FAMU AD address controversial comments, new initiatives

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Late last week, Kellen Winslow visited the Palm Beach Post for an interview about his first months on the job as FAMU’s new athletic director. He revisited his controversial statement that claimed that the FAMU Department of Athletics “can’t be fixed.”

At one of your first public appearances in Tallahassee this summer you said that the FAMU athletic department was beyond fixing and what it really needed was to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Is that the way you meant that to come out?

In just talking to our other partners on campus, athletics was so isolated. It was really just out there by itself. What I’m trying to do, and what the staff I’m putting together is trying to do, is we want to go from being the worst department on campus to the best department on campus. I think the best thing I’ve done since I’ve been there is I’ve painted three walls orange. All the walls were tan. They were old, beige, might have been painted in 1975. The carpets were old with tears in it. It wasn’t a place to do business. I asked people what do you think of our orange wall? And they’d said, ‘Well, it’s bright,’ or some would come in and say ‘Wow.’ And I’d say, ‘Thank you.’ It’s a reaction. I didn’t have that reaction when I walked in here.

Do you have anything new planned for Bragg Memorial Stadium this season, which opened for FAMU football games in 1957 and got its last renovation more than 30 years ago?

We’re starting a new premium experience that we’ve never had at the stadium before, where you can buy an upgraded seat and have a climate-controlled space and have access to adult beverages. It’s in the north end zone. It’s a limited amount of tickets and that’s going to be our value-added ticket experience that I think our fans have been clamoring for.

When will this be available?

We’re up and running. We’re laying the concrete now. The tents are going up. We’ll be ready for our home opener against Coastal Carolina (Sept. 20). We’re looking at the need to build facilities. That’s either a major renovation of Bragg Stadium with FieldTurf or it’s a relocation of Bragg Stadium and building a totally new stadium. There’s a couple of places on campus to put it. We’re going to look at all probabilities that make sense working with our county, state and city partners from an economic-development standpoint.

With all this talk of new things, will there be an effort made to preserve the tradition of Rattler excellence going back to all those national championship teams from 50 years ago?

One thing we’re doing right now is bringing over the director of the Black Archives museum on campus and she’s guiding us through how we take care of our trophies. We call it our legacy project. Now we’re going to take all those trophies with all the reverence that they should be treated with, and polish them up, clean up those cabinets, paint those cabinets and then she’s going to instruct us on how we display these things so that when you walk in that fieldhouse, you feel the legacy. We just haven’t taken care of that.

Read the full interview here.
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