NORFOLK, Va. -- When she has entertained prospects during the fall semester, Old Dominion women's basketball coach Wendy Larry has always had to improvise because there were no football Saturdays to use to highlight the atmosphere of ODU.
That will change in 2009, when Old Dominion will field a football team for the first time since 1940, using contributions of nearly $6 million from alumni, students and community leaders and promises of more to come to build a Division I-AA program.
"Even as a former student here, I think you dreamed of the day when there would be football games on Saturdays and parties and just the whole atmosphere of a football team. I just think it puts the anchor onto an athletic department," Larry said.
Already among the best teams in the Colonial Athletic Association in men's and women's basketball, the football Monarchs plan to make an impact, too. They will become the 13th football member of the CAA, which has produced two of the last three national I-AA champions, and allow Old Dominion to expand several established rivalries.
And the Monarchs don't expect to take long to get competitive.
"It's not going to be a tough start," university president Roseann Runte predicted at a news conference and tailgate party on campus Wednesday. "It's all the other teams that are going to have a tough season the day we begin playing football at ODU."
The Monarchs, who last played football when the school was a two-year division of the College of William & Mary, will play home games at Foreman Field, a 20,000-seat stadium that will get upgraded and have suites built in one end zone.
The artificial turf also will be replaced by either grass or a newer synthetic surface, athletic director Jim Jarrett said, and the field hockey and lacrosse programs that have called the field home will move to a new stadium to be built nearby.
The drive to add football -- even after several previous efforts failed -- started with a request from the student body, and continued with similar appeals from the alumni and then a unanimous endorsement from the board of visitors, Runte said.
More than 300 people attended the announcement under a beating sun, including Sonny Stallings, a board member and alumnus. Stallings referenced the previous failed attempts at adding football, then added: "After several fits and starts, it is exciting to be here today to be part of something that is going to complete this university."
It was a theme echoed time and again, especially by the other coaches who always have had to work around the absence of football and the excitement it generates.
"We've lost student-athletes because we didn't have a football environment," said Larry, who took the Lady Monarchs to the national championship game in 1997.
Men's coach Blaine Taylor said the absence of football caused him to entertain recruits on Thursdays and Friday so he could accent the vibrant atmosphere on campus.
