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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

BSU to capitalize on bowl victory


A Boise State fan shows support in downtown Boise. 
 (Associated Press / The Spokesman-Review)
Jesse Harlan Alderman Associated Press

BOISE – Boise State University officials were preparing Tuesday to ramp up a marketing and fundraising campaign that they hope will capitalize on the school’s unprecedented national exposure after a thrilling underdog victory in the Fiesta Bowl.

If the increases in enrollment and donations following Cinderella runs by the George Mason and Gonzaga basketball teams can predict Boise State’s “Bowl Bounce,” the commuter school in Idaho’s capital city should expect the glass slipper to fit for months to come.

“The market for colleges offers a vast variety of experiences,” said Paul Swangard, director of the Warsaw Center for Sports Marketing at the University of Oregon. “For those students who have strong interest in a major college experience, Boise State has now shown it can compete on a national level.”

Boise State is eager to cash in on Sunday’s 43-42 overtime victory over the favored Oklahoma Sooners before millions of prime-time television viewers. The Fiesta Bowl champions returned home to a jubilant welcome from a raucous crowd of 1,500 fans in the parking lot of Bronco Statium on Tuesday.

It’s a strategy that has worked well for Gonzaga University, which endeared national basketball audiences with an improbable run to the Elite Eight in the NCAA basketball tournament in 1999.

Gonzaga has qualified for the tournament every year since, while school enrollment and fundraising have soared. The school enrolled 6,700 students this fall, compared with 4,400 in the 1997-1998 academic year.

The applicant pool has grown by 2,000 and prospective student inquiries by 30,000 in the past 10 years. Annual fundraising has climbed by more than $5 million, said Dale Goodwin, Gonzaga spokesman.

“There’s no question that last night’s game will put Boise State on the radar with students across the country,” Goodwin said. “That’s been our experience.”

Goodwin said Gonzaga has never recruited students on the East Coast and rarely heard from those students before the basketball success. Gonzaga now receives about 30 unsolicited inquiries from East Coast students each year.

“It’s not so much that students value athletics, it’s that athletics creates a spirit on a campus that’s difficult to replicate any other way,” Goodwin said. “Sixteen-, 17-, 18-year-old students want to go to a place that has some spirit, that has some spunk – that’s fun.”

In the lead-up to Monday’s Fiesta Bowl game – only the second Bowl Championship Series appearance for a non-BCS conference team – Boise State sent e-mail to 16,000 prospective students touting the bowl appearance.

University President Bob Kustra said the victory fits in well with the school’s capital and marketing campaigns.

The aggressive campaigns, which feature billboards in Boise and a recruitment drive for accomplished students, seek to change Boise State from a commuter school with a large vocational component into a nationally recognized research university that anchors the Boise metropolitan area.

Boise State is preparing to announce an ambitious private fundraising drive. Kustra said he expects to be able to announce the largest donation in school history, a gift to the Economics Department, later this year.

University merchandise sales topped $663,000 in December and much of that money will go toward scholarships. The school will receive an estimated $3.5 million from the Fiesta Bowl appearance, with much of that paying for renovations at Bronco Stadium.

But the victory and the excitement of a gutsy two-point conversion play that sealed the victory, star player Ian Johnson’s teary marriage proposal during a post-game interview and the David vs. Goliath story line bought obscure Boise State incalculable national publicity, Kustra said.

“It’s going to be easier to recruit top-flight faculty, easier to recruit students and easier to raise money,” Kustra said. “It’s in a sense a coincidence because we’ve been preparing a comprehensive campaign for a year now.”

A one-time junior college, Boise State already was slowly blooming into a research university as the Boise metropolitan area attracted technology firms and thousands of urban transplants throughout the 1990s.

Kustra hopes the bowl victory will accelerate that transformation, mirroring the experience of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., in the nine months since it captivated basketball fans on a run to last year’s NCAA Final Four as a No. 11 seed.

“The president of George Mason University called me before Christmas and said, ‘You need to know, at Boise State, your life is going to change,’ ” Kustra said.