Below is Press Sports Editor Dustin Monke’s conversation with Dickinson State University President D.C. Coston about Blue Hawk athletics for the story that appeared in Sunday’s edition of The Dickinson Press:
What are your feelings about athletics at Dickinson State and university-sponsored athletics in general?
Firstly, I enjoy collegiate athletics. I always have. Regardless of where I’ve been. All the way from being a student to the present, I try to get to as many events as I can just because of enjoying the competition.
I’ve also had the opportunity to witness, at a number of places, the visibility that athletics can create for the institution, as far as bringing a number of people to the institution. Hopefully we can find ways to showcase the rest of the university, using athletics as kind of a door opener with a number of people.
Another piece is when you have athletes, coaches and others who are obviously striving hard, having success and being very positive in the way they represent the institution, they can be a big part of helping the public perception of who and what an institution is. That’s some of the things we hope athletics can be at Dickinson State.
Frankly, you begin to look and a lot of times we think of athletes as athletes, and they’re student-athletes. We have something on the order of 400 young men and women that have been attracted to Dickinson State, who are in classes, doing well in classes and also happen to compete on the court or the field or whatever their particular event is. That’s very much a positive too.
Students come to universities for a number of reasons and we attract a lot of wonderful men and women because we do have an athletics program.
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Dustin Monke 