honoluluadvertiser.com

Sponsored by:

Comment, blog & share photos

Log in | Become a member
The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Friday, February 18, 2005

Raising prices is step to just catch up

By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist

Now that the University of Hawai'i is raising premium seat charges in football and instituting so-called "high-roller" sections, the Warriors can catch up with Southern California, Michigan and others of the upper crust of the college football world, right?

No, yesterday's unanimous approval by the Board of Regents was more about trying to keep up with Fresno State, Boise State and others of a level more akin to UH's situation.

If the $3,500 to $15,000 UH will be asking of corporate and well-heeled individual donors in 2005 in return for blocks of seats in the loge level at Aloha Stadium gives you a faint feeling, then you don't want to know what the big boys have been demanding — and getting.

Let's just say that they endow positions — at $300,000 or more, each — and coaches. On the doors of the football coaches' offices at USC's Heritage Hall are thick gold plates that give testament to who writes the six- and seven-figure checks that pay the folks who work there.

Be assured it wasn't face-value ticket prices that paid Norm Chow's $500,000 salary as the Trojans' offensive coordinator last season. Or, the $200,000-plus Duane Akina earned as a co-defensive coordinator at Texas.

With the regents' action yesterday, UH sports stepped into a new era, the fast-paced and even faster-spending athletic arms race where success comes at a price. Albeit on a lesser scale than the super powers.

"Expenses are going up nationwide and we have to compete," Riley Wallace, UH men's basketball coach, forcefully told the regents yesterday in arguing in favor of what he called "Gucci Row" premium-priced seats. "We will never pay the full bill with (just) ticket sales alone. Never."

Sadly, Wallace is correct. And, gone, unfortunately, is the comfortable era of entitlement when fans could cling to certain seats for decades, as some have in Halawa since the opening of Aloha Stadium in 1975.

In its place has come, by necessity, a harder edge, bottom-line enterprise where UH's immediate aims are to keep up with Fresno State and Boise State and hope to close ground on some Pac-10 teams. And, it comes at a price.

Revealingly, when 'Ahahui Koa Anuenue officials started looking for a model in which to recast UH fund-raising, they went not to Texas or Oklahoma but to Fresno State. They visited FSU and brought in Pat Ogle, head of the Bulldog Foundation for consultation.

Ogle said he doesn't know of a mid-major or higher Division I-A school that doesn't have some form of premium and high-roller seating. "It is everywhere," he said. "It is what it takes to compete."

Not having full-on luxury boxes to sell as Fresno State does in its football and basketball venues and Boise State is preparing to build, UH has gone to peddling to the well-heeled its best available seating: courtside in basketball and loge in football. Coming soon to an arena near you, too, will be volleyball courtside seating.

The money UH hopes to raise from the new Ali'i, Anuenue and Director-level contributors who will be initially asked to pony up $3,500 to $15,000 — rising to $5,000 to $20,000 in 2007 — for four to eight football seats plus arena seats, parking and other rewards is the biggest step in that direction.

While Koa Anuenue officials have done their best to displace the fewest amount of patrons — 234 corporations and individuals will have to ante up to retain their loge seating or be relocated — inevitably some will be lost.

Athletic director Herman Frazier compares it to being caught in the predicament of an apartment dweller. "Sometimes the rent goes up," he said.

And, with premium seating and high-roller seats, the rent has clearly risen at UH, one of the last Division I-A holdouts.

Having embarked upon this new — for UH — course, the Warriors are not without increased responsibility, either. Along with the bucks come expectations.

Now it is up to Frazier and his department to balance the budget and make wise use of the money.

Reach Ferd Lewis at flewis@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8044.