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Mike Wilkins, bottom, and J.P. Jones, both of Eugene Sign and Awnings, position a piece of the new video board inside Legendary Gill Coliseum on Thursday, November 13.

Legendary to modern

Video scoreboards ready for first official action tonight as OSU meets Yale in basketball

By: Sol Allen

Posted: 11/24/08

If there wasn't enough reason to be excited about all the winter sports coming our way at Legendary Gill Coliseum, now there are two video scoreboards hung on each end of the court to help spectators enjoy the events in style.

Coming in at an incredible 34 feet wide and 19 feet tall, these scoreboards are no small project. With the capability of holding stats for multiple sports, from player's points in basketball games to ace and kill stats in volleyball matches, the video screens themselves are 18 feet wide by 10 feet tall with full replay capability.

While the boards are in place and have already slowly begun being used, don't expect to see them working to their full potential until January, when Pac-10 play starts for the basketball team.

Assistant athletic director Steve Fenk sounded hopeful, saying, "Of course there are always a few bugs to get worked out, hopefully we will find most of those in time for the bulk of the Pac-10 Conference season."

Costing an incredible $1 million, the funds were secured by Beaver Sports Property, a division of Learfield Sports. In short, it was not paid for by university or athletic funds, letting everyone enjoy the new luxury guilt-free. The project doesn't even stop at the two giant video scoreboards, but also comes paired with two banner scoreboards inside the coliseum where the small lower scoreboards used to be.

Since the scoreboards were taken down earlier in the month, it has had a small effect on the players and the fans. Not having a scoreboard to look to during matches has been a minor inconvenience for some of the volleyball players, who have had to deal with transition time the most.

"It's been weird," junior setter Camilla Ah-Hoy said. "Not being able to look up and see the score during timeouts."

In the transitional period, when the old scoreboards were removed and the new ones had not yet been installed, you could watch people in the stands searching the coliseum for a scoreboard to look to for a game update. Fans were left with the small scoreboards over the entrances into the coliseum for the score, and that is all they would get from those boards: the score and the time.

Legendary Gill Coliseum is now ready to match its counterpart, Reser Stadium, in raising the bar around the conference in the way fans can enjoy the games. While Gill is one of just a few arenas in the Pac-10 not to have a center-hanging scoreboard, this fact does not diminish the effect the new upgrade has. The technology at the fingertips of the media team at Gill now easily matches the best of those in the conference.

"It's going to be nice to catch up to the rest of the arenas in the conference," freshman constructional engineering major Jason Patterson said. "I think it's going to bring in a lot of students in for the basketball season."

That is just the excitement that the athletic department is going to need in their attempt to rise back to the top in all the winter sports.

In a very important year for the men's basketball team, and it is enthusiasm for something like these scoreboards that is needed to get the fans into Gill to support them. The scoreboard got its first run of action on Friday at the gymnastics' Orange and Black Exhibition, displaying event scores and team totals throughout the night. Tonight the scoreboard will be back in action for its first basketball game as the Beavers take on the Yale Bulldogs.

The winter athletics season will be a new year filled with new upgrades, from coaches and players to technological advances.

Sol Allen, sports writer

sports@dailybarometer.com