This interview has been edited and condensed.
The Charlatan spoke to J.R. Edwards, the new executive director of the Ravens football program, about the future of the football team.
The Charlatan (TC): To start off, what are the responsibilities that you have as executive director of the team?
J.R. Edwards: My focus is specifically on the business operations side. So coach [Steve] Sumarah will look after all of the football operations with himself and the staff and my responsibility is to make sure that . . . we have a sustainable program long-term. So I’m focused on the revenue generation side of the business, almost exclusively.
TC: Can you tell us what made you choose to come to Carleton?
Edwards: Well if you ask me, it’s a unique opportunity. I mean there’s only two programs that are operating under a privately-funded model in the country, the other one’s at Laval.
TC: So you talk about sustainability, what initiatives do you think you’re looking to take next year to secure revenue so that it’s a sustainable team in the future?
Edwards: We’re really going to try to look to do a few different things . . . we want to be able to have a winning program that builds student-athletes into future leaders. We want to build and rebuild a proud culture at Carleton University just using football as one of the many points that can make it proud. We’re going to ask with how are we going to garner our local partners, how do we garner our national partners who are interested in . . . supporting inter-collegiate sport, and of course, we’re going to hope that we’re lucky on the philanthropy support as well.
TC: So you talked about how it started up again a lot due to the philanthropy of it, is there any way that you’re giving back to alumni or the team hopes to give back?
Edwards: Absolutely. What we’ll do is have something customized for both what the university’s looking for, as well as for what the alumni is looking for. So I’ll give you an example, one of our prominent supporters is Eric Sprott. Of course his name’s on the school of business, a Carleton alumni which is great. It was really important to him to see, it’s always important to him, was hunger and different ways that we could work to be able to combat hunger and work against it.
So what we did is we put our student-athletes to work for a day to volunteer their time with a local food mission. We thought this was a great initiative, again these are student-athletes who already have a tremendous workload in addition to their academics which are the exact same as other students, and over and above, continue to volunteer their time so that people can see how Ravens football is coming back and not only to the university but to the Ottawa community.
TC: You mentioned the Laval team, how Carleton’s kind of trying to model their program after that. Would you know anything about how they’re trying to do that?
Edwards: For one, you can’t argue with Laval’s success on the field. In terms of success, they’ve got a winning franchise there, but I think most importantly from the business they’ve done a phenomenal job at rallying corporate support and support from their student base and their alumni base that have all sort of galvanized around the program and really made it a source of pride for the university. So what we’d love to do if we could get to the point where 25,000 people come to our football games like they do at Laval and we have such a proud student support base and such a proud alumni and corporate support base, I mean that’d be the best class in the country.
TC: How do you think the team will improve and get to that level next year, or not even next year but just in the future?
Edwards: I think we’re going to continue to see great progress. We know we’ve got the best in-class facility here in the Canadian marketplace. We’ve got phenomenal coaching staff, and we’ve got dedicated leadership at the university, and our alumni base we’ve got working together to make sure we’ve got the resources we need to be successful. It means we get the top recruits in the country because they see the facilities they want to help build the new program. In the CIS, it’s such a rare opportunity to build a new program from the ground up.
So I think when they see the combination of the support we get, the combination of the great facilities and the great environment that we have in Ottawa, and this great university like Carleton to participate in, this is a place where future leaders want to help out with the program.
