Tech President Phil Oldham said joining the Southern Conference furthers his goal of making Tennessee Tech a more recognized University.
Oldham welcomed Southern Conference Commissioner Michael Cross to the Leslie Town Centre Tuesday night. Oldham said he began preliminary discussions with the conference more than five years ago.
“Academically, we’re known as a great value as a higher educational institution,” Oldham said. “Our reputation is strong in a fairly narrow radius around Middle Tennessee. We’re not well enough known beyond that, unfortunately. The truth is, it’s just a practical point, I can’t buy enough billboards or make enough commercials to promote Tennessee Tech to a wider audience like successful athletics programs can. It’s certainly more than a marketing component, but that’s some of the value that successful athletics brings that nothing else can do for you.”
Athletic Director Casey Fox told the crowd assembled Tuesday to officially celebrate the move from the OVC, the University must invest more in athletics. Fox said the university must do a better job in marketing and promotions to get fans engaged. Oldham said that starts with keeping Tech students excited.
“The student energy gets infectious,” Oldham said. “The students learn how to compete themselves through athletics, how to be a more competitive engineer or a more competitive accountant or a more competitive teacher. Whatever their career path takes them, they can take a little more pride and a little more competitive energy with them because of that experience with successful athletic programs.”
Oldham said students as well as the local fan base have shown examples of that energy in recent years when the baseball team advanced in the NCAA Tournament or with the Womens Basketball team’s NCAA bids.
“I think there’s one basic point of human nature, and that is people like to be associated with winners,” Oldham said. “They like to be associated with successful programs and individuals It is a very contagious thing.”
With a new athletic director, the first-ever major upgrades to the football stadium, and investments across the campus to athletic facilities, Oldham said it is fair to say he believes in the need for Tech athletics to be better.
“Just like everything else, if we’re going to do athletics, we need to be good at it, and we need to do it well and be known for it,” Oldham said. “That’s a big part of this.”
Though he began working on a conference change some five years ago, Oldham said there were timing issues on both sides at various points that kept the change from happening. Oldham said the changes in the OVC footprint made the conference less of a fit.
“Our fan base drew less and less excited about OVC competition,” Oldham said. “The natural footprint of the Southern Conference seemed to fit us much better. 90 percent of our student population currently comes from the Southern Conference footprint already. These are institutions that our students are more familiar with. They have high school friends that attend many of these other institutions in the Southern Conference. But then you layer on top of that, the Southern Conference institutions are just very similar in many ways to Tennessee Tech in terms values, academic profile, financially, there’s a lot of similarities.”
Oldham said he had to educate some of the conference presidents about Tennessee Tech, but they soon saw the fit.
Tech will begin play in the Southern Conference next season.
