Lamar re-institutes football with great energy

HOUSTON For much of the afternoon Tuesday, Ray Woodard sat by himself at a table well away from the spotlight reading preseason media guides and talking on a cell phone.

Woodard, the friendly, new Lamar University football coach, had more of a distance presence at Southland Conference Media Days. But he's a major face in the league's future.

This year, Woodard joked he could bring no players for preseason interviews because he really has none.

He's building on a dream a big, long-awaited dream.

Lamar, a longtime SLC member that won four league titles from 1964-71, is bringing back its football program, something it disbanded in 1989 because of financial reasons.

And football is apparently returning to the Beaumont, Texas, school with new vitality and more resources than ever. The school will field a football team for the first time in more than two decades in 2010 and will play a full SLC schedule in 2011.

And that will have a major effect on University of Central Arkansas' scheduling.

The way the SLC schedule is currently set for an eight-member football league, the last playing date of the season is reserved for a "rivalry game." In the case of UCA, that's McNeese State, a stretch, but the other three matchups (Northwestern State/SFA, Texas State/Sam Houston State and Southeastern Louisiana/Nicholls State) have deeper roots and more tradition.

Beginning in 2011, McNeese State will renew its old and intense rivalry with Lamar on the last playing date. The universities, which will play a non-conference game to open the 2010, are slightly more than an hour apart and have almost the same prime recruiting area.

The conference at that time will have nine members, so each team will have a bye week at some point in the conference season.

Where does that leave UCA?

For the first two years beginning in 2011, the Bears will have an open date on the last playing date, a week before the beginning of the NCAA Football Championship Subdivision playoffs. That's an open conference date. UCA officials are free to schedule a nonconference game, but one at that date can be challenging.

"But that's only for the first two years," said Tom Burnett, SLC commissioner. "With nine teams, the open date at the end of the season will be rotated, and UCA is first in the rotation."

Theoretically, after the first two years of the late open playing date, UCA will not have a conference bye on that date for another 16 years (with the home-and-home rotation scheduling block among the nine teams).

As the schedule rotates, teams will have to move about their "rivalry games" a bit. But such a game only has special meaning at the end of the season if it decides a conference championship or a playoff berth. Otherwise, a true rivalry game has the same meaning any time it is played.

Longtime UCA fans will recall that Ken Stephens, one of the most successful coaches in UCA history who laid much of the foundation for the highly successful modern tradition, left UCA to become head coach at Lamar from 1982-85, when many of the school's financial issues were beginning to intensify.

The culture at Lamar and for Lamar football now cannot be compared with what was going on when the university was floundering and struggling in many areas in the 1980s.

Now, according to Woodard, who had been a successful coach in the junior college ranks at Navarro, things are much brighter and have much more vitality. Many of the university's facilities are being rebuilt with hurricane relief money plus an energetic capital campaign under James Simmons, university president, and Billy Tubbs, athletic director, who share a bold vision.

Simmons doesn't come from the "jock" ranks. He's an accomplished musician on clarinet, saxophone and piano and is a former band director who rose through the development ranks at Lamar. He seems every bit as proactive in marketing and developing the university on all levels as Lu Hardin is at UCA.

"I had just brought in a great recruiting class at Navarro, and I interviewed for the job with a whole lot of reasons about why not to go to Lamar," said Woodard, a former player at Sam Houston State. "I kept running into a consistent theme of why to go to Lamar. Dr. Simmons convinced me that he wanted not only to bring back a football program but to build a great one."

Anyone who is familiar with the rich tradition and fertile recruiting grounds for athletes in Golden Triangle of Texas (Beaumont-Port Arthur-Orange) plus nearby southwest Louisiana and the I-10 corridor from New Orleans to Houston realizes a championship team can be built at Lamar with mostly backyard talent. The area has generally been as rich in athletes as it has in oil and petrochemical plants and refineries.

"There are an awful lot of good football players within 60 miles of our campus," Woodard said.

When Lamar dropped football, its Cardinal Stadium was one of the best in the Southland. The stadium, vacant for two decades, now is being updated and remodeled with a new press box and new seating. Included in a multi-million dollar renovation of the Lamar campus is an modern athletic complex with offices, training and mentoring facilities and locker rooms.

"We're going from no football facilities, and a neglected stadium to what I think will be the best athletic complex and football facility in the conference and I know that's saying a lot," Woodard said.

The appealing part of what Woodard has found now at Lamar is the absence of college football in an area where football is king (basic high school scrimmages have attracted from 6,000 to 10,0000 fans through the years in the Golden Triangle) has created a great void and an intense desire. The Lamar students overwhelmingly approved (79 percent to 21 percent) a special fee to help with the funding in re-instating football.

"It's a great football area and now it's an area that is a hungry area for Lamar to have football again," said Woodard, who grew up almost next door to McNeese's Cowboy Stadium in Lake Charles. "The support I've received throughout the community has been unbelievable. The momentum has been building for so long. Everywhere, I go, you can just feel the great hunger and excitement for what we're doing. And there's great excitement about having a football rivalry with McNeese again."

And players?

"There's an appeal to a some players about getting on the ground level of something new," Woodard said. "That's a certain appeal that through the years as something develops to be able to point back to something you helped build the foundation.'

UCA officials and coaches can identify with that dream in the school's fledgling days of recruiting to NCAA Division I.

In similar fashion, there's another football giant on the horizon that will make the league even more fiercely competitive.

The Cardinals are not only returning to their traditional football nesting grounds, they are apparently preparing themselves to do some chirping.

(Sports columnist David McCollum can be reached at 505-1235 or david.mccollum@thecabin.net)