The Stony Brook athletics program is one made up of contradictions.
Its teams in the America East Conference have won a combined 27 championship rings in the last 10 years, but the program lacks the private funding or national recognition to properly capitalize on that success. Its athletes have taken home a slew of MVP and Rookie of the Year awards, but they play for a student body that is largely apathetic towards those accomplishments.
At the heart of those contradictions lies Director of Athletics Shawn Heilbron. Since Heilbron took over the department in 2014, Stony Brook athletes have achieved a level of success unrivaled in the school’s history, both on and off the field.
The Seawolves won their first America East Commissioner’s Cup — given to the best-performing athletic department in the conference — in 2019 and repeated the accomplishment this year. In the past five years, the school’s men’s and women’s basketball teams both reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time. Stony Brook’s women’s lacrosse team, an annual powerhouse, reached the quarterfinals of the tournament last year, losing by just three goals to the top-seeded North Carolina Tar Heels.
“For me, it’s about competing at the highest level,” Heilbron said in an interview with The Statesman. “We’re a national university. We’re one of the top public research institutions in the country. And as such, we feel like we should be one of the top athletic programs in the country as well.”
But many of the issues that predate Heilbron’s tenure continue to plague the program. The university has yet to fully engage its student body with its Division I athletics, and empty seats continue to litter Kenneth P. LaValle Stadium during football games.
When asking a small sample of students how emotionally invested they felt in Stony Brook’s sports teams, a vast majority replied that they were not invested at all, with few saying that they were either somewhat or very invested.
Some improvements have been made in recent years. The football team broke its own attendance record four times in the last seven years, a $5 million renovation in 2017 expanded LaValle Stadium to a capacity of 12,300 and the university opened a 106,000 square-foot indoor training facility.
However, Stony Brook’s most recent home football game against Fordham drew just 5,765 fans, even while being billed as part of the university’s “Family Weekend.” The remaining 11 football teams in the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA) averaged 9,982 fans at their most recent home games. It does not help that the Stony Brook football team has lost 12 of its last 14 total games.
!function(){“use strict”;window.addEventListener(“message”,(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data[“datawrapper-height”]){var t=document.querySelectorAll(“iframe”);for(var a in e.data[“datawrapper-height”])for(var r=0;r