Quality College Teams Were First to Flee O.C.
The sports exodus from Orange County didn’t start with the Rams. Cal State Fullerton and UC Irvine have jettisoned numerous sports programs in the last few years. Fullerton has dumped football, men’s gymnastics, water polo, golf and men’s tennis. UCI axed baseball from its minimal sports offerings.
Why can’t the county develop the college level programs that will offer our own sons and daughters the opportunities now available everywhere else?
Consider this: Orange County with a good Division I football program at Cal State Fullerton. A program featuring quality student/athletes from Mater Dei, Los Alamitos and the rest. A football program playing games in Anaheim Stadium, and happy to be there.
You would not need to build a new stadium. You would not need to offer the team owner millions of dollars to keep her team here. True costs of such an endeavor might be in the range of $5 million a year to get started. After a few years, the program could be self-supporting with gate receipts, television money and bowl game awards.
I sure wish a guy like Leigh Steinberg would stop chasing the Rams and get involved with something that might really happen.
TIM HOLLAND
Huntington Beach
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