Long: Hogs not done building for future
The No. 1 Collegiate Story of the Year in the Northwest Arkansas Times published Sunday. No surprise to some, the sweeping changes in the Arkansas athletic department topped this year’s list.
For the piece, I spoke with several in the UA athletic department and those that surround the program. The longest interview was with Jeff Long, who spoke with me in a sit-down interview for about 45 minutes on Dec. 17. The interview hit a lot of topics, most of which appeared in the story Sunday. But here are a few very interesting nuggets in the discussion that concern the UA’s future and didn’t make it to print:
Long
On what capital improvement projects he’d like to tackle next:
In the Broyles Center: Football office space, a new locker room, meeting rooms, more space for athletic training and sports medicine, a new equipment room, and players’ lounge.
“We have some work to do,” Long said. “It’s time to put some resources into football and we’re committed to that.”
On the possibility of building a basketball practice facility:
“I’d like to see us have that,” Long said. “For one, it allows us to alleviate the academic conflicts we have with men’s and women’s basketball programs with just one practicie facility.”
Right now, the women’s team practices somewhere in the neighborhood between 12 and 3 p.m. The men practice somewhere near 3 and 6 p.m. Many classes take place during the women’s practice time.
Other benefits?
“One of the things we can help the community with is doing concerts, doing shows, doing programming in Bud Walton,” Long said. “We do a number of things now in Barnhill and some in Bud Walton but, really, the basketball programs start working September through April. There’s little opportunity to displace your basketball practices.”
Ten of 12 schools in the SEC have or are in the planning stages of building basketball practice facilities. Obviously, this would help Arkansas in recruiting, Long said. He hopes to have plans in place in a few years.
“It depends on the economy and, also, those fans — those supporters who have the means — stepping forward and agreeing that this is something worthwhile for our campus community,” Long said. “We will have to do it with private funding. There’s really no other way to do it other than gifts.”
Perhaps AstroPlay or a new synthetic surface instead of the natural grass at Razorback Stadium?
“We tend to go back and forth,” Long said. “… It’s something we should look at. It’s something we’ll look at.”
Other tidbits:
— The UA is looking at the possibility of scheduling a throwback basketball game in Barnhill Arena next season.
“The truth is, we’d have to do significant amount of work to get Barnhill back to a basketball venue because it really hasn’t been one in quite some time,” Long said. “We may only be able to do an exhibition game because we might not be able to get a shot clock and some of the things you have to have for an official game.”
— Long said he’d like be more involved with fund-raising in 2009 than he has in his first year at the UA.
“You never feel like you’ve got it all done. There’s much more for us to do, to build our program,” Long said. “There’s much more for us to do in fundraising and we’re just now starting to scratch that surface. That’s the key to our future. I know that takes a personal touch, that takes me getting out there and working with Harold Horton and our fund-raising staff. … I haven’t done that as much as I would like.”
– Brandon Marcello
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