By Brittany Burke

It has been three and a half months since Paul Schlickmann officially began his role as the new Director of Athletics for the Central Connecticut State University Blue Devils and already he is making strides in the department and community.

Schlickmann spoke extensively about bringing the community to the CCSU campus and getting the students and New Britain area involved and excited about CCSU athletics.

“One of the biggest things that I’m working hard to do is to get out in the community and market us as much as possible,” Schlickmann said. “I want to get as many people on campus as possible, I want our sporting events to become community events and in addition I talked about how important it is to get students, it’s also important for us to get the community here. So my biggest thing is just to get people on campus.”

In order to ensure that the community does in fact come out to support CCSU athletics, he and the rest of his department have formulated a marketing strategy beginning with the 2010 football season.

CCSU plays five games at home on Arute Field, and it is Schlickmann’s plan to turn each home game into not only a CCSU event, but a community wide event as well. This entails assigning a theme to each home game to target a specific group of people, which will in turn heighten the support.

“So we have a chamber of commerce day, we have a youth football group that we’re talking to, some of the emergency and first responders. So we have different groups for different games and certainly homecoming is a big one so we’re trying to create themes for each game, we’re trying to make a football game an event,” Schlickmann said.

Gaining support must begin internally however, which includes getting the CCSU students to come out and show support for their fellow Blue Devils. Collaboration with the Office of Student Affairs has led to a new program for incoming freshmen during their initial orientation.

Schlickmann has stressed the importance of showing pride to be a Blue Devil, and that pride should begin early. His plan for the incoming freshmen has included bringing them to Arute Field on Friday, Aug. 27 to learn the Alma Mater with the school band while passing out memorabilia such as posters, t-shirts and team schedules, all to show that our Division I Athletics program is something to get excited about.

“Obviously we want students to come to our events because that helps us, so we need and want their support,” Schlickmann said. “There’s nothing more important than having student support, strong vocal student crowds and everything that goes along with that. At the same time I think it’s mutually beneficial because it’s part of campus life and it’s a good outlet for students to have activities like that to go as groups and bond.”

Getting the community and campus involved has all been a part of Schlickmann’s initial 90-day action plan, in which he got to know all of the coaches, teams, staff and alumni.

Part of the 90-day plan meant meeting with the coaches and players to go over budgeting, rules and expectations for the year.

“One of the biggest things that I feel good about as far as accomplishments to date is I feel like we’ve put together a good budget for the year and I was able to come in at a time to have an impact on developing the budget for our program and department.”

The next phase, which he is in the midst of right now, would be to meet with the coaches for a second time in order to map out a plan of action for the year and agree on the goals for the year. The goals he is trying to set span from financial, to academic, to recruitment goals.

When he wasn’t meeting with his staff, or his coaches, he was spending time with the back bone of his department, the student athletes.

“I’m meeting with them and talking to them about our expectations and how we want to operate as a department and our values and my expectations for them, generally speaking,” Schlickmann said.

“My rules are I want them to work hard; I want them to do the right thing. I want them to treat people with respect and I want them to understand what it means to be a Blue Devil, a loyal and prideful Blue Devil,” Schlickmann said.

As of right now, Schlickmann’s focus is on the preseason and beginning the fall season, his first full season since becoming Director of Athletics. From there he will put his other initiatives, such as community participation, into motion.