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Published: 6/4/2011 | Updated: 6/17/2013
By DON O'BRIEN
Herald-Whig Sports Editor
For the first time in a long time, Quincy University football coach Bill Terlisner will get to drive a recruit to his team's field with a little pride.
With QU kicking in $75,000 toward the artificial turf project at Flinn Stadium, the Hawks will have a new home, possibly as soon as the team's Sept. 3 season opener with Iowa Wesleyan.
That means the days of the Hawks playing in the rapidly deteriorating eyesore that is QU-Stadium look to be history.
Terlisner couldn't be happier about leaving "The Rockpile."
"It's a great, great thing, not just for Quincy University football, but for football in general," said Terlisner, who has made it a point in recent years to not take recruits to QU-Stadium for fear of losing them. "It's going to be a great venue. It's always been a great venue, but the playing surface can't handle band, soccer, football and everything else. Once they put that field turf out there, it's going to be a first-class situation."
If Flinn is a first-class facility, then the football side of QU-Stadium is third world. The bleachers at the south end have been covered with tarps for several years. If you go into the home team's locker room, you can see rebar sticking through the concrete. The only redeeming thing about the place was the playing surface, which was light years better than what Quincy High School teams have had to play on at Flinn over the past few years.
Now that the field at Flinn's being fixed, the Hawks will get a new home.
QU will get to play in a place where all of its fans will be able to sit without having to worry about dodging police tape quarantining entire sections.
"It's another step in the commitment we're trying to make for the football program," Quincy University Athletic Director Marty Bell said. "We built a new locker room (on campus) a couple of years ago and we've increased their staff.
"We've had a hard time trying to recruit kids to a venue that's not very attractive. Now we have a nice 4,000-seat place that has field turf. I think our alumni will resonate with that. I think our current students will resonate with that, and I think our recruits will resonate with that.
"In a lot of ways, it's a good move."
It was really the school's only move if it wanted to do something about the football team's playing situation.
The school's choices were to get on board with the turf project at Flinn or undertake a fund-raising effort to either rehab QU-Stadium or convert North Campus Field into a hybrid soccer/football facility with artificial turf.
Option A was $75,000 and Option B probably would have been well over $1 million.
The choice was simple.
But it might not be popular with some. When the school built the Mart Heinen Softball Complex in 2004, much was made about the fact QU wanted all of its sports teams on campus. This move takes one of the school's flagship programs off campus.
"In a perfect world, would I like to be on campus? Yeah," Terlisner said. "I'm also a realist. This will be a better playing situation than what I have now. Because of that, it's a positive move. Eventually, they may build an on-campus facility, but in the meantime we'll have an excellent place to play."
The Hawks are committed to playing at Flinn for the next three seasons, rent-free. In the fourth year, the school will pay a $500 per game usage fee to use Flinn. That deal will last for up to seven seasons. Bell plans to use that time to think of ways to bring the Hawks back home.
"It gives me some time to figure out what I want to do with our existing stadium," Bell said. "What do I want to do with North Campus?
"Rather than keep putting a band aid on something that's just getting worse and worse, we need to find a better home for those kids in the interim, so it gives me time to evaluate what direction we're headed with that."
Hopefully that will one day lead to another on-campus home for the Hawks. In the interim, Flinn will do just fine.
-- dobrien@whig.com/221-3365
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