I went to see Scott Strickland speak to the Gator boosters in Orlando tonight, nice event.
I went alone and when we walked in I approached a group that was talking and it happened to be Stumpy Harris, pretty cool. Then before the event got started, I was standing near the back and lo and behold, The HBC is coming in, got a chance to chat with him and thank him for all the years of enjoyment. The event itself was interesting, it was billed as an update on the facilities and there was a folder on each seat with artist renderings of the baseball, softball and football facilities. Coach Spurrier got up to talk first and introduce Scott. He told a couple of stories, one in particular on the origin of the God is smiling on the Gators phrase. When he was coach, Jamie Speronis would organize the walk on tryouts. One day Coach was walking around the field and came across this player and asked him his name and where he was from. The player says I'm Tremayne Allen and I'm from Nashville. Coach says, what brought you all the way to Florida? Tremayne's response was God was smiling on me to which Coach responded me too, and the Gators. Scott (he was asked during the session what to call him and he said Scott), is a really likeable guy and you can tell he knows his stuff and will get things done. He started off talking about the $100+ million we have spent in facility upgrades over the past 16 months, but also talked about the $250+ million left to go! He has been around quite a bit with stints at Auburn, Tulane and Baylor before Miss St. Greg Byrne, the new AD at Alabama is the one who hired him back to Miss St as Associate AD. Scott was promoted to Ad when Greg left. The Q&A had a few good questions, one about why we don't schedule better teams rather than 2 patsies, one about noon starts for September games and one about the ref bias against Florida. The last one got HBC fired up and he grabbed the mic to basically say yeah, it's true. He said every time he would complain, he would get reprimanded, but it would start to even out after that for a while... Afterwards I asked Scott where he thought we ranked as far as football facilities in the SEC, while he didn't answer directly it was clear he thought we were way behind and in the bottom 1/3. All in all it was fun, they showed highlights from all sports fro this past year on the big screens before and after and had nice appetizers and a cash bar. They are doing the same in Jacksonville next week and in Tampa the last week of the month. Ken Sent from my iPad -- -- GATORS: ONE VOICE ON SATURDAY - NO VOICE ON SUNDAY! 1996 National Football Champions | 2006 National Basketball Champions 2006 National Football Champions | 2007 National Basketball Champions 2008 National Football Champions | Three Heisman Trophy winners: Steve Spurrier (1966), Danny Wuerffel (1996), Tim Tebow (2007) --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "GatorTalk" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
