With the Kent State baseball team’s recent College World Series appearance, Schoonover Stadium is inked to be an even brighter spot on campus.

During the seventh inning of the Kent State-Arkansas game, President Lester Lefton made it official that the university would be seeking funds and “reprioritize some internal resources” in order to get lights for the stadium to allow for night games and practice.

“I’m very excited about our team. They’re a great group of guys. We’ve got a terrific coach. If I have ever seen excellence in action, it’s our baseball team and being in this College World Series,” Lefton said. “This is just a great thing for Kent State. It’s a great thing for the young men, for our coach. To acknowledge and celebrate the achievement of coach [Scott] Stricklin and his team, I called him last week and told him that I just signed the pieces of paper to put in a new lighting system at our stadium.”

The new lights are expected to cost somewhere in the $500,000 to $1 million dollar range. This comes just six years after the stadium got a $1 million dollar facelift.

Lefton went on to say that this was just the first step to not only solidify the Kent State baseball program, but spark excitement in other sports as well.

“I see this as the first of a series of installments in our investment in baseball,” Lefton said. “We clearly are showing that we are a national caliber team with a national caliber coach, and we need to have national caliber facilities. We are part of the way there — we’re going to go the rest of the way.”

Putting the experts in the field at control of the operation, Lefton is relying on head coach Stricklin and Athletic Director Joel Neilsen to take the team in the right direction for years to come.

The right direction is recruiting student athletes Lefton said, not money.

“This is really not about the money,” Lefton said. “It’s about keeping the words ‘student’ and ‘student athletes’ and having a first class team.”

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Contact Matt Lofgren at [email protected].