August 28, 2003
TO: Fans, Friends, and Supporters of LSU Athletics
FROM: Skip Bertman, LSU Director of Athletics
This Week:
Welcome to the 110th year of football on the LSU campus. This is the week we await with great anticipation every year because it kicks off the football season and gets our entire athletics year underway.
The LSU Tiger Marching Band got everyone warmed up last Friday afternoon when they took a practice run down North Stadium Drive and sent the Fighting Song booming across campus. Then on Monday, the students returned to class, and you can feel the fever for Saturday night rising with each day.
This week’s Cyber-side Chat will touch on various things you should know before making your way to Tiger Stadium for the LSU vs. UL-Monroe game.
We are opening a new FREE 45-acre parking lot on the corner of Nicholson Drive and Gourrier Lane. We’ve taken out four holes on the golf course, filled in the lakes and sand traps, and now we’re ready for football parking. With the addition of this new lot, we’ve now added over 4,300 free parking spaces in the last two years.
I invite you to go to LSUsports.net and click on “Getting to the Game” in the left hand column to find a football parking and traffic map, as well as other pertinent information.
BEFORE THE GAME
During your tailgating activities, help us keep your campus clean. This year we’ve beefed up our refuse collection points and have created a recycling program. We’ve expanded our clean up program by doubling the number of non-disposable containers on campus and adding new recycling containers and pickup service.
Perhaps most important of all, we have scheduled more trash pickup routes before and after games, and we have even added a trash pickup schedule DURING games, to make the area cleaner for you when you depart the stadium.
Last year, about 2,000 cardboard box containers were placed around campus. This year, we’ll replace those non-recyclable cardboard containers with 3,000 bright yellow reusable solid waste containers, and will supplement that with 1,000 recycling containers.
We have 91,000 fans per game in Tiger Stadium, and we estimate that as many as 20,000 more fans come out just to tailgate. We hope by adding new containers and scheduling additional trash collection, we can make game day more enjoyable for everyone.
For safety reasons, and as part of the recycling program, we are discouraging the use of glass on the campus. Broken glass in parking lots and fields has resulted in a number of injuries to both adults and children on the LSU campus.
Also, I hope you’ll take your family out to enjoy the new Pigskin Playground, located just outside of the south end zone by the airplane. Kids will enjoy slides, spacewalks and obstacle courses, plus interactive sports activities with LSU athletes. We’ll have the Pigskin Playground in place for the UL-Monroe, Western Illinois and Arkansas games.
We offered a 3-for-2 package for those games this year to encourage family involvement in Tiger football. If you haven’t bought your tickets or if you have a young person you would like to introduce to the great tradition of Saturday night in Tiger Stadium, come by and pick up tickets for those games, and then visit the Pigskin Playground.
AFTER THE GAME
This year’s LSU football parking and traffic map is color coded to indicate the best traffic routes LEAVING campus. Post-game traffic generated the most comments from our fans last season, and we have made it a priority to improve the flow of traffic departing the LSU campus on game nights. Please consult this map, which was also included in the LSU Fan Guide, to determine your best way out of campus after the game.
Finally, when you’re home on Sunday afternoon and reflecting on another great night in Tiger Stadium, tune into Cox Sports Television to see the new full-game replays of Tiger football. The games will be replayed in their entirety each Sunday afternoon beginning at 5 p.m. on Cox Sports Television affiliates throughout Louisiana.
Don’t forget to watch Inside LSU Football with Nick Saban each week (check your local listings for air times), and listen every Wednesday night to Tiger Sportsline with Nick Saban, a live radio show from Superior Grill in Baton Rouge. The show airs at 7 p.m. Central every Wednesday, and can be heard on Eagle 98.1 in Baton Rouge, and in many parts of the country on WWL 870-AM out of New Orleans.
For those of you who can’t make it out to Tiger Stadium, you can listen to every game, and every Tiger Sportsline show, on the LSU Sports Radio Network, or online at LSUsports.net.
It’s shaping up to be another fantastic year on the LSU campus, so don’t miss any of the fun. We want to hear from you about your game day experience, so write to us at LSUvision@etigers.net. Although I cannot guarantee a response to every e-mail, please know that they will all be read, and they will help us make Tiger Athletics better.
Thank you for your continued support of LSU Athletics.