Strollo addresses football staff, revenue share and facilities | News, Sports, Jobs

Correspondent photo / Robert Hayes
A Youngstown State football helmet in the snow at Stambaugh Stadium.

YOUNGSTOWN — This past fall, the Youngstown State football team stumbled to a 4-8 record after making the FCS playoffs the previous season.

Despite the Penguins falling below expectations, athletic director Ron Strollo told the Tribune Chronicle and Vindicator that YSU remains committed to head coach Doug Phillips.

“No one has higher standards and cares more than coach (Phillips),” Strollo said. “This wasn’t the season we wanted. The previous two were really good seasons for us, and sometimes that occurs. But I feel like we’re in really good hands with Coach Phillips.”

Strollo said that making a change at head coach was not something that he considered when evaluating the football program at the end of the 2024 season.

Phillips is under contract with YSU through the end of the 2026 season after signing an extension in January 2023. YSU also has the option to extend the deal by one season through 2027.

“We’ve made a commitment to coach and feel good about those directions,” Strollo said. “We understand how difficult the competition we’re playing against is and how the margin of error is really small. There’s going to be some years that we’re really excited about, and maybe there’s going to be — hopefully they’re few and far between — some years that we’re not.

“But the people close to our program — our president, our board of trustees, are very supportive of coach (Phillips) and what he’s been able to do in the community and what he’s been able to do on the football field.”

Still, since the end of the season in November, Phillips elected to make several changes to his coaching staff. Over the past couple weeks, YSU has begun to officially announce those new hires.

After parting ways with former offensive coordinator Troy Rothenbuhler, Phillips hired Mike Yurcich to oversee the offense and coach the quarterbacks. Yurcich has spent 25 years coaching at the collegiate level and has previously served as offensive coordinator at Penn State, Texas and Oklahoma State.

The Penguins have also hired Chris Parry as wide receivers coach, Justin Heacock as running backs coach and Michael Zordich as cornerbacks coach.

“I feel good about the new staff that we’re bringing in, and I feel really good about the recruiting class that we had last fall,” Strollo said.

The Penguins are set to begin spring football on March 11, culminating with the annual Red-White Spring Game on April 12 at 11 a.m.

REVENUE SHARE

Athletics departments across the country are preparing to deal with the coming changes brought on by the pending settlement agreement of the House v. NCAA lawsuit, and YSU is no different.

The historic settlement changes the college sports landscape to allow schools to share revenue with athletes directly and it also allows athletes to receive benefits from schools that were previously prohibited by the NCAA. The settlement also removes scholarship limits for all sports, while changing roster sizes and limitations.

Some schools, such as fellow Missouri Valley Football Conference member North Dakota State, have elected to opt out of the settlement, but Strollo said YSU will be opting in.

“We’ve already opted in because we’ve started offering partial scholarships in volleyball,” Strollo said. “Our feeling is the only reason not to opt in is the whole roster limitations. But there’s a lot of advantages to opting in because you get legal protection and other stuff. We really feel like we’re going to be able to affect enrollment, even with those roster limitations, in the same way that we’ve been affecting enrollment.”

The settlement allows schools to share roughly up to $20.5 million in revenue, but those figures largely apply to Power 4 schools.

Naturally, the revenue share amount for smaller-sized schools like YSU will be considerably less and in some cases, nonexistent. So Strollo said it’s not going to change things overall with how YSU operates with its NIL programs like the Penguin Collective.

“We don’t have that kind of revenue share, so I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to change what we’re doing on the NIL front,” Strollo said. “Even for some (Power 4) schools, it’s going to be a stretch for them, I’m guessing. But there’s no real revenue to share that we’re not already spending on the student-athletes with scholarships and stuff like that.”

YSU uses athletics as a way to supplement enrollment numbers and bring in additional tuition revenue for the university.

So even as the university as a whole continues to work through declining enrollment and budget cuts, Strollo said YSU’s budget situation is not as dire as Horizon League rival Cleveland State, which recently announced that it would cut men’s wrestling, women’s golf and softball to address budget shortfalls across the university.

“I think we’ve been very careful here, really taking a Division III approach in that we have athletics here to bring students on our campus,” Strollo said. “It’s our intention that those sports net the institution a positive figure, so we wouldn’t want to affect enrollment by dropping sports.”

FACILITIES UPDATES

Strollo has said in the past that YSU’s facilities needed to be enhanced to be competitive with other similar-sized schools in order to allow the Penguins be able to recruit and retain student-athletes and retain coaches.

The university made a significant step in that direction last summer with the renovation of the seats inside the newly-named Zidian Family Arena at Beeghly Center. YSU also installed new video boards to its main scoreboard that hangs above the court, and just recently completed the renovations to the men’s basketball locker room.

“That’s a credit to (men’s basketball chief of staff) Rocco Nolfi and (former head coach Jerrod) Calhoun,” men’s basketball coach Ethan Faulkner said of the renovations. “I give them all the credit in the world for that. Our players now are the ones that are going to reap the benefits of that. It’s big time, it’s a gamechanger for us to finalize the renovations here in the Beeghly Center.

“In the last two years — a brand new athletic training room, obviously the gym was renovated with new seats, new scoreboards, all those things we did this summer. Now to have our locker room finalized, it’s as nice as any one I’ve been in in mid-major basketball, and it’s really going to help us on the recruiting front.”

Then a couple months ago, YSU also replaced the turf playing surface at Farmers National Bank Field, the Penguins’ soccer and lacrosse field, in the Covelli Sports Complex adjacent to Stambaugh Stadium.

But all that was just the beginning.

Next, Strollo said YSU still plans to add a booster room on the north end of the Beeghly Center and replace the video board in Stambaugh Stadium. He then added that the next big project would be to renovate the football team’s locker room in Stambaugh Stadium.

“We’re going to keep picking away and try to improve what we can,” Strollo said. “This community’s just been so supportive of all these projects. We’ve been fortunate that financially, they’ve made it possible.”