A major upgrade in the facilities plus an increase in their budgets have raised the Penguins’ expectations for competing
By Joe Scalzo
scalzo@vindy.com
In mid-April, on the basement floor of Stambaugh Stadium, women’s soccer coach Will Lemke was sitting a big tan couch with Ashley Furniture tags still sticking out through the cushions, talking about a program that, over the past 15 years, hasn’t been worth talking about.
The overhauled locker room has a new flat-screen TV, a study area and new lockers. It looks — and smells — more like a doctor’s waiting room than what you’d find across the hall in the football locker room.
“You don’t really get that smell with girls,” said Lemke, smiling.
About two years ago, Lemke was hired to lead a program that — to put it in locker room terms — was a lot more like football than soccer. It stunk.
“I’m not shy about it,” Lemke said. “We’ve been the dregs of humanity, basically.”
Youngstown State added women’s soccer in 1996-97 as part of its “Gender Equity plan,” which is a fancy way of saying it had to comply with Title IX.
Soccer was a logical addition since the team could play at Stambaugh (which — and this is a very important point financially — was already built) and could sport a big roster with a not-so-big budget. At the time, there were fewer than 100 Division I soccer teams nationally. YSU was just happy to be one of them.
“In hindsight, we could have considered waiting to add the sport while we accumulated the proper resources,” said YSU athletic director Ron Strollo, who was the department’s business manager at the time. “This would have placed the program in a more competitive position earlier.”
YSU won between three and six games in each of its first four years — with three different coaches — before bottoming out in 2000 with an 0-19 record.
The Penguins then joined the Horizon League in 2001 and, like many of their athletic teams, struggled to compete. They went 1-19 that first season and lost their conference games by an average of four goals.
Over the next seven years, those margins narrowed but the losses mounted. YSU won 10 games — total — in its first eight years in the league. Five of those wins came in non-conference games.
By the time Lemke was hired, the losing culture was ingrained. He was taking over a program with no tradition (YSU’s best record was 6-13 and that was in 1997), poor facilities (Stambaugh’s dimensions aren’t wide enough for Division I soccer and the field has a crown) in a poor recruiting area (no girls soccer team in the tri-county area has ever made it to the state semifinals, much less won a title) with little reason to believe things would change.
Oh, and one more thing. By 2009, there were now more than 320 Division I soccer teams.
Over the last decade, only four of YSU’s 18 teams have won Horizon League titles: women’s golf (2002 and 2008), women’s outdoor track (2004-06, 2008-09), women’s indoor track (2004-05, 2008) and men’s indoor track (2003). Not a single YSU team sport has a winning league record in head-to-head play, although the women’s tennis team is close at 33-33.
In 2010, YSU failed to win a single league title in any of its sports, with the six major team sports — men’s and women’s basketball, baseball, softball, women’s soccer and volleyball — all finishing either last or next-to-last. (The football team, which competes in the Missouri Valley Football Conference, also finished last.) Three teams — volleyball, men’s tennis and women’s basketball — failed to win a league game.
But this story is not about that.
This story is about what YSU is doing about that.
On the surface, Lemke was facing an impossible task. Below the surface, there was reason for hope. The Penguins went 4-14-2 in 2008 — Coach Anthony James’ last, and best, year — and the margin of defeat had started to shrink.
If the adage “Show me your checkbook and I’ll show you your priorities” is true, YSU started making women’s soccer more of a priority.
After joining the Horizon, the Penguins tripled their scholarship budget (adding nearly $170,000), doubled their operating budget (adding $21,000), tripled the recruiting budget (from $2,000 to $6,000) and, in 2005-06, added a full-time assistant coach.
Lemke, meanwhile, increased the expectations (and its conditioning level) and challenged his team to make the program’s limitations a strength, rather than an excuse.
“Youngstown is a tough place,” Lemke said. “So we said, ‘Let’s make that who we are as a team. Let’s be tougher mentally and physically.’”
He went 4-10-3 in his first season, then went 3-13-1 last year despite playing the whole year without five injured starters. Eight of the losses were by one goal, including what Lemke called (only half-jokingly) the program’s “signature loss.”
On Sept. 19, YSU played at nationally-ranked Michigan. With seven starters out, Lemke started six freshmen and lost 1-0 on an own-goal.
“That was the defining moment, where we were going to either stick together and do the best we can or fall apart,” Lemke said. “We held our own and that’s when I knew the girls were really buying into what we were doing.”
By then, the new locker room was already under construction. In June, the WATTS indoor facility will open, giving the soccer team a more flexible practice schedule. YSU is in the process of choosing an architect to build a new soccer complex across the street from Stambaugh (with a regulation turf field).
Lemke has also poured time and energy into the program’s summer camps, which are both a fund-raiser and a recruiting tool. He signed seven recruits in March and thinks the program can post its first winning season in the next two years.
“The hard part is sticking with what you’re doing,” Lemke said. “You’re going to have setbacks and there are going to be times when you have to see between the lines and understand that sometimes the progress doesn’t always show up in the win-loss column.
“But, ultimately, it has to show up in the win-loss column.”
Youngstown State’s annual athletic budget is about $12 million, with $4 million of that going toward scholarships. As the only Horizon League school with scholarship football, YSU is at a financial disadvantage in several sports — most notably, men’s basketball.
The Penguins fare better in women’s sports because the athletic department uses Gender Equity funds approved by the Board of Trustees. To help the men’s programs, the department has cut staff — YSU has six fewer administrative positions than it had in the 1990s — and increased those sports’ budgets.
Baseball, for instance, has added nearly $130,000 in scholarships, $60,000 in operating funds and the recruiting budget has gone from $2,500 in 2000-01 to $15,000. There have been similar (although not quite as drastic) increases in sports such as softball, tennis and volleyball.
“The ultimate goal of all of our programs is to compete for championships on a regular basis,” Strollo said. “At this point, some programs are in different stages of budgetary and facility enhancements needed to maintain those expectations.”
Like soccer, the softball team just got a new locker room and there are plans to build a stadium across from Stambaugh, but the biggest addition will be the WATTS, softball coach Brian Campbell said.
“That’s the game-changer,” he said. “We’ll be able to bring teams on campus and offer clinics and show people what YSU has to offer. That helps our future recruiting because we’ll be able to offer the same things that schools like Kent and Akron already have.
“And we’ll be able to work out no matter what the weather, which makes such a huge impact, particularly in the offseason when we can’t get outside on the [Stambaugh Stadium] turf.”
The WATTS owes its existence to the football program — no other sport garners even a fraction of the interest or income — but sports such as track (which buses to Kent State’s indoor facility several times a week), baseball and softball and golf stand to benefit just as much, if not more.
The golf teams, for instance, practice at Mill Creek and Youngstown Country Club in the spring, summer and fall, but they have to spend a lot of time hitting into nets during the winter. The players sometimes practice at the Golf Dome in Girard during the offseason to practice, “but that gets cost-prohibitive,” said men’s golf coach Tony Joy.
The WATTS will have a putting surface and former assistant football coach Sam Eddy is helping to raise money for a swing analyzer. That should make already strong programs even better.
“Recruiting-wise, it’s going to be a big help,” Joy said. “The rest of the Horizon League won’t have anything near as good as us.”
YSU spent much of its first 10 years in the league trying to close the gap — both in budgets and facilities — between it and the rest of the league. Strollo believes the Penguins have made significant strides.
As proof, he points to adding $1 million in scholarship budgets — more than double — for non-revenue (i.e. not football or basketball) programs over the last decade. YSU has added seven full-time assistants, doubled its recruiting budgets and made locker room renovations to baseball, softball, soccer, volleyball and swimming. Further renovations are planned for golf, tennis and track.
The school is planning office renovations for track, softball, soccer and volleyball and plans to add renovated tennis courts next to the new softball and soccer complexes.
But finances and facilities are just two ways of showing support. The athletic department does a lot more, men’s tennis coach Mark Klysner said.
“One of the things I love about YSU is the athletic department doesn’t make you feel like one of the smaller sports,” Klysner said. “From the administrators to the athletic director to the associate athletic director, they all come out and watch our matches. And I’ve been at many schools were that’s not the case.
“They put their trust in the coaches and let us do what we do best. From the administrative side of things, they’ve given us everything they can give to try to make us successful. And that’s all you can ask.”
