Athletics releases future plans

The Ole Miss Athletics Department released its “Five-Year Plan” on Friday, which offers a behind-the-scenes view into the entity’s strategies and tactics to meet both short and long-term goals over the next five-plus years.

The document is broken down into 11 strategic areas: academic support, finance and budgeting, revenue generation, governance and rules compliance, communications and public relations, marketing and promotions, school spirit, staff enhancement and human resources, student-athlete health and well-being, facilities and maintenance, and diversity and equity.

Among the many goals and planned tactics to achieve them, the athletics department will evaluate the possibility of establishing a general studies degree program with the Office of Academic Affairs and “other key stakeholders.”

“We first started thinking about it when we had several athletes who did not graduate while they were here and then five years later, or even sometimes up to ten years, they would want to come back and they only lacked a few hours when they left.” Ole Miss athletic director Pete Boone said.

Changes in the curriculum forced some of the returning students to need up to 30 extra hours.

“(Planning for the degree) started out in a sense of having a degree in which people could come back and use the hours that they have earned and just add to it to be able to get a degree from the University of Mississippi,” Boone said.

“The other part of it, obviously, is having a degree program that is a little bit more diversified and offers a little bit more flexibility with things that might be of interest to incoming freshmen, including athletes, that might not fit into the normal curriculum that they may have in liberal arts or criminal justice or business school or something.”

The athletics department listed a 3-5 year goal to work with Aramark to develop a new dining facility near the athletic buildings on campus.

The proposed dining facility would also be available to the general student population.

Student-athletes sometimes have a hard time adjusting to college life as freshman, and the Five-Year Plan intends to combat this with the creation of a Summer Bridge Program, which would help incoming students prepare for the rigors of the college life.

Potential expansion of Vaught- Hemingway Stadium is also mentioned in the document. In the revenue generation section, it states that the department “must identify ways to maintain (the season ticket sellout of 2009) and identify methods to increase priority-giving levels each year by 4%” before planning can begin for expansion in the north end zone.

Priority giving is when fans make donations to secure better seats and parking locations.

In the marketing and promotions section, the document includes an immediate goal to research the pros and cons of installing ribbon boards in Oxford-University Stadium.

The prospective boards would be placed on the backside of the outfield fences with the purpose to give the students in right field and fans in left field information such as the score and ball and strike counts, Boone said.

Included in the same section and goal time-frame is the potential review and upgrade of video boards in C.M. Tad Smith Coliseum and the baseball stadium.

The Ole Miss Softball Complex will host the 2011 SEC Softball Tournament, and Boone said the university is looking into options to install a video board with replay capabilities.

They are also considering video boards for both the indoor and outdoor tennis courts.

The entire document is available online at olemisssports.com.