by Lavi Aulck
Sports Editor

Having been SCC’s athletic director for over nine months now, Doug Palmer has constantly tried to keep his eyes on the future. After all, strengthening community relations, boosting dying enrollment, and completing an overhaul of a college gym is no overnight job.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Palmer to discuss the past, present, and future of our schools athletic department and couldn’t help but come out of this hour-long sit-down impressed with the foresight and realism with which Palmer approaches his daily chores. (“We’re going to keep on doing as much as we possibly can and over time, it will get better,”) Palmer said of his efforts at SCC.

Palmer came to SCC in January with the mission of sculpting the Athletic Department into one that is equally respectable and successful. So far, he admits, he underestimated how long it will take to achieve his goals, but not the goals themselves. “I certainly overshot myself in what I can do in a certain amount of time”, he said, “but the goals, no. It’s just going to take longer. It’s a situation where you don’t have enough support, and I don’t mean that in terms of people not wanting to support you, but in terms of bodies that can get things done”.

Upon arriving, Palmer stated his first priority was opening up gym space by both giving the floorplans an overhaul and doing major renovation. (“We have enough things here that we can spend the next decade improving this building,”) Palmer said of the gym. “We’ve brought some architects in to take a look at it. (First thing we’re going to is spruce up the women’s locker room. We literally have toilets falling off the walls and showers that are rusted.) That’s where the first shot of money will go, to do as much as we can in there to get it to a higher level.”

Palmer also says that he has big plans lined up for the men’s locker room. “The men’s locker room was built for football and we’re never going to have a football team again”, he says, “So there’s a lot of space down there that maybe we can turn into a free weight room or turn some of that into offices and classrooms.” Besides that, Palmer also wants to renovate the main gym in the future, citing the bleachers and scoreboard as another high priority.

Strengthening the relationship between SCC and the neighboring community and businesses has also been high on Palmer’s to-do-list. “I’ve joined the rotary club, I’ve joined the (Shoreline) Chamber of Commerce, and I’m on the ‘Scholar for Dollar’ board”, he said. “That should hopefully pay dividends. (I’m) talking (to the city) about Shoreline, the college, and Shoreline athletics.”

Palmer has also kept to his word about helping the athletic department become more financially self-sufficient, promising ways in which both SCC alumni and the Shoreline community will have opportunities to support athletics. “We will have a booster club up and running. There will be flyers (for the booster club) this fall quarter”, Palmer promises. “That’s my number one project once we get through the first week of school”.

Palmer wholeheartedly believes that a booster club will help the athletic department with their financial troubles while generating a sense of school spirit and pride. “The booster club,” he describes, “is a grassroots movement in the athletic department to build a relationship with your alumni and that’s going to be very long term”.

Intramurals are another topic of interest to Palmer as he has already brought his ideas up at previous SCC Senate meetings and he hopes to continue to do so. “First thing I plan to do once the student government gets back to meeting,” he tells, “is go show them the schedule for fall and see what they want.”

The biggest fear Palmer has with intramurals centers around the lack of campus activity after lunchtime. “We could potentially do intramurals at night,” Palmer rationalizes, “but there are no dorms and no one is going to come back here at night to play an intramural (game). When you are on a drive-in, drive out campus, basically once people leave, they are not going to come back.”

Despite this, Palmer is looking to possibly start intramural basketball this coming quarter. “Maybe we will try a basketball league”, he envisions. “If we have four teams and they play twice a week for four weeks, that will be successful as far as I’m concerned.” Palmer has also been considering creating a cross country team for SCC and has also looked over the idea of possibly adding archery, golf, and wrestling to SCC’s list of sports activities sometime in the future.

Palmer hopes offering more rewarding scholarships and having a more variety of sports will help resolve the school and athletic department’s problem of declining enrollment. (“We have scholarships to offer,”) he tells, “the NWAACC, our conference, made things a little easier this past year. Before, the most you could give was $200 a quarter (per athlete)…but now we can pay for about 65% of (the athlete’s) tuition. (We want to use athletics to bring in more people…athletics are a pretty big part of enrollment.”)

Now, with close to one year under his belt, Palmer realizes that his task here at SCC is larger than what he first anticipated. “I don’t think I’ve gotten accomplished a lot of the stuff I wanted to accomplish”, he explains, “but I also came to the realization that I’m not gonna get as much accomplished as fast as I wanted to”.

Yet, Palmer continues to stand firm in optimism and would like to let Shoreline students know that the Athletic Department “is here for the students. (We have people who care about the students and really are trying to work with the students to make them better people in three different levels – academically, health wise, and in their sports.) (That’s what we are here for– to benefit the students.”)