Today should be a day of celebration at UNO. But it will feel like a wake.
This is a day for which we've long waited. UNO intends to go Division I. But there won't be a parade or confetti.
I applaud the plan but do so with a heavy heart. The Mavericks will be growing up, but the powers-that-be are recommending that two great friends of Omaha, UNO football and Mav wrestling, be left behind.
It's all pending the backing of the NU Board of Regents, but finally, after years of indecision, UNO has announced its identity. Dodge Street High has decided what it wants to be when it grows up.
UNO will be a hockey school and a Division I basketball school. It will be a Summit League school, with a shot at the NCAA tournament, playing in an intriguing mix with former North Central Conference members and schools from Indianapolis, Tulsa and Kansas City.
UNO is not the state's school. UNO can never be UNL. It can't be North Dakota, which is the UNL of its state, with all the subsidized benefits of being the big dog.
For years, people — including myself — have wanted UNO to figure out what it wanted to be. Before hockey came in 1996, it was easy. Don't blame hockey. Hockey was a brilliant idea. Back then, UNO was the nice little Division II school down the street. But it was looking for an identity in Omaha, its slice of the pie. Creighton had basketball. UNO had hockey.
But the byproduct of hockey was having one foot in Division I and the other in Division II. For the most part, the hockey people and other coaches made nice. But the combination wore thin. The hockey people were competing against other Division I schools and budgets and wanted to raise the budgetary and marketing ante. But UNO had a Division II mentality, too. Eventually, you had a water-and-oil mix of treating hockey big-time — going into the Qwest Center Omaha — with a Division II athletic budget.
http://www.omaha.com/article/20110312/S ... 03129742/0
