What a GREAT Night!!!!!

For the first time in years, the University of Arizona Football program hosted an awards banquet to honor its players, and mainly the Seniors.

At the Westin LaPaloma last night, Coach Stoops and his staff honored all of the Seniors and the host of players that have won awards for this past season. When it was all said and done, you could almost say it was a banquet to honor our head coach, Mike Stoops.

Coach was greeted at the microphone with a standing ovation from the fans, boosters, administration, parents, but more noticeable was the players. Coach was his humble self and immediately deflected all of the praise to all the coaches wives, who he said "sacrifice so much".

All of the players mentioned how much they appreciated and love Coach Stoops. Even Mike Thomas explained, at first chance given, how the shoving incident was so misunderstood. It seemed that every single player mentioned that Coach Stoops was not only a great coach, but they all felt they would better men after playing for him.

Tim Cummins, who is in charge of Sports Video for football, put together an AWESOME highlight video of the season. He also put together a video honoring the Senior players.

Coach could not thank the Seniors enough for all that they had done for the program and for him. All in all, it was an incredible night. The food was awesome and the program was even better!

We're Looking for Managers!!!!

We get asked all the time, how does one become a student manager? Well, it is a simple process.

The number one thing that is necessary, a person has to be a full time student at the University of Arizona to even be considered.

Then we need to hear from you! If you are interested, or know someone who might be interested, please email me at wneal@arizona.edu and let me know. At that point I will respond and let you know more details.

We do offer different levels of scholarships for these positions.

So let us hear from you. Spread the word. We are looking for potentially 6 new managers for next fall.

I look forward to hearing from you! Wendell

Big Day Today

Lots of excitement as we start the day today!

First of all, it is the first day of school and everyone is back. Second of all, Tim and I return from the AFCA Convention in Nashville and we are charged up!

Recruiting is heating up as we come down the home stretch with signing day right around the corner. This is an exciting time for us because we find out who we will be working with the next few years.

The managers report to work this afternoon. Our first big duty will be finishing the inventory. We will be doing the physical count of everything in stock. This is an opportunity to get everything cleaned up and organized.

We will also be running reports on usage so we have a better understanding of what we are actually using the most in terms of styles and sizes.

Most of our Nike gear has been ordered, but we still have things like shoes, gloves and other Nike accessories to order. This inventory and usage reports will help us do a better job of ordering.

We also have the rest of our stuff to order, such as Riddell items like helmets and shoulder pads.

The AFCA was very beneficial. We were able to visit with other equipment managers to see what worked well for them this past season. With the new hot item of the year, the Revolution Speed helmet by Riddell, the discussion was especially good. It seems that Riddell has once again hit a home run with the product development.

We also had a Pac 10 Equipment Managers meeting which is always beneficial. All the schools were represented with the exception of UCLA, Oregon and Washington State. We talked about many things, but most of it centered around our upcoming Pac 10 Equipment Managers meeting in May, once again to be held in Las Vegas. The group decided to add more workshops and seminars to the agenda. Riddell will once again sponsor the meeting.

Spring 2009 is shaping up to be an exciting semester!