Kansas baseball is all the rage right now, and the school’s athletics development campaign is hard at work to capitalize on Dan Fitzgerald‘s recent success to pool cash as the Jayhawks host an NCAA regional for the first time in school history.
Kansas, ranked No. 15 in the latest USA Today Coaches Poll, will contest a double-elimination playoff beginning with Northeastern on Friday in Lawrence. Arkansas and Missouri State will contest the opposite end of the region bracket, and both winners will play again on Saturday.
It’s exciting times, sure, and Hoglund Ballpark, which normally seats 2,500 attendees, is outfitted to roughly 4,000 fans – a 60% increase – with a transformed venue featuring a see-through left-field wall, standing-room only sections, and private club areas to accommodate the upswing in traffic.
As a result, Kansas athletic director Travis Goff is using the opportunity to solicit donations, which already includes that of head football coach Lance Leipold and his family.
On Sunday, should the Jayhawks advance, it will be the program’s first CWS berth since 1993.
Winning your own NCAA Regional would go a long way toward raking in those much-needed donations, and it’d be a much-needed capacity upgrade to a ballpark that sold out twice this season – and we haven’t even gotten to the revenue garnered from the big weekend ahead.
Kansas is already on the hook to compensate Tyran Stokes, the top college basketball recruit in the Class of 2026, as well as complete its second-phase $362 million portion of David Booth Kansas Memorial Stadium. The department, too, recently upped its credit line from $35 million to $50 million earlier this spring.
Should Kansas lose, it’d be quite the momentum-killer for Goff’s latest marketing campaign. Although they’ve already extended Fitzgerald through 2031, the athletic department isn’t exactly working with house money when it comes to a potential remodel of Hoglund Ballpark.
The keyword’s potential, and the baseball program has a lot of it riding on this weekend.
