Seawolves Fans

Quote from: Chairman of the Board on June 05, 2020, 02:21:00 pm

its a good question.

firstly- how can it be a good location when such a large portion of LIers won't attend SB, but would rather go to Buff/Bing/ua?

secondly, we are isolated.  LI is a bubble, full stop.  hard to get to.  traffic.  hard to get out.  high prices.  difficult people.  scarce open space.  not gown-friendly.  it's the reason you see LIers go up to bingo but not bingo kids down to LI.  rinse/repeat with another upstate region.  add that to #1, and we lose across the board.

while we are on the topic. LIers arent the easiest to get along with.  because it's insular.  ask an SB grad from a different region how that feels.  it's part of the reason those students last two semesters and split.

we say we are NY-accessible, but we all know it's really not.  2hrs on the train, or deal with 90min of driving and good luck finding/paying for parking, college kids!

realistically, the large population we draw off of is LI, queens, brooklyn, bronx.  none of which either have strong sports (relatively speaking), nor care about sports. 

add to that- that each one of those kids CAN and most WILL go home every weekend.

because of the train.  geography.

and the campus is in the middle of affluent suburbs.  it hinders off campus housing; college kids cannot afford an 800k house with 25k in taxes.  so they stay home, stay in the miserably overfilled dorms, or move to selden, PJ, mt. sinai, nowhere near campus.  the student population is thus fragmented.  don't give them any reason not to show up to something.  with all the distractions and technology today.  add in a car, designated driver, parking, traffic, and time.  time away from laptops and chargers. 

the campus also is just not designed well.  there's no congregation area.  there's nothing open on weekends.  no actual houses on campus.  no one is there.  and then it becomes cyclical, feeding off itself.  this may never change and it's a shame.

i think the only real solution here- and it's a long term one- is twofold.  they really need private industry to come in and build houses and a college town with a scene (and it needs to be done correctly).  secondly, they need to get away from this enrollment of local kids who just go home on thursday afternoons and return monday.  use the excelsior program, take in kids from the cap district, southern tier, CNY, ADK, WNY.  free money, more contribution to the community. 

all you need to do is spend a saturday night up in guilderland and you'll quickly see why they will eclipse us.  if they haven't already.

http://sbufan.createaforum.com/around-stony-brook/making-sb-better-idea-thread/

(and i didnt even get into what the campus looks like, it's lack of history, tradition, spirit, and the indifferent faculty)

Spot on Chairman. Well said.

May I add one more thing. You wont say it but I will.

You have to realize, even if SB found away to keep the majority of students on campus for the weekend they still won't be attending any football and BB games. Almost 50% of Stony Brook students are of International descent. They don't care about American sports. They are only here to learn our way of life. Learn our engineering, our business, then take it back to their country to steal our innovations and technology..( I had to say that Chair). But seriously. They start up manufacturing in Asia and sell our products back to us. All this because of our very good education system in America.

Bottom line. I've come to the conclusion, after over 10 years of attending SB sports, this University will never, ever be like a Syracuse, a Penn State, Rutgers, or even a B.C.

10 years ago we had just barely started offering all of our allotted scholarships for football, 20 years ago we had just left division 2 and weren't even in the AAU yet. Change can happen and fairly quickly, but you can't throw your hands up and expect it will never happen. Academically we're there, but it's the other parts of the school we need to improve. The points made about our demographic make up have some merit and are worth considering. More out of state kids who stay on campus, and a shift in campus culture towards a more sociable one will over time improve the perception of the university. Change can happen, but we can't just give up on it.