EDITORIAL: Soccer Hall’s Demise Is Yes, Indeed, A Call To Look Ahead

2-19-10

Doug Willies had it exactly right in lamenting the end of a 30-year effort to achieve a flourishing National Soccer Hall of Fame in Oneonta.
“Hindsight is similar to foresight, except it has no future,” the chairman of the board told press and members of the public gathered in the futuristic building in West Oneonta Thursday, Feb. 11, to hear the bad news.
So we’ll leave it alone.  No couldas, wouldas, shouldas.

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What was discouraging isn’t what’s lost, but what isn’t ahead – at least right now.
Perhaps the four world-class soccer fields can be preserved and the state high-school soccer tournament – it filled every hotel room from Oneonta to Cooperstown two weekends in October – maintained.
As for the rest of the 62-acre campus, it sounded like the Otsego County Development Corp. accepted the gift – valued at $3.5-4 million, if anyone can be found to buy it – with the idea that something is better than nothing.
The public was asked to “be patient” for a year and a half as planning moves forward, although it was suggested the property might be used for some sort of so-far unspecified non-profit entity.

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Where’s the “big idea” – to borrow from SUNY Oneonta’s Alex Thomas, student of our Upstate atrophy – that made New York the Empire State indeed?
It’s lacking, and the entities we might depend on to provide these “big ideas” – the chambers of commerce, the universities, the major institutions, the banks, our Albany leadership – seem unable to do so.
Meanwhile, let’s stop talking about our so-called high taxes.  Those same taxes are being paid in New York City, one of the world’s foremost engines of wealth.
Let’s stop talking about cold weather.  The winters in Vermont, if anything, are colder, and that state has taken what we see as a negative and successfully marketed itself as a winter wonderland.
Let’s have our leaders stop talking about how hard they work.  People work as hard in Decatur, where the per-capita income is $16,541.
You can’t build a future on your liabilities.

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Sure, let’s be patient.
But at the end of that year and a half, let’s have identified our assets: our world-class tourist attractions, our proximity to urban centers, our good roads, educated population, good schools and delightful seasons – and, if the drilling rigs haven’t arrived by then – our environment.
SUNY Oneonta graduates 1,500 a year, Hartwick College another 400, who we now let slip through our fingers.
Are there a half-dozen students – in the music industry, in fashion, in business – who would welcome the opportunity to start their own businesses?  Are we identifying them and giving them an opportunity to do so here?
There it is – the answer.

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Yes, IBM went somewhere else.
But the 800-employee Covidien plant in Hobart is successor to D.M. Graham Laboratories, which Doc Graham founded in his garage in 1960, and employs 800 people.
Ioxus, the growing ultracapacitor maker on Winney Hill Road, is an outgrowth of Custom Electronics, itself the creation of Peter Dokuchitz, a single individual.
The Lifgrens and Astrocom.  The Smiths and Medical Coaches.
Eventually, some of these will end up in South Korea or Taiwan, but Otsego County, in its universities, has an unending supply of brains, ambition and youthful enthusiasm in its institutions of higher learning to replace yesterday’s startups – and today’s mainstays – with tomorrow’s startups.

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At the 10th annual SUNY Oneonta Faculty Research Show the other day, professor Jaqueline Bennett was talking about her research in identifying cheaper, quicker and less-toxic ways to manufacture imines, used in cholesterol-reducing Zetia® and cancer-fighting Taxol®.
She applied for her first patent a month ago.
This is what we’re talking about.
OK, let the Soccer Hall of Fame go. And let’s be patient.  But by the end of 18 months, let’s have a plan, built from the bottom up, full of “big ideas” that engage our true our assets, foremost, our latent brainpower.
Defeatism and whining are intolerable.