The future of City 6 men’s basketball: Facilities are a bottom-line need | Mike Jensen

This was three decades or so ago, La Salle basking in the immediate aftermath of the Lionel Simmons era, flying high, dreaming higher. Tom Gola himself brought a plan to his alma mater for a new arena on campus, down the hill. Gola would take personal charge of the fund-raising.

“I remember seeing the drawings,” said a longtime Explorers insider, although never an employee.

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Speedy Morris, La Salle’s coach at the time of Gola’s overture, said this week that he was aware of all that, right to the targeted campus location, but Morris didn’t think such a project ever moved off the back burner. If it had gotten built, it would probably feel old by now. The point is not that history could have changed with such a move, just that these discussions have been going on at La Salle for so many years. Same thing after La Salle got to the NCAA Sweet 16 in 2013 … let’s talk about a new arena.

So here we are in 2021, clock ticking, just louder right now, with a major gift left in a will, except that gift came with an expiration date. Quickly arriving.

The bottom line, La Salle is fully aware that to compete in this day and age, facility upgrades must happen as soon as humanly possible, which translates to as soon as enough checks come in.

Let’s widen this out. Drexel had a chance for an interesting alternative to the Daskalakis Center … but opted for squash courts. (No, really.) Practice facilities were built at Villanova and then Temple and Penn. St. Joseph’s makes incremental progress on campus. Expect the next major project to be at 20th and Olney.

“Oh, absolutely,” said La Salle athletic director Brian Baptiste, about whether such discussions were part of the interview process before he was offered the job in 2019. “Whether it’s a new arena or renovation or reimagining the existing structure, that was part of the conversation, and, honestly, part of the draw.”

You hear a lot of background chatter that La Salle is getting ready to move forward on a project. You always hear that chatter. Baptiste said an athletics master plan is nearly complete. Heard that before, too.

There is a difference, though. You can hear the urgency in Baptiste’s voice. Don’t look for a new arena. Don’t be surprised if a project involves turning the court itself perpendicular so that stands surround it on four sides, instead of the current two sides.

“Whatever we do to the existing space, the expectation would be that it would look completely different,” Baptiste said this week. “I just think that needs to be the outcome — that you go into the space and don’t even realize you’re in the same space.”

Baptiste knows all about the renovation of the Pavilion at Villanova. In some ways, that is a model, extending to use of spaces away from the court. There are buzzwords in the athletic industry and “premium hospitality spaces” is one of them. Baptiste uses them.

“When Villanova did their renovation of the Pavilion, part of that, when you see those different types of club areas, that’s what people expect,” Baptiste said. “We’re social creatures and want to be able to get together in a social community.”

He’s not talking about generations of Explorers fans jammed elbow-to-elbow trying to get out of the gym after a La Salle game or to a concession stand or restroom at halftime.

What Baptiste is talking about is a basic cost of doing business in college sports. Any successes by the Explorers under Morris and Giannini and now Ashley Howard, and several generations of La Salle players, should be understood in the context of overcoming high hurdles.

Another reason you can trust La Salle is moving now with greater urgency: I’ve had a number of people say to me in recent years, “You know about John Glaser’s gift?”

Before La Salle graduate John Glaser died in 2013, seven months after that Sweet 16 appearance, he’d been the owner of the Stutz Candy Company in Hatboro, and a major benefactor of his alma mater. The video scoreboard they’d added inside Tom Gola Arena came from a Glaser gift.

Before he died, Glaser had a larger gift in mind, and put it in writing, $5 million toward a new basketball venue. Here’s the catch: Do something in ten years, or the gift goes elsewhere. (Even a man filling out his will had gotten impatient.) A source familiar with the gift confirmed that’s the caveat, with the expiration date in 2023.

Let’s assume that $5 million in 2013 dollars is more today. Another wrinkle is over exactly what the money can be used for, whether it has to be new construction or not.

While that kind of gift won’t get you to the finish line, it’s safe to say nobody wants to leave it at the starting line. Deadlines spur action, and we hear whispers about this former player from the mid-’80s meeting with donors, another heavy hitter ready to contribute, other such chatter.

As for a timeline, the hope is that enough can happen quickly that maybe the new space would be open for business by 2023-24. If this quick timeline actually comes off, maybe first look for a season of Explorers ball at the Palestra, just as Villanova spent a season of home games at the Wells Fargo Center while the Pavilion was reinvented.

“Really at the core of it, we need to be able to create a competitive advantage from a recruiting standpoint,” Baptiste said. “It has to be innovative, forward thinking, can’t be obsolete in five to ten years.”

Just as Mark Jackson was brought into Villanova before the Pavilion renovation partially because he had been in charge of a major Coliseum renovation at USC, Baptiste’s former title at Northwestern was Deputy Director of Athletics for Capital Projects and Operations. Chief project: a renovation of Northwestern’s basketball arena.

If you’re thinking right now is, sounds great, but La Salle isn’t swimming in cash, obviously that’s both true and why the fund-raising is front-burner and large-scale. They’re not going to be doing this out of petty cash. You want to say this shouldn’t be the top of the agenda in higher education right now, fair point. Just realize this is all, “what it costs to buy into this poker game,” as Giannini put it. “Let’s look at the realities of the competition. Look at the A-10.”

“Whatever we do to the existing space, the expectation would be that it would look completely different. I just think that needs to be the outcome — that you go into the space and don’t even realize you’re in the same space.”

Giannini, now Rowan’s athletic director, wouldn’t say a word about La Salle facilities, on or off the record. He still loves the place. But he started ticking off how at St. Louis University, “if you combine the arena and practice facility, you’re looking at over $100 million. Dayton’s renovations, $100 million. Duquesne, $60-70 million. UMass just built a practice facility in the $50-100 range. Rhode Island, the same.”

Giannini then said, “You can quote me on this, Jay Wright has proven, they have a nice facility. But it’s not Ohio State or Michigan or Texas or countless Power 5 schools. You don’t need the best of everything.”

Baptiste is right, though. You need to show you’re trying. Does anybody think Wright would have stayed at Villanova despite overtures from half the planet if the Davis Center hadn’t been built as a practice facility? Wright used the word “essential” to describe the Davis Center, not for winning titles, but to be competitive in the Big East.

“Other than the players themselves, it was the most important aspect to building our program,” Wright said.

Some of the bells and some of the whistles around college sports can seem silly. But 16-year-old recruits notice everything.

“At Seton Hall they have an underwater treadmill,” said the parent of one current Division I player. “[Virginia] has sleep chambers in the locker lounge area.”

“You can get better anywhere,” is the way St. Joseph’s coach Billy Lange put it. “But if you have [bells and whistles], it’s more about the recruiting and the retention.”

Lange wasn’t saying such things weren’t important. He can point to his time with the Sixers, how building their own space in Camden was a game-changer. “I saw the moods change, the determination change,’' Lange said.

According to a source on Hawk Hill, there are “major plans” in the works to upgrade the practice gym at St. Joe’s. Nobody is shying away from all these issues, even in a pandemic time.

On North Broad Street, it’s fair to say the facilities are up to par, once they got dedicated practice courts for the men’s and women’s team inside the Pearson-McGonigle complex. I’d argue that while the Liacouras Center is far from obsolete as it nears the quarter-century mark, it was made a little too big — 8,000 instead of 10,000 could have made for a better atmosphere, since Temple has never entirely filled it without the help of opposing fans even in the best years. The building also is a little generic, architecturally speaking.

Over in West Philly, Penn has a practice court shared by the Quakers men and women in the Hutchinson building adjoining the Palestra, allowing their Palestra locker room to serve as a home base for the teams while having access to two courts. Let’s face it, the Palestra itself stands far above the rest of the Ivy competition as a show palace for the sport.

At Drexel, a renovation of the DAC was done instead of an alternative plan to turn the nearby armory into a Dragons home court. When the DAC is full, the DAC Pack letting loose, that place gets going. The problem? But the gym is as basic as it gets, and the capacity is half as big as the next smallest CAA gyms. And every DAC Pack alum I’ve ever had contact with seems steamed by the decision to turn the Armory into our national squash headquarters. There were plans to turn it into Drexel’s version of the Palestra, a cool old place, exposed beam work above, a destination spot. Plans changed.

La Salle coach Ashley Howard left talk about plans for upgrading the Explorers’ facility to his AD, but Howard did say, “Facilities really make people feel good about just waking up and being in a place that’s modern.”

His thing, Howard said, recruiting and development are more about having the right people in place. Certainly, “being able to have a designated space for men’s basketball, where our players have 24-hour access to the gym where they can work on their game outside of a normal practice,” that’s been a big part of discussions.

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Baptiste knows the La Salle faithful have been waiting to get beyond the talk stage. Even if they didn’t know about Tom Gola’s visit about a new gym, they’ve heard the endless chatter over the decade about the place that ended up bearing Gola’s name.

“They just want to be able to see something in their hands, something that is achievable,” Baptiste said. “People want an eventual outcome.”

That’s exactly what they want. La Salle’s fan base, typically hoops savvy, understands the school needs this badly, not to get ahead, not to go back to the glory days when Gola himself was on the court. Just to play some catch up, to stay in the game.