The head football coach's distinct accent gets the attention of his players as they work through a series of drills in the stadium of their coastal campus. Between plays there's even the distant horn of a ferry as it prepares to cross Long Island Sound.
Wait .... Big South football on Long Island? As in New York?
Yes, one of the top football teams in the Division I-AA Big South Conference is Stony Brook University, a state school with an undergraduate enrollment of 16,000 located on northern Long Island. It may not make geographical sense for Stony Brook — which joined the Big South in 2008 and went 5-1 in conference games in each of the past two seasons — to align itself in a league whose six other institutions are based in Virginia and the Carolinas, but it's one of the steps the school is taking in its ambitious quest to build an elite college football program.
“I think they would agree it was a marriage of convenience,” said Stony Brook athletic director Jim Fiore, now in his ninth year on the job. “They needed a sixth member to get an automatic bid to the NCAA (FCS Championship) and we needed a home to give us a transition from zero to 63 scholarships in a conference that cared about football.”
In an economy that has forced many schools, including local rival Hofstra, to cut football entirely, Stony Brook, which competes in the America East Conference in all other sports, is moving in the opposite direction.
Recognizing the marketing value that football brings to a public university, the program has upped the ante by increasing its recruiting budget and emphasizing external fundraising. There are also plans to eventually expand the campus's 8,300-seat stadium.
Fiore sees the transition that the University of Connecticut made from I-AA to I-A in the past decade — and the ongoing transition by the University of Massachusetts — and views it as a model of where Stony Brook needs to be.
“UConn showed that you can take a nondescript football program and utilize those strengths to help the university in terms of marketing and branding,” Fiore said. “My job is to set us up for the next 40 years, not the next four years.
“Football is an important piece of that. Look at all the large states in the country. New York doesn’t have that flagship. We are an academically superior institution. Our job is to get us to a level that is commensurate with the academic side of the house.”
One of the ways to do that is to schedule matchups against schools at the highest level of competition. Stony Brook played the first I-A team in school history last year, a 59-14 loss to South Florida, and it kicks off the 2011 season on Sept. 3 with a 2,200-mile trip to El Paso to take on UTEP.
They already have games lined up through the next four years against Cincinnati, Marshall, Army, Buffalo and Boston College. In addition to giving the team visibility in football rich Texas, the UTEP game will also put $250,000 into the athletic department's budget before travel expenses.
The team, which finished 6-5 in each of the past two seasons, is certainly going to have to take some lumps from the big boys if they want to get to a level where they can consider joining them.
While sixth-year head coach Chuck Priore is excited about the future of the program, his main priority is improving on a season-by-season basis. The roster still has a mix of transfers — seven current players previously played on I-A rosters — but the staff has been focused on selling talented high school recruits on the value of Stony Brook.
“We’ve been able to gradually get our name out there to say ‘Hey, we’re a program that you want to be playing for,’” Priore said. “I think our players in the program now are better football players.
“We need to all be realists and understand where we are today. We’re still a program that’s growing, trying to get recognition and trying to get our alumni support financially. We’re really taking it a season at a time."
His boss agrees, although that doesn't stop him from imagining a day when the Seawolves are big enough to host games in venues like Citi Field or Yankee Stadium.
“We need to one day align ourselves [athletically] with the large research universities on the East Coast,” Fiore said. “I’m not saying we’re going to do that in 2014 or 2015 but if we’re not working towards being the best and setting high goals then we’re going backward.”
