The last two weeks we’ve been counting down the top ten ways to fix LB sports, with submissions from you lovely people (as well as a few of our own thoughts). Now, we’ve rounded them all up, partly to make sure you get a chance to check them out, and partly to make it easy for the movers and the shakers to make sure we get the ball rolling on a few of these ideas.
#10: Bring Football Back To Long Beach State
Okay, okay. We know you saw this coming. But, that’s why we’re doing it first and getting it out of the way. Eight of our commenters said football at Long Beach State, the third-biggest university in the state, is the best way to improve sports in the city. One reader called it “a no-brainer.” Of course, almost that many pointed out that it’s impossible, impractical, or otherwise a bad idea. And you know what? They’re all right.
If you know anything about Long Beach sports, you know that nearly everyone pines for football at Long Beach State—but if you know that, you probably also know that it’s not there for a reason.
When they suspended the football program at the Beach in 1991, less than 4,000 people were showing for games, on average. The program was hemorrhaging money, and they really weren’t all that good (their final season record was 2-9). The larger point is, football at the university couldn’t survive in the economy of ’91—does it really have a shot in 2008? It would take an enormous investment from the community, the university, its students, and its alumni, even if there were no new stadium construction, and right now that money is a dream. Even if it materialized, it would take a significant investment in women’s sports to balance it per Title IX restrictions (those who blame Title IX for the program’s downfall would, however, do best to remember that it was passed in 1972, nearly twenty years before LBSU’s football team was disbanded).
All that said: it’s silly that the school doesn’t have a team. We’re in perhaps the richest city in the nation for prep football recruits, and there’s no four-year university in Long Beach where they can continue their careers. As one commenter put it: “You mean to tell me that Fresno can do it and Long Beach can’t? Please.” Several attempts have been made to start a program, and none have found traction. Is it likely to change? Probably not in the short term.
We’ve been talking (read: complaining) about this for a while—JJ’s first published sports article in college was called “Bring Back The Ball,” an opinion piece about why the school needs football. A year later, Mike wrote an article about why it would be impossible for that to happen. Neither of us are wrong, and nobody’ in this city is going to stop talking about it. For now, it’s all we can do. Until, that is, football comes back to Long Beach State—it’s the impossible necessity.
#9: Tear Down The Breakwater
Listen, this one’s kind of a no-brainer. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of “controversy” surrounding the breakwater, and whether or not it should remain standing, and tens of thousands of dollars have been spent on examining whether or not it would be a good idea to examine whether or not it would be a good idea to submit a proposal to develop a plan to determine how much it would cost to fund a study on removing the breakwater. But, from a sports perspective, let’s look at it this way: without the breakwater, the thousands of kids that go to Long Beach State don’t have to spend their money in Huntington to surf, the local economy gets a shot in the arm from increased tourism, and there’s a decent chance we get to host surfing championship tournaments in this city in the next twenty years, like we used to back in the day.
Consider this: growing up in Long Beach, kids have world-class parks to play in, can be taught any number of different sports, from water polo to football to volleyball, in world-class club programs using top-quality local facilities. But if that kid wants to swim, surf, or body-board in the ocean, they have to drive out of the city limits. Tear down the breakwater, and we basically add an entirely new sports segment to the city’s repertoire. And that ain’t a bad thing. Besides, look how small it is from above: it couldn’t be that big of a deal to knock it down, right?
#8: LBSU Vs. LBCC
A few commenters pointed out what we’ve noticed over the last several months—Long Beach’s sports community is passionate, but disparate. One way to start lacing that community together is to create some events that will help introduce different fan bases to one another. We think it would be great for the city’s fans to get to attend a Long Beach Classic series, featuring the school’s two colleges, LBCC and Long Beach State.
Now yes, it would be safe to assume that the D-1 LBSU would have the advantage over LBCC, which can’t even have scholarshipped athletes, legally. So we’re not necessarily talking about official events here—but how cool would it be to have a pickup soccer game at George Allen, or slosh ball at Blair? These could be fun, fan-interactive events a la MTV’s Rock n’ Jock series, with the attendance proceeds going to a charity of the schools’ choosing, or to their respective foundations. We could hold a series of five throughout the year, and the team who won the majority could win the official Long Beach Cup (if the schools put it together, we’re happy to provide the trophy!).
The best would be a flag football game between the LBCC Vikings, and a collection of LBSU athletes from all the school’s sports. By the way, if you think this kind of fundraising series is science fiction, here’s a nugget of wisdom: the first official game played at Blair, way back in 1958, pitted the two schools against each other.
#7: Marketing & Merchandise
So far we’ve talked about fixes that are pretty direct—bringing sports back to LB (shore sports and football), and pitting the city’s two schools against each other. This idea is a little less specific, but at least as important: we need to encourage a cohesive sports identity, through better marketing, and with more city and school merchandise.
For marketing, consider that Long Beach is one of the US’ biggest cities, larger than Cleveland, Miami, Sacramento, New Orleans, and Honolulu. But those cities have projected an image of themselves so that the nation knows who they are, even without visiting—the image the nation has of Long Beach is bleary and distorted, and tends to leave out some of our nicer aspects. If we want to continue to draw big athletic events and be taken seriously as the youth and prep sports mecca that we are, we’re going to have to do a better job putting that image out there.
One way to start is to make it easier for people to wear their pride on their sleeve, as it were. The LBSU store on 2nd Street has been filled every time we’ve been in there, partly because of alumni, but also partly because of how excited the community has been to buy Long Beach-branded merchandise. Before the store opened, well-known options were pretty much limited to the Long Beach Clothing Co. at the Pike, whose fashion is primarily aimed at the youth market. So, budding entrepreneurs, get on it: start websites, open stores, hold design contests for Long Beach State students. We’d love to see the LB high schools get together and get a store together on 2nd, where each school could have their own corner to sell merchandise, which isn’t always easy for fans and parents to find.
It’s easy to be a fan of Long Beach sports—it shouldn’t have to be hard to explain to people from out of town why, and it shouldn’t be hard to show your support with decent merchandise. If Honolulu and Cleveland can figure it out, so can we.
#6: A Soccer Stadium
But not just any soccer stadium, my friends–we’re talking about a bona fide, thousand-seat capacity soccer stadium, with lights and everything. You know, the kind that most NCAA tournament teams get to play in. As the economy tightens and facilities upgrades become more and more difficult, we’re going to need to prioritize, and right now, there isn’t a more talented group of athletes in Long Beach playing in a worse arena than the Long Beach State women’s soccer team, who last season won the Big West regular season title, hosted the conference championship, and made it into the NCAA bracket, all while playing at a field that simply can’t host night games, because there aren’t any lights. Moore League football teams have lights they can practice under, but LBSU soccer has to schedule marquee games at 4pm–seating at George Allen consists of four large bleachers pushed against a fence. That’s just silly.
This is perhaps the team with the brightest future at LBSU right now, and if we support them the way we should, we could be looking back on them in twenty years the way we look back on women’s volleyball over the last two decades. Sweetening the deal is the fact that youth soccer in Long Beach is always booming, and the city has a ton of adult club leagues as well. As one commenter pointed out, “Right now club soccer is willing to drive to San Bernardino and Lancaster for field space to play tournaments.” Let’s give them, as well as our winning 49ers, a worthy space to play in within the city–inviting the community in to use the field, for a fee, should help with the costs, as well as further bridge the divide between LBSU and the surrounding community. And if we can’t get a new stadium, let’s at least put some lights at George Allen, yeah?
#5: Show Up!
No, that title isn’t directed at our local athletes—who have made a habit of showing up big in big games, from PONY league world championships to the World Series, from CIF championship games to the Super Bowl—it’s directed at the fans. If there’s one easily fixable, legitimate problem with sports in this city, it’s that attendance is always too low (if only, sometimes, because it could never be too high).
For the CIF semifinal football matchup between Poly and Lakewood, about 12,000 people showed up—that number was thrilling, staggering. But why? It was the first time two local teams had met that deep in the playoffs in over thirty years, and both teams have an enormous following. Yet non-rivalry games that deep in Ohio’s high school playoffs will regularly draw upwards of 20,000 fans, without anyone even batting an eye. Why? Certainly the fact that there’s so many other options vying for your entertainment dollar in SoCal plays a part, but it’s definitely not enough of an excuse. A MaxPreps writer who travels the country covering big matchups every week criticized the city’s fans for not showing up en masse for Poly vs. St. Bonny, the biggest game in the country that week. In Texas two weeks prior, he said, he’d seen several times as many fans.
As we head into 2009, make it a resolution to set aside twenty dollars a month to go see three LB teams you’ve never watched before, whether that’s Cabrillo soccer, Lakewood wrestling, or Long Beach State men’s volleyball. Wait, actually, only one of those teams even charges for admission. The point is, we all know that there’s a ton of high-quality competition in Long Beach, in nearly every sport. With ticket prices incredibly affordable (Lakewood Poly tickets were approximately a tenth of what it would cost to see the USC UCLA game, and it was an infinitely better contest), and the knowledge that those sales go to support local teams, get out there and try something new. We guarantee you’ll like what you see.
#4: Fix The Media
Er. Yeah. That’d be us. Prior to the launch of this website, news coverage of Long Beach sports (by local outlets) was limited to the Press Telegram (whose budget implosions are well-documented), a broadcast of one game a week on Ed.Tv, and… that was pretty much it. This is, as we’ve mentioned previously, one of America’s largest cities, with a larger population than Miami, which has five newspapers covering local sports (and two more that print in Spanish), three TV stations, and two radio stations keeping up on local action. Granted, we suffer from the fact that we’re in the shadow of Los Angeles—the bigger publications and TV stations up there don’t recognize LB as important enough to cover regularly (how many Long Beach State articles have you read in the Times, or how many Poly highlights have you seen on NBC broadcasts?), and few have ventured to start new enterprises that are local-grown, because of the myth that LB is just an LA suburb and not, you know, bigger than Miami.
But for all its evils, the fact is that the media drives sports. How much easier is it to follow college football or get excited about NFL playoff matchups because ESPN helps to build hype, as well as showing games and providing highlights? The job of the media is to keep the community apprised of what’s going on, help them get to know their teams and players, and (in the digital age) to bring some highlights and excitement to the table. There are 14 teams at Long Beach State (not counting the excellent club teams), and there are 21 sports (participated in by seven high schools) in the Moore League. Not counting youth sports (like the World Champion LB PONY team), pro teams like the Armada, and special events like the Grand Prix and the marathon, that’s a total of over 150 teams competing in the area, all of whom have a story, all of whom the community deserves to know about. Even if the PT returned to its glory days, and we were able to quintuple our video highlights, game writeups, and podcast episodes, Long Beach would still be about halfway to where it should be.
So: anyone want to go halfsies on an LB Sports TV channel?
#3: Facilities Upgrades
It’s no secret that Long Beach’s primary sports venues aren’t looking their best. Vet’s hasn’t had a paint job since the authors were born, Belmont Plaza is practically falling down , and without a regular resident, and the Long Beach Arena has fallen into disarray (which is why one commenter pointed out that they need a regular team playing there to help keep it looking nice). Even the Pyramid seems unfinished with all the dead space around the walkways. With the economy in its current state, the construction of any new large facilities lives somewhere between improbable and impossible, but that doesn’t mean we can’t focus smaller-scale efforts on renovating or improving our existing facilities, restoring them to their former glory.
Obviously, even renovating facilities can be massively expensive—Green Bay spent nearly $300 million upgrading Lambeau a few years ago, and that was without doing any heavy grade construction. So to help offset costs, as distasteful as it might seem, it would probably be a good idea to try and find some generous members of the community (the way Long Beach State found the Walters when they wanted to build the Pyramid), and ask for their help. It would be worth it to have Vet’s get some new seats and a fresh coat of paint, to have Belmont renovated to allow it to hold the top-tier events it used to host (and maybe get the locker rooms de-funked a little), and to have the Arena fit for new occupants. If there aren’t any takers, we’d love to see more high school games held there—there’s no reason a Nike or Reebok couldn’t be coaxed into hosting a top-flight national tourney in Long Beach.
Of course, it would be amazing if half a million dollars for a new multi-use sports facility (which one commenter pined for), but that’s unlikely to happen—in the meantime, let’s make sure our historic venues don’t continue to slope towards disrepair, that they instead reflect the luster of their pasts.
#2: A Long Beach Sports Hall of Fame
We know what you may be thinking—what about the Century Club Hall of Fame? Or the Wilson Athletics Hall of Fame? Or the Poly Football Hall of Fame? Or the city-run Long Beach Baseball and Softball Hall of Fame? Or the Millikan Hall of Fame that’s in the works? Or Lakewood’s Youth Hall of Fame? Or the Long Beach State Hall of Fame, or the Long Beach City College Alumni Hall of Fame?
Well—that’s kind of the point. Right now the history of this city and its surrounding areas is scattered, visible only in high school gyms (like Wilson’s) or McDonald’s (like Lakewood’s). But what if we could bring all these threads of history together, under one roof? What if when you hosted friends from out of town you could bring them to one building, with one ticket, that housed the Goydos hat, one of Willie McGinest’s Super Bowl rings, an old racket of Billie Jean King’s, and Misty May memorabilia? Part of the facility could be used for a display about LB’s sports history, a timeline that illustrates how incredible LB athletes have been on the national (and international) scene, as well as highlighting athletes who remain local legends.
There’s nothing wrong with each high school, college, and organization in the city acting as the shepherds of their own history, but putting all those pieces together would be even better—with the number of national stars we’ve produced, there would even be enough items of general interest that this could become a tourist draw. We even have a location in mind—the Press Telegram Lofts on Pine are perfect. The bottom few floors could be used for parking, and the three or four floors above could house the Hall. It could help with the revitalization of Pine, and finally be a way to put the PT Lofts to positive use, since they’re currently a vacant eyesore.
#1: Moore League Vs. Trinity League
If you’re familiar with the Lexus Gauntlet, awarded annually to either USC or UCLA, depending on which program wins the most head-to-head matches, then you know what we’d like to see here. Kicked off with a first-week Saturday football bash, whichever league wins the most inter-league contests throughout the year would get the SoCal Cup (or the Lexus Cup if they want to throw down some cash). A Saturday slate of football contests, alternating annually between Vet’s and Santa Ana Stadium, which one commenter suggested, would be great. But what if Poly/O. Lu, Lakewood/Servite, and Jordan/Mater Dei were the start of a season of rivalry games, with Wilson and Mater Dei playing baseball in April to potentially decide the winner?
This kind of season-long event would help nearly every current problem with LB sports. It would help establish the city’s identity through the LB/OC rivalry, would bring in more gate money for the local schools, encourage higher attendance (because Lakewood football fans will not let themselves get shouted down by an opposing team’s section), and generally create excitement and a great year-long story.
It could also help to draw more focus from surrounding media—I can’t think of a better slate of football games in the country, for example, than a Moore League/Trinity League Rivalry Day. Add in the storylines, the revenue potential, and the opportunity to help unite local sports fans, and you’ve got one hell of an improvement to LB sports. Which, it’s worth pointing out one last time, are already as good as they get. Almost.