Jim Tressel on the move at University of Akro
By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
Published: April 6, 2012
Former Ohio State football head coach Jim Tressel (second from left) talks with students, Markel Croston (left), Rana Barghouty, Mallory Kennedy and Matt Garvin outside the student union during a University of Akron campus orientation tour for Tressel by the students on Thursday. (Paul Tople/Akron Beacon Journal)
Jim Tressel won’t start his new job at the University of Akron until May 1, but he showed up this week for what he cheerfully called “fact-finding.”
On Thursday, he wanted to get the lay of the land, literally, and toured campus at the side of four enthusiastic student orientation leaders under postcard-blue skies.
“I couldn’t have envisioned this,” he said at one point as he struggled to orient himself to the new campus, which has undergone more than $600 million in improvements over the past decade. “This is unbelievable.”
The former Ohio State football coach already had some familiarity with campus: He earned a master’s degree from UA in 1977 and was an assistant football coach and physical education instructor from 1975 to 1978.
Those were the olden days, Tressel recollected to his tour guides, when dinosaurs seemingly roamed the earth.
UA’s new vice president of strategic engagements shared many stories with his guides.
How he and the other coaches treated prospective players and their parents to a deluxe spread of glazed doughnuts, orange juice and milk.
How he lived at the Buchtel Field House because he couldn’t afford more.
How his father ordered him to go to UA for his graduate degree when he already had an offer from Penn State’s Joe Paterno and really, really wanted to go there.
“He said I’d have more opportunities here, and I did,” Tressel told the students.
He led his tour guides on an impromptu walk off campus to the old field house on Wheeler Street — once home base to the university’s football team. After 35 years, not surprisingly, he couldn’t quite remember which streets to turn on.
But Tressel did remember that they didn’t have much equipment to train with, dumbfounding students used to rock-climbing walls and lazy rivers.
Times were tough in those days, he told them.
“The only excuse you had for missing class was a death in the family,” he said. “Your own.”
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