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Tressel pleased by downtown’s resurgence
By Joe Scalzo
AUSTINTOWN
At Monday’s Curbstone Coaches luncheon, Frank Nolasco began a question about Youngstown State’s athletic budget by calling Jim Tressel “Coach.”
“Coach?” Tressel said, before slamming his fist down on the podium. “It’s president!”
While that got a huge laugh from the crowd of 100 people, Tressel’s remarks during a 45-minute speech/question-and-answer session made it clear that he’s no longer speaking as the school’s football coach, even if he still sometimes speaks like a football coach.
“Like anything else, if you really become extraordinary it’s because you decide what you’re going to be good at,” Tressel said. “We liked to run off-tackle. We never won a national championship at either level, at YSU or Ohio State, where we didn’t run off-tackle at least 250 times during a season.
“We decided we were going to be good at that … and maybe be better than anyone in that nation at that.
“You think about the Youngstown Business Incubator, they decided that software development and additive manufacturing, they were going to be the best in the world at that.”
Developments like those, Tressel said, have given notoriety to the university, helped the downtown have a resurgence and helped the city rebound from its economic problems.
“When I was here in 15 years, not one time did we take a recruit to Federal Street,” he said. “Now, when you go to Federal Street, whether it’s the ‘OH WOW!’ or the restaurants or all of the various things that’s going on, [it’s amazing].
“We’ve got those beautiful apartment-style residence halls down there in the Hollow and the new Flats residence halls up by Lyden and Cafaro House and the new College of Business Administration and to see all that’s gone on in our little world is amazing over the last 14 years.
“And I think in large part it’s because people have hung together and decided they want to be really good at something. They’ve decided it’s important for Youngstown State University to be good and that’s given us a chance to be part of the [city’s] resurgence.”
Here are some of the other highlights from Monday’s speech:
Tressel would like to see Youngstown State schedule more games against Akron and Kent, but he doesn’t think the Penguins need to be in the Mid-American Conference to do so.
“We have new presidents at Akron and Kent and we’ve gotten to be pretty close from the standpoint of being the new ones in the room at the state meetings and having some of the same learning curve,” Tressel said. “We’ve had just preliminary off-the-cuff discussions that that would really be a good thing for all of us if we played one another more often and created those natural rivalries.
“In terms of the Mid-American thing, we did apply for the Mid-American back in the 1990s and they wanted to geographically branch out. What will happen in the next five-10 years in terms of conference affiliation, I think will be very interesting.”
That said, Tressel noted that MAC schools spend significantly more on athletics than YSU, which is why it might not be a good fit right now.
“The good news is, we’re in a real good conference for football,” he said. “Our Horizon League basketball and track and soccer and volleyball and baseball and all those things seem to be a good fit, so we have had no discussions about being in another conference, the MAC included.”
Tressel said the university has no plans to increase its athletic budget, despite ranking near the bottom in most sports in the Horizon League, including last in men’s basketball and women’s basketball.
“We’re in a financial challenge right now, so nobody is getting more money,” he said. “In fact, a lot are getting less.
“We have a chance to raise our [athletic] revenue by selling more tickets, raising more money, more sponsorships corporate-wise and so forth, but as far as directly from the institution to the athletic department, you will not see an increase because there’s not increases available for anyone at this time.
“The only way we’re going move up more is to generate more and that’s just the reality of it. The same thing is being said to schools way larger than us.”
Tressel said the Mahoning Valley’s population loss, particularly in Youngstown’s city limits, has made it more difficult to build a championship football team with local recruits than it was when he was hired in 1986.
“There are probably less folks here that are of the ability level than there were when we were here in ‘86,” he said. “What I’ve always believed about local recruiting is we would like to have as many as we can, as long as they’re good enough academically, athletically and character-wise.
“But we owe it to the area is to make sure we do a great job of evaluating and don’t just go out of town to recruit. People can disagree with our evaluation but we have to have been in there and looked and looked and looked.
“And we’ve got to do a good job when there’s a good one and everyone knows it, of getting in the hunt and beating the teams at the mid-level. We’re not going to beat Ohio State or Penn State for a kid, but let’s beat everyone else in the middle.”