keep going?
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The Smith Center opened in 1986 and somehow UNC-CH has survived with students sitting in the end zone.
 
BiffTannen said:
The Smith Center opened in 1986 and somehow UNC-CH has survived with students sitting in the end zone.
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Yea and they hate it and are working on dumping it. The Carmichael/Woollen model was infinitely better for them. Dean had a damn freight train rolling in 1986. A product of his being so young, hungry, and having the right gym.
 
PhDeac said:
This is a good post.

Is a $20M donation to football or a basketball arena going to have more bang for the buck? Or putting it in NIL for hoops recruits?
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Counterpoint is that boomer generational wealth is staring down the barrel of significant estate taxes, so there's some liquidation of assets happening for charitable giving.
 
donaldross said:
Yea and they hate it and are working on dumping it. The Carmichael/Woollen model was infinitely better for them. Dean had a damn freight train rolling in 1986. A product of his being so young, hungry, and having the right gym.
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Dean Smith was 55 years old in 1986.
 
BiffTannen said:
Yeah, a 40-minute walk is a bit much.

The elephant in the room is that we need to find a way to take over Old Town Club and make it part of campus. Shorten #13 on the way out to University Parkway.
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If the King couldn't do it, it can't be done.
 
BiffTannen said:
The Smith Center opened in 1986 and somehow UNC-CH has survived with students sitting in the end zone.
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Carolina basketball has probably 20x more donors and season ticket holders than Wake does. I understand the problem of having to placate donors vs students - for larger schools with larger basketball followings, but Wake isn’t Carolina or Kentucky. We don’t have enough blue hair season ticket holders to justify pushing students into the end zones
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
Carolina basketball has probably 20x more donors and season ticket holders than Wake does. I understand the problem of having to placate donors vs students - for larger schools with larger basketball followings, but Wake isn’t Carolina or Kentucky. We don’t have enough blue hair season ticket holders to justify pushing students into the end zones
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I'm not sure that's entirely true. In fact the opposite might actually be true. We have to squeeze more out of our individual donors. Tickets are actually as much a vehicle to incentivize giving to new donors and community donors as accommodating long time donors. I don't believe it has to be either/or. There are likely ways to make everyone happy here. I would just love to see more consistent engagement from students. Empty seats for ticketholders at least generate revenue. The fact remains that someone has to sit behind the basket, and students can have a meaningful atmospheric impact from back there on shooting.
 
I'm looking for an example of what I want to see Wake build, and I think Alabama's new arena is exactly what I want. It's about 10,000 seats, it looks great from the outside, tons of glass and natural light. $183 million. That should be easy.
 
Right. Carolina could build a 30,000-seat arena and extort money from everyone, force the kids to hang upside down from the ceiling, and still be okay.

But we're giving seats to the students in the lower bowl in the end zone, like 97% of every other P5 college basketball school, and we've got the problem ?
 
I’m of the mindset that a more impressive, more intimidating home court advantage would pay for itself by creating an exciting environment vs reserving all the closest seats to the floor for donors.
 
If the current Ath Dept doesn't see the need to do at least something about the Joel, then they aren't the AD that I thought they were.
 
BiffTannen said:
we've got the problem ?
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No reason to be defensive, this entire thread is just discussing hypothetical improvements for a new or renovated arena. Just because an element was normal for arenas built in the 70s and 80s doesn’t mean we need to keep it for a new arena 35 years later
 
donaldross said:
None of these strategies will ever work.

Our fan base is the same as everyone elses and always will be:

1) Old people will sit for most of the game.

2) Students will come if they aren't crapped on and shoved behind the basket. You will always have 500 students who are excited at Wake and 4K who aren't.

It's not about convincing people to change. People are people. It's about designing a building that uses people, and their natural tendency, best. That's what makes the Cameron design so timeless and why it has been copied so well at Florida, Michigan State, etc.

8-9 rows of student risers between the free throw lines. A cut -- so the top donors -- can sit just above them (they all love those seats). The rest of the students who aren't hungry enough to get in there shoved elsewhere in the 7500 range, tight wall build. No cavernous overhangs designed for circuses and tractor pulls.

Will this mean we go to the Final 4 every year? Of course not. Can we go to the final 4 once or twice without it. Of course. UNLV had a brief run too with a cheating, likable gun slinger. We can as well and we should be trying that too! But if we as alums want to give our team the best chance to win over the long haul, we need the proper college basketball venue for our size base. Winston-Salem blows and our alums aren't staying there. Just like Durham blows. You have to account for that recognizing the size of your normal crowd for a 9pm weeknight bubble game against Clemson. You don't build your Church for Easter Sunday.
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How many games did you attend at Cameron during the 1994-1995 season, when K was out and Duke was terrible? I went to a bunch, and it was a lame venue. Very low energy. K made the building, not the opposite.

I think a small arena fits our enrollment, and in general should be the way we go, whether we renovate the Joel or build a new arena. But I am under no illusions that the arena will make a difference in the success of our program - that will be determined by the coach and his staff because that has been shown time and again, across all schools and all sports, to be the key to success in college sports. Clemson has had a 9,000 seat arena for 50 years, yet that has not led to sustained success. Why? - because the key is the coaching staff.
 
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