John Zamberlin does have some valid points that he's discussed with Jay Heater, such as a lack of chartered flights to various destinations, no catered lunches for the coaches, and the low salaries of most of the assistants. But then again, when Larry Lewis and Brian McNeely had winning teams, they were able to overcome these obstacles and still recruit good players and win some games. Whereas Coach Z never did take the blame for his failures and instead has blamed the athletic dept. for what they haven't given him. I don't care if he does read this -- long ago Frank told him to quit reading the ISU message board and he never did listen to him. And another thing, Heater said that ISU has had a history of having FB coaches with losing records. But the thing he failed to mention was that McNeely and Lewis both took their lumps and had losing records while they were turning the program around, and eventually had some winning teams. And it's giong to take time for any coach to rebuild and turn around a program, even for Coach Kramer -- they can't just do it overnight.
In any event, I know that last year Coach Z's staff were flying recruits into Salt Lake and not directly into Pocatello. And this is something that really needs to be remedied, because it would greatly help recruiting at a cost of about $15,000 or so. I know that Idaho Falls has direct flights to Denver and to Mesa, AZ, and this is advantageous for recruiting as it's only about a 45 minute drive from IF to Poky. Whereas recruits from the Seattle and Portland areas used to fly into Boise and from there take a Horizon flight to IF. A few months ago Horizon had discontinued this service, but there's been talk about starting it back up again.
Coach Z does have a valid point about assistant coach salaries, because most of them only make about $22,000 per year. You can't support a family on this amount, and it would be hard for a single guy to make it, unless they had a few roommates. And this is something that Coach Kramer's assistants are going to have to deal with, unless ISU finds a way to pay these assistants a little more money. And all of the coaches work very, very hard throughout the year. And it's because of our lack of being able to pay these coaches a reasonable salary is the reason why Coach Kramer has hired very young assistants, with many of them having graduate assistant jobs last season. If I was super rich, then this is an area that I'd certainly be willing to help out with.
Having catered lunches for the coaches would eventually be a nice thing to have, because I'm sure that the staff is tired of bringing baloney sandwiches or leftover burritos to work every day, but perhaps we can provide that eventually when we can get more funding for FB. And the same holds true for chartered flights, as they're certainly a luxury, but then again you can't strictly blame a loss on the fact that you took a commercial airliner to where you needed to go instead of a chartered flight.
This is something that's not related to ISU athletics, but did you notice that over the weekend Idaho only had 8,011 fans for a FB game at the Kibbie Dome. And yet they're persistently determined to continue to compete at the 1-A level -- with the WAC completely falling apart and all!!
