I understand everyone’s opinions and agree with most of them to a point.
@TheSilasSonRising @dtm1997 @Supersizethatorder-mutt and others in this thread have completely valid points. I was not trying to dissuade engagement, ie IPTAY like efforts, but we need the whole strategy.
1) GT athletics needs massive cash infusions for about 10 years if not more. $75M/year, maybe more.
* From where we are now we need a large number of really large donations each year. These typically come from the extremely successful who have either made a bunch over a very long time or are quick hitters. Something like a combination of one $10-25M, 5-10 each $5M, and then 20-25 each $1M type of campaign. Every single year.
* Some in this category of people don’t want to give to athletics & prefer research but we should ply them for $50-100K and/or get it written into their wills.
* Need to re-engage the mid-career people. They’re busy with families, business, community work, etc. Net worth as been established on here is in the $2-5M range. Getting them to open up for $10-25K gets them in the giving spirit so when the move up to the big donations they already have a history of giving. Maybe we can only get them to pony up $1k but it’s better than nothing.
* Then the newbies. Just getting started out. Buying new cars, here comes the baby, I want to take a trip to Europe or I’m not funding my 401k enough crowd. Not rich, not poor, but have all kinds of reason to not donate. Get them donating now & 30 years later they’re donating at a much higher level.
* Somehow we need to convince our millionaires that $50/month is not going to kill them & if that’s too much they need to quit complaining about GT sports.
2) GT athletics needs to work on its culture.
* We like being nerds but we do it in a way that pisses people off. There are people that don’t splice genes, split atoms or design rockets that are not dumb. They run successful companies, are community leaders, etc & they didn’t graduate from GT. There’s only one place I can think of where the gene pool is substantially defective, but those people deliver our pizzas, clean our restrooms and take out our trash. They do have some value & we should pity them.
* Our last regime & diehard supporters allegedly ran off the stars from the previous regime and made them feel unwelcome. It soured a large portion of our fanbase apparently. Now we have some doing the same thing. It’s not good for GT athletics. It’s GT athletics and the fanbase needs to get along & stop warring with each other. I do not see this at any other school quite frankly.
3) Maybe we can make student athlete’s lives easier rather than harder. New President needs to get the academic staff in line. GT’s precious reputation is not going to be soiled if the kicker gets a waiver to take biology instead of physics. If classes are not offered at reasonable times, then accommodations need to be made. There’s roughly 1800 academics on staff and another 6000 administrative. Someone should be able to figure out how to have a class at 0800 instead of 1800 or have more than one.
We didn’t get here in 1 day & frankly we won’t get out of it in 1 day either. Even if someone dumped $500M on us tomorrow we wouldn’t have the infrastructure to deploy it properly because all our people know how to do is make do with little or nothing.
I hope our President and AD have a lot of talent & have a vision/strategy to rebuild our programs. What other choice do we have?
