As he looks forward to Saturday's home game against Liberty for the Big South Conference title and FCS bid, former Stony Brook player Stu Sharoff looked back to 1977, when the team played on a club level.
Game preparation started well before calisthenics. "The night before the game, we carried aluminum stands over to the field," he said.
Coaches often limed what was a thinly grassed, uneven playing field. Road trips to Marist, Ramapo, Worcester and Niagara were by bus. "A yellow school bus," Sharoff said.
If there was a financial shortfall, players would pay out of their pockets. As the program progressed, Sharoff remained one of its biggest fans and financial supporters; he says he has donated more than $500,000 during the past 30 years. Now the managing director of Guggenheim Securities in Manhattan, Sharoff said of his playing career, "It was the greatest four years of my life. You really learned about teamwork. As I became successful I gave back more and more.''
The football landscape started to change in 1984 when Sam Kornhauser was hired to start a Division III program, but the playing field and its surroundings were slow to improve. "When we got a Porta-Potty, it was a big thing," said Kornhauser, who retired from coaching in 2005 to become a fundraiser for the athletic department.
"If we had to hide the weight room because we didn't have one that compared to other schools, we did that,'' Kornhauser said. "If we had to hide the field, we sold all-you-could-eat lunches in the cafeteria. It was whatever we could do to bring kids in, play football, develop a program. Instead of having kids buy cleats, we were buying cleats for them. Instead of three dollars for lunch, they were getting seven."
Small strides gave way to a giant leap forward with the 2002 opening of LaValle Stadium, named for State Sen. Kenneth LaValle, who secured the funding from Albany. Then-president Shirley Strum Kenny, a former cheerleader during her undergraduate years at Texas, envisioned playing programs of that ilk. Richard Laskowski, the director of athletics at the time, tempered that thinking but did foresee a future beyond Division III and let Kenny have her vision, saying, "There's nothing wrong with dreaming."
Kornhauser fondly recalled opening night at LaValle, before 8,136 fans. "I could see the noise. It was like waves," he said. After that, anything seemed possible.
The athletic administration of Jim Fiore and coach Chuck Priore ushered in scholarships in 2005. It reached the full complement of 63 in 2009 and has paid rapid dividends in the Big South. The Seawolves shared the conference title in 2009 and 2010 and are 18-4 in conference play entering the Liberty game.
Fiore said, "I feel confident in stating that Stony Brook University and the department of athletics made a well-thought-out decision and ultimately implemented a comprehensive strategic plan when we decided to go to scholarship football -- and we do not plan to ever look back.''
The final step in this phase is gaining the automatic bid in the 20-team FCS field. "There's a lot of teams out there that have never gotten to the NCAA," Priore said. "For it to be a tangible thing on the last game of the season is pretty exciting."
