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Message: [QUOTE="sutomcat, post: 495123, member: 27"] I don't think SU expects the football HC to raise the money for facilities improvements himself. That would normally be done by the people working for the SUAD; experts at doing fund raising. The problem is, the SUAD people have not been successful at raising funds for SU AD projects. The 3 major projects completed in the last 10 years are 1) the Melo Center 2) new Fieldturf practice fields, new Fieldturf field in the Dome 3) new scoreboards for all SU athletic facilities The SU AD was unable to get anything done for the Melo Center. JB took the bull into his own hands and with the help of his wife, got the job done. The new Fieldturf was paid for with money Jake had left for a rainy day beofre he retired. Again, it was not paid for by fund raising efforts by the SUAD. My understanding is that the new scoreboards were paid for by Pepsi. Nice job by TGD and his staff to arrange this. But again, no funds were raised, no donations were made by SU alums/supporters of the university, etc. The SU AD has been trying to raise money for the IPF for years. I believe they spent most of what was raised to retrofit Manley as an indoor practice facility as a temporary measure, but we all know this is only a temporary measure. Not sure where the money came from for the other improvements recently made to Manley. Was it borrowed? Was the money raised? Regardless, it was not a significant amount of money. DM saw what happened with the Melo Center and to his credit, tried to raise the funds himself for the IPF/better treatment facilities/etc. He failed. I think part of the problem is that we don't have professional fund raisers trying to get these things done. People like DM and Chris Gedney will try their best to make things happen but I believe fund raising is a very difficult, involved thing. You need to get people who really know how to do it in order to gain traction. I see evidence of this based on my personal experiences and the experiences many others on the board have reported, where we, clearly people that should be being targeted for these initiatives, are not getting contacted. Ever. The other part of the problem is that we as a fanbase are not doing a good job supporting the SU sports programs. This goes for the big pockets people that make multi million dollar donations as well as the medium and small sized donors (that in my opinion have been largely ignored over the past 10 years, perhaps longer). There are other contributing factors: the economy has been bad for an extended period. And perhaps most of all, SU has been running an extended fund raising initiative to raise 1 billion dollars. The [URL='http://www.syr.edu/news/articles/2012/campaign-09-12.html']Campaign for Syracuse [/URL]University surpassed $1 billion in September. Maybe this extremely ambitious campaign drained resources from many donors who might have normally made donations to athletics over the last few years? I know I have been contacted to donate to the Campaign for Syracuse a number of times every year. Just wish the athletic department tried even a tenth as hard as the university did to raise funds. [/QUOTE]

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