Boosters have campaign to build Dynasty in all sports

By Charlie Barnes, Executive Director - Seminole Boosters

Bobby Bowden's gift to us is the Dynasty. When it arrived in a package in 1987, we relied on our imagination, as the years progressed, to consider what other possibilities might take shape. We used Florida State's success on the field to drive the revolutionary construction of University Center. National Championships, ten-win seasons and top-four finishes. All fired the passions and led us to see a destiny that could be ours.

We know exactly what the nation's leading college football program should look like, how it should perform, what it takes to maintain the standard of superiority. And we also know what constitutes a great, comprehensive collegiate athletic program on the national stage. It is one that expects to contend for championships in every sport. It features first-class facilities, and modern playing fields, and superb training and sports medicine accommodations. It provides intense academic support and guidance in life skills for all its student-athletes, and professional and ethical administration. It is well funded and well led with generous enthusiasm.

Such a program, if it could be brought into being, would be a magnificent picture window through which America could view the greater work of our University. Indeed, the lofty profiles enjoyed variously by Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas, Southern Cal, Ohio State, Michigan and the like, all stand upon original foundations of athletic excellence. Those impressive profiles bring the universities' stories to the nation. In turn, if the universities know how to use that attention, they benefit in far greater proportion than those whose needs and ambitions are not so clearly heard.

Florida State does not yet have that kind of collegiate athletic program.

Ours is very good, superior to many, and well led, but we cannot yet provide all our student-athletes with competitive, championship caliber playing facilities, or with the training and rehabilitation and treatment capacity that is needed to sustain excellence indefinitely.

We do know, however, exactly what needs to be done to achieve that ambition. And most especially, we know what it costs.

Is it always about money? Well, no, but we are at a point where we do have to decide. I suppose it's like being given the opportunity to become King. It's good to be the King, as the fellow said, but that means you also have to become part of the Royal Family and you have to accept the culture and the responsibility that go with it.

Who, really, ever has the opportunity to become a King? Florida State has that opportunity. Now is our chance for our young university.

Four years ago, the Seminole Boosters asked Dave Hart to make an assessment of the entire Seminole athletic program and determine what it would take to give teams and individuals in each men's and women's sport the chance to compete for championships. It was a very simple charge: How can we use the Dynasty to create an overall athletics program as successful as any in the country?

Hart is exactly the man to make this assessment. He knows his business, and brings a sense of urgency and ambition to the Seminoles. Hart's vision is of an entire athletic facilities park, radiating outward from Doak Campbell Stadium, its architecture echoing the collegiate gothic style of the stadium and the older campus core.

Hart produced the plan and the statement of costs. It is a plan to stir the pride of every Seminole. It also gives our teams and our coaches facilities that can compete against any in the country.

On Sept. 22, the Seminole Boosters announced a Capital Campaign for Athletics, the first of its kind. The Dynasty Campaign will seek to complete all our athletic scholarship endowments, and put new first-class facilities and needed renovations into place.

The goal of the Dynasty Campaign is $70 million.

That should go a long way toward doing it all, and doing it right. About half of that amount will be for the scholarship endowment, and half for facilities.

The Boosters and Dave Hart began assembling lead gifts as part of a "quiet phase" of the campaign three years ago. Since September 1997, more than $35 million has been committed to the goal. In this new, public phase of the campaign, we will work to raise the rest.

Every campaign has a beginning and an end. We plan to end this one in October 2002, with a grand and triumphal celebration the Friday night before Florida State hosts Notre Dame here in Tallahassee.

Can we do it? Can our university barely 50 years old accomplish a goal that most other universities have never achieved? Perhaps they have never even attempted it.

We have a chance. The opportunity that is before us now was never there in the past, and it may never be available to us again. While the Dynasty exists, while Coach Bowden leads, while the passion is high and while the emotion resonates strongest in our hearts, now is the time to take advantage.

Who would have thought it possible? What would our future have been if destiny's unseen hand had not guided events to unfold as they have?

There's no conjurer's secret to raising money. It's simple: all those who love Florida State University must be asked to give however much and in whatever way they feel they can.

Every person who shares the powerful vision of what Florida State can achieve must be given the opportunity to help.

That done, the Dynasty Campaign will have the chance to achieve its promise: From Dynasty, To Destiny.