Lyndsay Krisel
Equinox Staff
With the continuous shift in athletic seasons during the 2012 academic semester, the demand for the Keene State College Athletic department to provide its sports teams with proper equipment can often be challenging due to budget constraints.
However, with a newly introduced fund raising idea, they may have just discovered the winning ticket.
Each athletic team including coaches has been asked to participate in selling raffle calendars for all of five dollars.
The idea of it is that for those who purchase a calendar, their names will be entered in a drawing, for a chance to win some pretty great prizes during the month of November. These prizes are worth over $3,500 and include multiple gift cards; Ski lift tickets and money to the Keene State College bookstore.
If you haven’t purchased one yet, the Keene State College athletic department urges you to do so.
KSC Men’s Basketball Coach Robert Colbert seemed to agree with this new fundraiser, and said that it is a great new way to help raise money for the athletes and the department.
He explained, “It’s a pretty neat idea and there are some cool prizes included. It’s always a new experience trying to sell raffles to people, but this is different than selling candy bars or raffle tickets, I think it’s a very attractive $5 piece,” he added.
KSC Athletic Director John Ratliff elaborated a bit more about the new fundraiser explaining that the department wanted to come up with a strategy that would deem both attractive and affordable to students around campus. He said, “We wanted to target college students in particular, and I think it’s inexpensive enough that people aren’t sort of second guessing it saying, “Ah, do I really need to do this … its like, no this seems like a pretty good deal, and I think that is what’s most appealing about it, is that, we hope they will feel that way.”
Ratliff said he was optimistic about the new design, as the department has sold several calendars thus far, with around 400 athletes each selling ten calendars to family and friends.
He also mentioned that there would be a t-shirt designed, and given to the team that best met the goal of selling their raffles.
“We’re really excited about it, Ratliff continued, we think it’s really going to be that second major fundraiser that we’ve been looking for and can build off of.”
The brains behind the operation, KSC Field Hockey Coach Amy Watson, discovered the idea and said it was needed to support the locker room project, which currently concerned several coaches. She also mentioned that given the full effort from the athletic department as a whole, they would be able to raise an abundance of money for different projects as well.
“We knew that together as a department, we would have a lot more power to raise money than each team individually trying to do it,” Watson said.
Nevertheless, KSC Athletics has hit the lottery with this initiative, and it will be interesting to see its ultimate turnout at the end of the month.
“There are always projects to be done in athletics, explained Watson, and I believe that this fundraiser has the potential to be a big annual event each year.”
Eight people have already claimed their prize and 23 more will be lucky enough to receive a prize from the KSC athletic department as well.
Lyndsay Krisel can be contacted
at lkrisel@keene-equinox.com