Long Beach State hosted a ceremonial ribbon-cutting for its iconic arena, which was officially renamed the LBS Financial Pyramid as part of an $8.5 million sponsorship deal approved in November.
In advance of Friday’s first home competition of the season — a women’s volleyball game against UCLA — university officials unveiled new signage for the pyramid. In addition to displays at the pyramid’s entrances, the floors of the volleyball and basketball courts now prominently display the new sponsor’s name.
The naming agreement will last 12 years, but the funds were delivered upfront, allowing Long Beach State to immediately put them to use. Already, some of the funds have gone toward renovating the basketball lobby, which was previously bare, a poor representation of the history of those programs, said Bobby Smitheran, executive director of athletics at Long Beach State.
The lobby renovation is an investment in recruiting and retention, especially because it’s an “entry point” for student-athletes, Smitheran said.
The rest of the funds will be spent over the 12 years, and Smitheran said Beach Athletics intends to be a responsible steward of the investment. That means evaluating the facility needs of all the athletic programs — within and outside the pyramid — and prioritizing accordingly, Smitheran said.
Some of the funds may go to repairs and upgrades (for years, the pyramid has been plagued by structural problems, from a leaky roof that has disrupted basketball games to a partial ceiling collapse). But since the pyramid was completed in 1994, the landscape of college athletics has evolved. In recent years, the focus has shifted from facilities to talent acquisition, Smitheran said.
As a result, the university previously signaled that the majority of the money would support student scholarships, essential in order to adapt to an increasingly competitive collegiate sports scene. As scholarship limits have been eliminated and student athletes receive competition directly from their schools through revenue sharing, it has become even more costly to attract top talent, Smitheran said.
On top of that, costs to operate sports teams have risen sharply, from how teams travel to how they eat to the gear they receive, Smitheran previously said. All of these factors mean the sponsorship deal was sorely needed and could help launch Long Beach State into a new era of athletics, he added.
The gift will not only benefit student-athletes. Ten percent of the funds — $850,000 — are earmarked for the campus activities fund and will be directed to student programming and student life initiatives, Smitheran said.
Though the pyramid will lose the name of Mike and Arline Walter, who donated $2 million to offset the pyramid’s construction costs, Mike Walter previously said he understood the necessity of the move to keep up with a rapidly evolving collegiate athletics landscape.