Our coach salary pool is around the middle of the Sun Belt I believe and isn’t even competitive with AAC or MWC. While we were fortunate/smart with Satt and Drink (and hopefully Clark), eventually that kind of budgetary disadvantage will likely catch up to us. Not to mention, you’d like to see the program keep improving, right?MrCraig wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 7:12 pmWill it? App State is one of the (at least) top 5 G5 over the last 10 years, they just had a wrestling All-American, and the men’s basketball team went to the Big Dance. If App can do all those things with the current money coming in, why do I have to donate as well?Saint3333 wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 6:31 pmNo but what you’re willing to give up matters. Whether that’s time traveling to games, making calls to friends to donate or go to games, or cut the check.APPdiesel wrote: ↑Tue Mar 30, 2021 8:26 amI just caution everyone here who constantly (and I mean CONSTANTLY) makes App fandom all about who’s donating the most money to prove it. Yes, money helps. But others contribute in other ways...emotional investment (and how that investment manifests itself) is extremely important too. Writing a check doesn’t make you a better fan than anyone else. There is absolutely a toxic subculture of app fans who think that.
When I was young I gave what I could and spent more time fundraising, made a lot more events/games as well. Time is more limited now, but checks are bigger.
Watching games on TV isn’t enough to get a seat at the table, being invested does matter.
It will take a much larger percentage of our fans to make strides and be the program we all love App to be.
As for basketball, I’m going to push back on the notion that one hot week In Pensacola for our first tourney bid in 21 years qualifies that program as a success story.
If you don’t like the idea of contributing money so we can pay rich coaches more money, I can empathize with that. But it’s a reality of college athletics whether we like it or not.