When Daryl Gross was named the Syracuse director of athletics in December, women’s basketball head coach Keith Cieplicki approached Gross and asked about the possibility of playing a women’s game in the Carrier Dome.

Manley Field House, with a capacity of 9,500, has always served as the home for the women’s team, but the lure of playing a single game in the Carrier Dome excited Cieplicki.

Cieplicki’s request, though, came with many obstacles. The women’s basketball team averaged just 642 fans per game last year, not enough to fill even a section of the Dome. It’d also be more costly to operate the Dome, and with fewer fans SU would lose money.

Gross’ response to Cieplicki, then, might seem a bit odd. He told Cieplicki he’d like to schedule an entire season there, starting with several games this year.

‘Why would we not do that?’ Gross said. ‘People were like, ‘You might not get too many people in the seats,’ but you’ve got to start somewhere.’

That line of thinking carried Gross through every marketing and athletic meeting during his 14-year tenure at Southern California. Whenever a staff member raised a potential conflict, Gross would stop the complaint and tell his staff to start at the end result and work to the beginning.

Gross’ insistence on the end product continues with his marketing efforts at Syracuse. He’s already launched a Times Square advertising campaign to raise Syracuse’s profile in New York state, converted the Carrier Dome surface to FieldTurf and switched logos to help SU brand globally.

‘Don’t start at the beginning because you might run into too many hurdles,’ Gross said. ‘Three or four hurdles and all of a sudden you lose your momentum.’

Utilizing the Web

Daryl Gross pictures an ideal world where everyone has a computer and uses the Internet to get their information about Syracuse athletics, from tickets to SU jerseys.

He’s worked backwards from there, starting with a site redesign of suathletics.com.

Along with Syracuse’s new block ‘S’ logo, the new site incorporates a multimedia banner at the top of the page that promotes Robinson’s first year as head coach. The site is easier to navigate and will incorporate an online merchandise store in the near future.

The new site also includes a link for online ticketing. In the past, users had to go through the Carrier Dome Web site and then follow a link to tickets.com to buy seats. Now a tickets link is located at the top of every page, making it easier for fans to buy single game or season tickets.

With those changes in mind, Gross told his staff to drive more traffic to the site. The marketing department placed the Web site address at the bottom of every ad.

‘You want to make it so easy for the consumer that they don’t have to, after work, drive up to the Dome, figure out a place to park, find out where the box office is and figure out how to buy tickets,’ Gross said. ‘Instead, go home, have a glass of wine, order some tickets. Here it is. It’s real simple. You don’t want more than a couple of clicks.’

By featuring the site more, the school is also generating additional ad revenue because the site’s traffic has increased. For example, a U.S. Army button is located beneath a video player on the front page of the site. Every few days the video is updated to give users a glimpse of what SU All Access subscribers get when they purchase a subscription.

If you visit the site on a Wednesday evening, you might see a snippet of Robinson’s mid-week press conference and a clip of football practice leading up to a weekend game. A few highlights from a soccer game might follow a commercial for the Army.

Users are then told all the benefits of the SU All Access package, such as radio broadcasts if you’re out of the area and video highlights of all sports.

In the past, Gross said a spot like the U.S. Army ad might fetch $10,000 for a set number of views. With the site earning more traffic, that same spot could grab 10 times that amount, giving ISP Sports, the outsourced corporate sponsorship arm of Syracuse, an additional tool to sell to potential advertisers.

‘We’re gaining new inventory and more users to the site,’ Syracuse ISP Sports General Manager Joe Baldini said. ‘The site’s very dynamic. We had great traffic before and it’s getting better.’

Gross’ grandest idea, though, is to Web cast every game from every sport online. Gross met two weeks ago with representatives from WAER, a campus radio station which broadcasts men’s basketball, lacrosse and football, to discuss a plan where students from the station would call play-by-play for non-revenue sports online.

Lynn Kahle, a professor at the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, said Syracuse’s push toward Web content is part of a general phenomenon of sports teams utilizing the Internet. The teams that provide more gain an edge on their competition. Providing live video feeds of every game is one way to do so.

‘The Internet can be an endless source of information for the fanatic or casual fan,’ Kahle said. ‘A lot of fans can get their information in real time from a school’s site. A lot of things can help the casual fan, too, like buying tickets a few days before a game or checking a team’s schedule.’

New York, New York

If you’re driving toward Times Square on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 49th Street in Manhattan, an 11-story orange and blue billboard encircles your vision.

A giant orange-colored apple accompanies a block ‘S’ that declares Syracuse ‘New York’s College Team.’

An estimated 1 million people view a combination of three Syracuse billboards in this part of New York City every day. Gross launched the ad campaign in August to raise Syracuse’s profile in America’s largest city. He also negotiated a radio deal that puts all of Syracuse’s football and men’s basketball games on air in the city.

‘We want to brand in New York City,’ Gross said. ‘New York City is one of the largest media markets in the world. I truly believe the city is open to who’s going to be their true college team.’

Syracuse already has a strong alumni base in New York City but the latest campaign should increase corporate sponsorships, Baldini said. As potential customers see the campaign and the school becomes more popular, businesses in New York City will have the option of sponsoring a team their customers recognize.

‘Daryl’s vision of New York City will help us get new business out of there,’ Baldini said. ‘We did a really good job of expanding the footprint from Buffalo to Albany before. This will help us downstate more.’

Tapping into New York City is one step, but Gross is still focusing on other cities in the state, such as Binghamton, Buffalo and Rochester. Syracuse has placed a number of 30-second television spots in those markets. Football head coach Greg Robinson appears on the cover of every Yellow Pages telephone book in Syracuse and each fall sport has a team page inside.

Gross accomplished all that through trade deals, often a commodity like tickets for a television ad. Utilizing such a swap increases Syracuse’s profile without spending money.

‘I want it to be anywhere in New York state their home team is Syracuse,’ Gross said. ‘I think we can create that.’

Basketball supremacy

When Daryl Gross discusses the future of the women’s basketball program, he includes it in a list with men’s basketball, men’s lacrosse and football. The commonality between those three programs is they make money.

Gross wants the women’s basketball program to do the same.

To accomplish that, Gross sees a team that’s one of the best in the country, drawing huge crowds in the Carrier Dome. If the team succeeds, Gross predicts, the Syracuse community will watch and the team will generate revenue.

The problem is that so few fans watch the team now that it’ll take a continued rebuilding effort by Cieplicki to draw local attention. The Orange went 13-16 last year in his second season, seven more wins than the first year. The team even won a first round Big East game last season.

But Gross doesn’t want to wait for the team to be one of the best in the nation before fans begin showing up in the Dome.

Starting this year, the women’s basketball team will have several home games in the Dome. At least one will have its own date, but others might be part of doubleheaders with men’s games. The plan is still being finalized and Gross stressed it’ll be a few weeks before anything concrete is announced.

He’d like to market one game so that as many as 20,000 people show up to experience what it’s like to have a raucous crowd at a women’s game. Syracuse hosts Connecticut on Feb. 22, a possible date because of the Huskies’ national prominence.

‘Maybe that’s the game we do it,’ Gross said. ‘We can have some kind of giveaway or festive atmosphere just to check it out, just to get people to feel excited about women’s basketball.’

Rebuilding the women’s basketball program is on par with Gross’ efforts in other sports at Syracuse. He often uses his time at USC as a blueprint for building a successful athletic department. Much attention is paid to the football team that’s produced back-to-back national championships at USC, but volleyball and water polo have also won titles.

USC built a new track stadium, expanded its tennis facility and added a women’s soccer field during Gross’ tenure to aid those non-revenue sports. Gross wants to build an additional training facility at SU to complement a football-only building that’s under construction. That way, recruits in any sport have an additional reason to come to Syracuse.

‘It’s not just about football and basketball,’ Gross said. ‘When you win one in women’s volleyball, it gets contagious. And we’ll parade it like it’s the Super Bowl.’

Every idea comes with a cost, hampering Gross’ creativity. He headed numerous marketing campaigns at USC, led the school’s corporate sponsorship department and raised millions, but numerous obstacles are in his way to building Syracuse into another USC.

Every time a problem arises and another road block deters his vision, Gross still manages a smile and imagines the end result. It worked at USC and Gross feels it will at Syracuse, too.

‘It sounds simple but it solves a lot of questions when you work like that,’ Gross said. ‘You’ve got to dream on these things.’

Published on October 4, 2005 at 12:00 pm