Ave Maria athletics far from founding visions, but faith abounds

In the beginning, Tom Monaghan and supporters had visions, however fleeting, of a new Notre Dame, of glorious fall football Saturdays rooting for the home team at his new Catholic university in his new Catholic town in rural Southwest Florida.

Some 15 years since Ave Maria University was first announced, though – way out east on Oil Well Road in Collier County, past the endless tomato fields and signs of development finally beginning to take root – such visions are still barely more than a dream.

“This could be the Notre Dame of the South. Why not?” the late Bishop John J. Nevins of the Diocese of Venice said at a press conference in 2002 announcing the school, which was said to be the first new Catholic university to open in the United States in some four decades.

“In a few years we could have another nationally ranked football team in Florida,” said Jeb Bush, a prominent Catholic and Florida’s governor at the time.

By the time of the school’s opening in 2007, following a spike in construction costs and first salvos in the brewing housing market collapse, Monaghan, the orphan-turned-billionaire founder of Domino's Pizza and former owner of baseball's Detroit Tigers, had tempered that vision.

Rather than the 80,000-seat football behemoths and $100 million budgets common to college towns, Ave Maria would start "pretty small," as Monaghan once described it, "just one side of the stadium, room for 10,000 attendance." Donors would be sought to help with costs estimated a decade ago at more than $20 million.

Still another decade on, though, that vision, too, has yet to occur, begging questions both of when it will get built, and whether they will still come for an athletics program that in many ways is tied to the fortunes of a university and town itself.

“We have no interest in being like Notre Dame,” Ave Maria President Jim Towey, whose son is a junior at Notre Dame, in South Bend, Indiana, said in February. Towey took over daily operations of Ave Maria in 2011.

“There are many admirable qualities about the University of Notre Dame. But Ave Maria doesn’t want to be Notre Dame. It wants to be who we are.”

Rather than the second-tier I-AA level, now known as the Football Championship Subdivision, that Monaghan settled on a decade ago as a realistic compromise, Ave Maria instead plays in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), home mostly to small schools with negligible resources and equally minimal fan support.

United States college athletics associations

• NCAA – National College Athletics Association (Divisions I, II and III)
• NAIA – National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics:
• NCCAA – National Christian College Athletic Association
• USCAA – United States Collegiate Athletic Association
• NJCAA – National Junior College Athletic Association 

A football stadium doesn’t exist beyond a poorly draining field, metal bleachers that can hold about 1,000 and a narrow, three-story building to house media and scorekeepers, which was a minimum requirement to join the NAIA.

Last season, when the football team went 0-10 under another new coach, the program’s fourth in its six seasons, average attendance was only a little more than 500 for five home games.

Staff turnover also has hurt continuity in many sports. Outside of pockets of success – such as football going 8-2 in 2013 and women’s basketball excelling almost from its outset before slipping back to .500 the past three seasons as resources have declined – results mostly haven’t been good.

Indeed, Ave Maria remains better known nationally for its strict Catholicism – often gawked at for such items like the prohibition on birth control sales anywhere in the town – than any athletic exploits.

“We’re not where we want to be. It’s clear,” Ave Maria Athletic Director John Lamanna, 35, the school’s fifth in nine years, said of athletic results to match the school’s academic reputation.

“We’ve drudged through all of the growing pains, and now is the time we should start experiencing some real, actual growth. I just think we’re a year away from really kind of taking off.”

It was several decades ago that Monaghan, who turned 80 in March and remains active as chancellor, had an epiphany about the many material extravagances that once filled his life. Those included a collection of 244 classic cars, $30 million resort on Lake Huron and even $40 cashmere socks.

“I always hated a showoff. I realized I was a showoff,” the Ann Arbor, Michigan, native told Bloomberg in a 2014 profile. "I wanted not just more, I wanted more than others. What I thought were virtues were really not.”

Ave Maria – the town and university, thriving football and sports programs included – was part of his answer.

“There’s so much you can do at a university that can change the whole world,” Monaghan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told Bloomberg. “I didn’t want a diploma factory. I wanted a saint factory.”

Ave Maria athletics key dates

• 1998, 1999: Dominos Pizza founder and former Detroit Tigers owner Tom Monaghan opens Ave Maria College and Ave Maria Law School in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
• 2002: Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos. announce plans for Ave Maria University and the town of Ave Maria in Collier County.
• 2007: The town “opens” and university begins classes on campus after operating college and law school at temporary home in Naples.
• 2008: Ave Maria begins athletic competition and joins NAIA.
• 2011: Ave Maria holds inaugural football season.
• 2011: Jim Towey hired as school president; Monaghan steps aside from overseeing daily operations.
• 2017: John Lamanna promoted from interim to full-time athletic director, AMU’s fifth in nine years.

Ave Maria, then, makes no apologies when it comes to its strict academic, religious and cultural standards, even though such standards often can be barriers to recruiting – and winning with – many of the athletes that its peers do enroll.

“Don’t come to Ave Maria University if you’re looking for a hook-up, binge-drinking environment. You’re at the wrong place,” said Towey, 60, who was legal counsel for Mother Teresa for 12 years and was director of President George W. Bush's Office of Faith-based Initiatives.

“We’re not into all the Lady Gaga nonsense and cultural rot that you see out in the world. We’re interested in values that the Church has stood on for thousands of years, and we have high academic standards. We’re not going to set kids up to fail by recruiting kids that can’t make it.”

Monaghan, a former Marine, always envisioned athletics as central to the school for the lessons sports can teach, contributions they can make to campus atmosphere and visibility winning programs can provide.

Against the backdrop of a scandal-filled college sports landscape, even at religious schools, Ave Maria doesn't believe it has to choose between winning and maintaining its values.

“The students know we love to win,” Towey said. “We’re not satisfied for just having a sports program here. We want athletics to excel like everything else.”

Rather than principles, resources have been the greatest limitation to Ave Maria’s athletics growth and success, based on available evidence.

When Towey first arrived in 2011 – the year Monaghan had set to cease personally funding the school after pouring hundreds of millions of his own dollars into its creation – his first move was to cut school-wide spending by about 10 percent, or about $3.6 million. More than 20 positions were eliminated.

“I’m like, ‘With what? Where are we going to get the money? Tom’s not writing checks anymore like that,’” Towey, who had been president at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania prior o joining Ave Maria, said of the proposed budget upon his arrival.

A big chunk of the cuts came from athletics, which saw its budget hacked from about $3.1 million to about $1.5 million, Towey said.

Salaries, scholarships and a new track and field program that was just starting all were cut.

Today, the school has about 40 percent of its 1,042 students competing on its 15 teams, including more than 100 in football and more than 50 in baseball.

“I loved that Tom’s vision for the university had a robust athletics component, because I think you can learn about life and about your faith through athletics,” said Towey, a student manager and graduate assistant for the Florida State men’s basketball team for seven years in the 1970s and '80s.

“(But) they started off with so robust an athletics plan that it was not sustainable initially. They were trying to grow enrollment quickly and felt sports would be the way to do it. All well intended. We had to slow that down and scale it back a bit. But I think we’re now hitting the sweet spot.”

Monaghan’s vision of a saint factory hasn’t been wholly immune to the real world.

Academic and criminal problems plagued the debut season for men’s basketball in 2008-09, results for which don’t even appear on the school’s website. The team’s first coach, fired before the season even began for repeatedly swearing, later was accused of fraud by Puerto Rico's basketball governing body.

Three years later, Towey’s first, there again were academic and other conflicts with the football team. Those resulted in heavy roster turnover, the firing of the founding coach and relocation of the founding athletic director elsewhere at the school.

“You can’t bring in a bunch of kids that are flunking out and that are undermining the culture of the campus,” Towey said. “They just wanted to play football. Well, they were at the wrong school.”

While financial limitations also have hindered staff continuity, Towey believes the school has finally built a good foundation for athletics to align with broader campus standards.

“I think the best look at the direction we’re going is based off our overall behavior incidences on campus,” Lamanna said. “Athletics has had on the higher end of those (numbers of incidences). It has reduced significantly over this past year, and a lot of that has to do with the recruitment of the coaches and the culture the coaches have put into place within their programs.”

“I think we’re recruiting better kids that are talented in athletics that also are interested in being at Ave Maria University,” Towey said. “Eventually word will get out. It’s just going to take time.”

The Gyrenes – a nickname picked by Monaghan using the once derisive term for Marines that they long ago proudly co-opted – ultimately face the problem familiar to many schools and athletic programs: money.

The sports budget has increased to only about $1.7 million, Towey said. That minimal amount often leaves Ave Maria with inferior staffing, equipment, facilities and other resources compared with many of its NAIA peers, much less the NCAA Division II programs it still hopes to become.

Even scholarships aren’t on par with the packages Ave Maria itself first offered when it began athletics. The school offers athletic and academic packages covering only about a third of its full annual cost of about $30,000, leaving students and families picking up at least $20,000 in yearly costs.

“It’s been frustrating, yeah,” said Lauren Gillingham, a Fort Myers High School graduate and junior on the Ave Maria women’s basketball team. “You would hope the school is providing everything it can. We don’t know the logistics behind it. I would assume they’d been providing everything they can for the athletic department to be successful.”

Ave Maria plans in the next five years to add lights and artificial turf to the football field and build a student recreation center to accompany its 1,000-seat Tom Golisano Field House, opened in 2011.

Rather than FCS football, the school's future hopes now go only as far as joining the NCAA D-II Sunshine State Conference, a Florida-based league of mostly private schools that would better fit Ave Maria's academic and financial profile than its current NAIA conference.

But such "an expensive proposition,” as Towey described it, hasn’t been in the draft versions of the school’s five-year plan, potentially leaving Gyrenes athletics still in their relative infancy for the foreseeable future.

Even Florida SouthWestern State College in Fort Myers, a junior college athletics program, has the benefit of brand new, $28 million, 3,500-seat Suncoast Credit Union Arena on campus and a $1.1 million budget for just the four sports the school has restarted after shuttering its athletics program in the 1990s.

“We don’t have a band or anything like that. Every high school has a band and thousands of people packed in,” said North Fort Myers High School graduate Brian Byrd, a junior wide receiver on the Ave Maria football team. “But you have to be proud and humble with what you have. I’m grateful for the 600-700 people who do come out here and watch us.”

In his 2014 interview with Bloomberg, Monaghan acknowledged that his investment in Ave Maria the town, developed in partnership with land-holding titan Barron Collier Cos., “has been a bloodbath.”

Monaghan said he was spending $5 million a year on roads and other upkeep and even tried launching a chain of hamburger delivery joints, called Gyrene Burger, in the model of Dominos to generate revenue. Two in Collier County opened and subsequently closed. One in Knoxville, Tennessee, has a 2017 date on its website but appears closed.

“If it gets to 100 units, that could make me $3 million to $4 million a year,” Monaghan said.

And yet, there's strong signs that Ave Maria will stand on its own.

A decade after the collapse of the housing market hit the town hard during its formation, real estate recovery is finally now proving a boon for the school and town.

In 2015, Ave Maria led Southwest Florida with 253 homes sold, according to the Collier Building Association. Last year it reached 342 homes sold, according to Ave Maria Development.

"It’s enormous how much it’s grown," said Byrd, recalling a football camp he attended at Ave Maria before his sophomore year of high school. “It was absolutely empty. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I couldn’t live out here.’"

On campus, enrollment has risen about 60 percent since 2011, Towey said. In November, Ave Maria broke ground on an $11 million building for its nursing program and a performing arts center and auditorium.

And in January, the university sold its opulent oratory in the center of town to the Diocese of Venice, which received land from the school and town to support growing needs in both, it said.

Even a 2016 lawsuit accusing the university of siphoning funds away from its affiliated K-12 school, the Rhodora Donahue Academy, was not an indication of financial strain, Towey said.

“These people were upset with the direction of the academy because they didn’t feel it was Catholic enough,” Towey said. “They thought they were going to get a Catholic utopia here. Well, they’re upset.

“Our finances have never been in better shape. Standard and Poor’s just gave us a stable rating. We’ve got tens of million of dollars in reserve. That puts us in the top half of all the schools in the country. But we’ve still got to raise money. We’ve got to grow enrollment, like all small schools.”

Indeed, at a time when a growing number of small private colleges in the country are closing amid financial crises, Ave Maria has a goal to fill its existing dorms, for which the school is still paying debt service, and reach enrollment of 1,500 within five years.

“We could fill them tomorrow," Towey said. "The issue is getting the right men and women here and making sure they’re here for the right seasons. One of them will be athletics. But it can’t be the only one.”

Fifteen years after it was first spelled out, some still see Monaghan's original vision eventually coming true in some fashion, new Notre Dame or not.

“I wouldn’t say him saying that was far-fetched. I just don’t think he realized how long it would actually take," said Ave Maria senior cross country runner and student body president John Gargano, a Bishop Verot High School graduate who is acquainted with Monaghan.

Gargano pointed to the growing numbers of people attracted to Ave Maria's affordable housing in between Southwest Florida and Miami, the latter only an hour from the school and community Monaghan built from scratch.

"In the next 20-30 years, the only way for any of those people to go is here,” Gargano said. “The only place in the middle is Ave.”

• 1,042 – Undergraduate enrollment, fall 2016
• 40 – Approximate percent of students on intercollegiate athletics teams
• 1,000 – Approximate bleacher seating at football field
• 500 –  Average attendance at 2016
• $1.7 million – Approximate 2016-17 athletics budget
• Source: Ave Maria

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