UND Fan

As a little preview addressing the above highlighted comment.... I am the guy who has run many different LHB's over the last few years. "Let's Help Bubba" (which really means "Let's Help UND Football") has raised thousands of dollars assisting the program with everything from safety (knee braces for OLs, helmet pads for practice), computer equipment for watching/editing game film and practice tape, jackets for late season road games and much more. I hope to roll out another (maybe my last) LHB soon. It will be a professionally done "Wall" honoring our Conference Championship teams, the National Championship team, All-American players, All-Conference players, All-Academic players, etc. We are trying to determine the best location for the Wall in our new facilities. It will be done in a first-class manner by a company with experience putting them together. We want to recognize all of these former players and teams but, as important for the program's future, we want it to be impressive for recruits and their parents who are visiting campus. For those of you who haven't seen our FB facilities over the last 20+ years, they have not been good (an understatement). Frankly, I have been surprised that we have been able to land some very talented recruits but, in my opinion, not enough to be truly competitive with other MVF and FCS teams. We recruit good kids who work hard and become better players. However, in recent years, we have had very few first team All-Conference players, let alone All-American players or players drafted by the NFL. We now have equal or better facilities compared to the competition. That is great but we still have a challenge with geography. Most kids we recruit need to drive by Fargo and/or Brookings, Vermillion, the Cities, even Cedar Falls to get to Grand Forks. We need to do all we can to be different/better than our competition. We are fortunate that UND is a great school and really has an attractive campus. Anything more we can do to set ourselves apart from the others will help. We want this Wall to be a factor in a young recruit and his parents deciding that UND is the right decision. This LHB will be considerably more expensive than our previous campaigns. I hope everyone will do all they can to make this successful. More information will be forthcoming. Thanks

I understand that Mara is making progress and a full summer in GF should continue to help his development. There are four scholarships available.

You are 100% correct!

Someday you will learn all that Kris does for UND athletics and UND athletes!

Funds are being raised to establish a Women's BB scholarship in Katie's name. Any contribution will help! Here is the link.... https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fundfoundation.org%2Fkatie-richards&data=05|01||81652bb17bfa410c051b08dbf7968a3d|84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa|1|0|638375998174825784|Unknown|TWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D|3000|||&sdata=5SWEcjyev2JIBCcdzWQNxafCe%2BgpleuwILOBA6Y4yRM%3D&reserved=0

Thanks for posting - I live in Jacksonville and was not aware of this!

I had hoped Aumer might step into that role but, not tonight, at least.

We are down by 2 with 5 minutes left in the 3rd.

Kacie is unreal - she does need some help. I think she will get help when some of other girls settle down/settle in!

Any other observations?

I have purposefully not read any posts on a football thread since the start of the Boise game. I know I would have been frustrated by many of the comments about our play, the play of Schuster, our coaching, etc. I would guess that many of the observations were "right on" while others, as usual, got carried away with petty, naive and just plain stupid comments. I will make a few observations before concluding with the point I think we must all (those of us on ss.com, the UND athletic department and the football staff) understand and address: I was very disappointed in our play. We certainly didn't look like one of the better FCS programs in the country. Tommy did not have a good game. It sure appeared he lost his confidence/composure in the second half. That said, our offensive line (one of our strongest positions) did him no favors - he had very little time to do much of anything. His lack of mobility was very apparent against a team like Boise. I sure hoped we would give Boise a good game but any expectations to win this game may not have been well-founded. Despite their 0-2 record, they have a lot of talent and seldom lose at home. If you go position by position, you could count on one hand (maybe a finger or two) the number of superior football players we had compared to Boise. They were bigger, faster and more confident than our players. Before UND-FB-FAN gets on my case for not implying we should not expect UND to win some of these games and, if not, play a good game and gain everyone's respect for how well, how hard and how disciplined we play. I fully agree that this is what we want to our program to be and we need to get there as soon as possible. Now my primary point.... for UND to compete at the level we all want, we need to recruit better athletes. I have been following UND recruiting very closely for many years. We continue to sign very few highly recruited prospects. For us to be successful, we need to land kids that many DI schools want. I do think that a lot of our not-highly-recruited players turn into pretty good contributors but we are not going to be a championship level team until we get more studs to decide to play ball at UND. It is too bad that Wiki is not still available. Over the last 10 years, you would see 1) most of our recruits had few, if any, other DI offers and 2) that we seldom landed kids that had offers from NDSU or SDSU. While that is a criticism of our recruiting, we must realize that it is difficult to recruit kids to Grand Forks do its rather remote location compared to other schools we compete against. Fargo is only 75 miles from GF but, with their years of success, recruits and their families do not mind the distance. We can't do much about UND's location but another problem has been our facilities. It isn't that long ago that we had a locker room that should have been condemned 10 years earlier. The Pollard Center has been a great improvement but with a locker room across the street, a so-so weight room, etc. has not impressed kids that we need. With Phase II finally becoming a reality, it should help a great deal. No more excuses! We also need to do a better job of bringing in talented transfers - much of the above applies to transfers as well. Do we have the coaching staff to recruit better players, I guess we will find out! Regarding Phase II, you will be hearing about a LHB&F (Let's Help Bubba & Fritz) campaign quite soon.

We were about to launch a Let’s Help Bubba to purchase the equipment (storage, shelving, etc.) needed for the inside of this trailer (and maybe the paint job) when someone offered to pay for it. This is a good step forward - much better than trying to load everything onto an airplane. I don’t know what the airline charged for loading, transporting and unloading the plane but it must have been substantial. Additional football equipment can now be efficiently transported to away games - whether the game is in Brookings or Boise! There will be more info on a Let’s Help Bubba soon.

This doesn't belong here but didn't want to start a new thread.... A good article on Amani Hooker. He is Q's brother. It would have been great to have landed him - we tried! He went to Iowa after receiving no interest from UM. https://www.grandforksherald.com/sports/pro/minnesota-native-amani-hooker-got-passed-over-by-gophers-now-hes-starring-in-the-nfl

Check your PM

It will be announced soon.