Valley Children’s Stadium? Fresno State fortunate to be hospital’s charity case
Fresno State was lucky to get $1 for the naming rights to its old, dilapidated football stadium, let alone $1 million per year.
Exaggeration? Only slightly.
Bulldog Stadium’s age (it opened in 1980) and deteriorated state (where to begin?) are only part of the reason why. There’s also the reality that people have been calling the place by a certain name for 41 years — and most aren’t going to stop because it suddenly has a new one.
Which is why Fresno State’s athletics department was exceedingly fortunate to strike a 10-year, $10 million partnership with Valley Children’s Healthcare that includes a decade’s worth of stadium naming rights starting in 2022.
Valley Children’s Stadium? Sure, let’s go with that. The new official name will sound just fine on television and radio broadcasts. Even if that’s the only time anyone uses it.
The smart people at Valley Children’s Healthcare surely understand this as well. Yet they evidently don’t care. Why not? Because Valley Children’s already boasts one of the region’s most recognizable brands. The hospital headquartered a few miles north of Fresno in a Madera County growth area doesn’t need the exposure. Having its name on a college football stadium (used six times per year) is merely the cherry atop an already large marketing sundae.
Usually when an old stadium gets a new name, the change occurs following extensive renovations. When Albertsons paid Boise State $12.5 million over 15 years to rename Bronco Stadium in 2014, the facility had just undergone $100 million worth of upgrades — on top of the $135 million multistory suite tower and $22 million football office built a few years prior.
That isn’t the case here. Besides the new-ish lights and playing surface, Fresno State has barely touched Bulldog Stadium since the early 1990s. It’s more than the absence of modern amenities. Fans with mobility issues still struggle with steep ramps and staircases — not great for an aging fanbase. The bathrooms still stink. And who can forget the time an irrigation pipe burst six days before a game and sent a river of mud onto the field?
So if Valley Children’s Healthcare wants to pay Fresno State $1 million per year to put its name on that concrete heap, bless them. Athletic Director Terry Tumey must be doing cartwheels.
Parsing the announcement, you’ll notice that money isn’t going to stadium improvements. Most will be spent on operations, scholarships and academic initiatives designed to improve children’s health care.
I’m told this partnership has been in the works for years, if not decades. For a cash-strapped athletic department hemorrhaging revenues from the pandemic, it couldn’t have materialized at a better time than the week before Saturday’s season opener against UConn.
New Fresno State president sounds like old one
The helping hand from Valley Children’s helps Bulldogs sports “get to dry land” fiscally. That’s how university President Saul Jimenez-Sandoval put it last week in his first public comments regarding athletics.
“If we don’t do that, we will always be struggling for more or wanting for more and in this case it is my responsibility to really build this critical brand that is Fresno State athletics,” Jimenez-Sandoval said.
“Athletics is synergistically woven into the fabric of what Fresno State is all about. We have the 100-year celebration of athletics right now. It grew up with the university. You cannot distinguish one from the other.”
Sounds like Jimenez-Sandoval has similar thoughts about Bulldogs sports as his predecessor, Joseph Castro. Hopefully the new guy is less of a meddler.
Just as valuable to Fresno State as the money (and perhaps more so) is the pipeline to David and Derek Carr, who helped broker the deal. Valley Children’s has maintained close relationships with the former and current NFL quarterbacks, closer even than their alma mater.
Getting the Carrs on board as part of any future stadium fundraising effort can only pay dividends.
Hospital donations, Bulldogs “not the same money”
Where Valley Children’s Healthcare stands to benefit is less obvious. Since last week’s announcement, questions have been raised about where the nonprofit hospital will get the money it gives to Fresno State.
The answer from Lynne Ashbeck, Valley Children’s vice president and chief community impact officer: Not from donations raised through fundraisers such as Kids Day or by rounding up the change at Walmart or Panda Express.
“It’s not the same money,” Ashbeck assured. “Those dollars go directly to patient care and are vital to our continued existence.”
Ashbeck explained that the $1 million per year earmarked for Bulldogs athletics will come out of the hospital’s marketing and communications budget (which she personally oversees) and reflects a recent strategy shift. Valley Children’s, she said, wants to expand its presence, both nationally and regionally outside the Fresno market, as well as redirect advertising dollars to projects that benefit community health.
For example, instead of spending money on a freeway billboard or a full-page newspaper ad (gulp), spend it sprucing up a park where children play.
“The money going to Fresno State doesn’t impact patient care at all,” Ashbeck said.
If only Fresno State took as good a care of Bulldog Stadium as Valley Children’s takes care of sick kids. Then we’d be on to something. For now, the Bulldogs are happy being someone else’s charity case.
