What reality TV is missing is a show on tree-cutting services. My neighbor had several trees cut back today, and it was high-level entertainment. There was high-wire danger (tree-cutters dangling from a rope with a chain saw), drama (are they going to avoid the house and fence?) and some intriguing sky-walking characters.
Tennessee is beginning a $15 million project to make 102-year-old Neyland Stadium the rare college football venue with a full Wi-Fi system deployment, my colleague Bret McCormick reports. The school is shooting for full deployment by the 2024 season, with all ticketing areas and plazas and some of the seating bowl ready by the 2023 season. The Wi-Fi work falls under a larger $180 million project that’s improving numerous aspects of the fan experience, including widening concourses from 12 feet to 30 feet.
The project was already in the works when AD Danny White was hired in 2021, but he and his team quickly realized Wi-Fi , and better connectivity in general, needed to be part of the improvements. “Danny and our administration have been very public about how we want to utilize our construction projects and all our decisions to modernize one of the most historic brands in college sports,” said Tennessee Deputy AD and COO Ryan Alpert, “and, beyond that, to be the most effective and efficient business we can be.”
Like most college venues, the nearly 102,000-seat Neyland has a distributed antenna system (DAS; a cellular system) but never had WiFi. The new system will include roughly 2,000 Wi-Fi access points throughout the stadium (roughly one for every 55 seats), primarily mounted under seats.
High-density Wi-Fi will be targeted at ingress areas to help with digital ticketing and people flow. Aruba built the equipment for the system, which was designed by MS Benbow out of New Orleans, and installed by Massey Electric, an electrical firm that’s worked on Neyland Stadium for more than 25 years.
The system will be configured for Wi-Fi 6e, which isn’t approved for outdoor use yet, but almost certainly will be in the near future. The stronger connection will enable myriad business opportunities and should have a major impact on concessionaire Aramark, which will be able to hard-wire every point-of-sale unit into the Wi-Fi system to speed up transaction processing. Additionally, the stadium system will be integrated to that of the larger campus, so that users from campus — i.e. students — won’t have to sign on to a different Wi-Fi system.
“This lady gets to shine eight times a year,” MS Benbow Senior Technology Consultant Kit Keen said about the stadium. “They might do a concert, but for the most part it’s strictly football. The fact they’re putting pervasive, high-density Wi-Fi all over, all the way out to the street … for the university to take that step, it’s a big step.”
Neyland Stadium will be the rare college football venue with a full Wi-Fi system deployment
When it comes to finding candidates for mid-level jobs and up, hiring takes a lot of effort. College leaders say they’re serious about taking an active role in hiring at all levels, but it’s admittedly easier to just pull a few resumes out of the stack than it is to go recruit the best candidates.
“We hear people say how important it is to find the right people all the time,” said Drew Turner, CS Connect’s co-founder and president of Collegiate Sports Associates. “But there doesn’t seem to be the appetite for the effort it takes to find the right people. So, that’s been surprising. … Can you imagine if your coach just put out an ad and said, ‘Hey, we’re looking for a quarterback.’ You wouldn’t be very competitive.”
CS Connect has signed 35 schools to its hiring service and about 8,000 individuals have created profiles on the platform. That puts Turner’s platform in the middle of a lot of job openings and hires. I connected with Turner earlier today to find out what trends he sees on the hiring front in college athletic departments.
One that stood out is turnover. “We’re losing a lot of really talented people to jobs outside of athletics,” Turner said. “I believe we’ve been slow to evolve and react. I’m worried about what that’s going to mean for the ADs and the future leaders over the next 10 to 15 years if we don’t react and evolve in the way we treat our employees. It’s not just compensation, but also quality of life.”
Not surprisingly, the hottest genres within athletics are athletic trainers, creative/video services/graphics and revenue generation. Those are areas where there just aren’t enough candidates to meet the demand. Turner: “Every campus we visit, they say they don’t have enough trainers.”
A special SEC committee is contemplating various penalties to curb the issue of fans storming the football field, including forfeiture of the game or loss of a future home game, which seem like drastic measures. So, I asked events expert Jeff Spoerndle from Best Crowd Management why the NFL never seems to have these problems.
Spoerndle highlighted several key differences, starting with venues. Most NFL stadiums have taller walls around the field that discourage fans from coming over. The clubs also put premium seating around the field level, creating an extra layer to get past.
College stadiums have lower walls and typically no premium seats to clear to get to the field. Find the access areas to the field, Spoerndle said, and stop them up with uniformed security. Most of the time, those access points are coming from the student section. If security can slow down the first few rows of students before they reach the field, guards have a fighting chance. But once they start coming over the wall, it’s probably over. “You might have to eliminate the first few rows of seats, which might mean sacrificing some revenue,” Spoerndle said.
There’s also a difference is who’s coming over the wall at NFL games compared to college games. Spoerndle: “At an NFL game, if you jump on the field, you’re likely losing your season tickets, and you might be going to jail. At college games, you probably have students that start rushing the field and everybody comes with them. It’s just a difference in culture.”
Schools have to be willing to put up with some bad publicity if they’re serious about keeping fans off the field. It’s going be written that schools are against fans having fun if they crack down on security. Stopping the field storming means that schools have to stop celebrating it. Spoerndle: “There are some scenarios where it can be properly controlled. There are safe ways to do it.”
When will we know the NIL marketplace is beginning to mature, even slightly? Bill Carter tells us what he’s watching in this month’s NIL Corner.
It starts with investment from businesses outside of NIL; consolidation and/or strategic partnerships from many of the start-ups in the space; and an educational resource that helps businesses identify best NIL practices and trends.
Check out Carter’s full entry here.
- SBJ profiled Mark Dyer and his growing ticketing business — Taymar Sales U. Here are a couple of his keys to running the business: he never delegates hiring; more than 75% of his hires are people that Taymar recruits; he looks for people with minor league baseball on their resume.
- About 41% of male college athletes said in a survey that they had been told about an incident of sexual assault or domestic violence, but that they were largely unaware of their school’s procedures on what to do next, and many mistrusted school and law enforcement officials to handle an investigation, notes ESPN.
- Ball State AD Jeff Mitchell told the Muncie Star Press that the program’s Feed The Bird Foundation is “arguably one of the most sophisticated collectives in the Group of Five.” Mitchell said his connection to the group, “I have to be at arm’s length. It’s just kind of the way that athletic directors and coaches have to be with regard to the collective.”
