Sand Shark 20/20 Project Public Meeting

The USCB Sand Sharks might be hosting their biggest home game yet June 26th, but it won’t be in The Cove. In fact, if all goes well, it will lead the Sand Sharks to a much bigger tank.

USCB planned a public meeting on Thursday, June 26th, to present the Sand Shark 20/20 Project — a “bold new vision” that would make up for almost two decades of dead ends on the quest for the type of multi-pronged partnership required to deliver the funding required to compete in today’s college athletics arms race.

More details will come at the public rollout, but the project promises to deliver “a multi-purpose arena and sports complex … that will support athletics, education, entertainment, and community events for years to come.”

This would be the culmination of nearly two decades of work by far more people than will be present at the groundbreaking — and in full disclosure, I’ve been one of them.

I was assigned to cover USCB’s athletics teams from the program’s inception and sat with the school’s first athletics director, Kim Abbott, and baseball coach Rick Sofield in the dilapidated trailer that served as the athletics office in 2008 as they discussed the plans for an on-campus baseball field.

When Sofield left three years later for a job with the Pittsburgh Pirates, assistant Bryan Lewallyn took over and led the Sand Sharks to the NAIA World Series, re-routing the road to Lewiston, Idaho, through their makeshift home at Hardeeville’s Richard Gray Sports Complex in the process. Meanwhile, former athletics director Ty Rietkovich quickly built a winner on the softball field, and the success continued under Laura Heberling, as USCB grew into a formidable NAIA power.

Despite both programs’ immediate and sustained success, every effort to bring the teams on campus hit one snag or another, and Lewallyn left for Pensacola State (where he’s now the AD) while Heberling kept climbing and is now the pitching coach at Kansas.

Both programs have since seen their prestige diminished as they languish in a subpar facility, but it has been masked by the hype generated by the launch of basketball and Ron Fudala’s men’s team’s incredible run to the Peach Belt Conference championship game in its second year.

USCB managed to get the basketball programs off the ground in a makeshift facility that was designed to be a student recreation center — and funded because of the importance of such a facility to campus life. The Cove is amazing. But every year the basketball programs have to call it home delays the start of more indoor sports (potentially volleyball or wrestling) and moves us one step closer to seeing more transformative coaches leave for greener grass while the programs they wilt behind them.

This facility would bring thousands of prospective students on campus every year, not only for sports camps, clinics, and tournaments, but also for concerts, conventions, and — perhaps most important — high school graduations.

I’ve spent more time than I’d care to admit considering the possibilities, and I’m not the only one. As current athletics director Quin Monahan often said during my tenure as USCB’s director of sports information and athletics marketing from 2011-17, we kissed a lot of frogs.

Now, finally, it seems the Sand Sharks have found their prince — or rather, they’ve assembled one, because getting this thing over the finish line will require a whole lot of hands.

I’m not privy to the details and eagerly await the opportunity to gain a better understanding of how this project has finally come to this point, but I can tell you this much: It should include financial support from both Beaufort and Jasper counties, as well as the state, and every municipality it will serve, because it has a chance to transform the Lowcountry and launch USCB in one fell swoop.

Note: This edition went to press on the same day the meeting was scheduled, and any developments will be reported in a future issue.

Justin Jarrett is the sports editor of The Island News and is the founder of Lowco Sports. He has a passion for sports and community journalism and a questionable sense of humor.