Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Game day at Arizona Stadium should be much improved for fans

What used to be Jerry Kindall Field at Frank Sancet Stadium is no more.

In recent days, bulldozers flattened the right-field bleachers, dugout and batting cages. The home of Arizona’s 1976, 1980 and 1986 national championship teams is nothing but dirt, making way for the UA’s $16 million Indoor Sports Center, due for occupancy in January.

Across the street, a $25 million renovation of the east side of Arizona Stadium is three months from completion.

The only real suspense of Tucson’s sleepy summer sports season is if construction will be complete by the Sept. 1 football opener against BYU.

Everything else is ready to roll — as long as quarterback Khalil Tate remains healthy — which reflects well on athletic director Dave Heeke’s vow to make game-day experience at Arizona Stadium more fan-friendly.

After its smallest average attendance (42,632) since 1997, Heeke said he will implement the following changes:

• Public address announcer Jimmy Zaza will not return. He will be replaced by McKale Center PA man Jeff Dean, who has a more measured and a less-shrill tone.

• The Pride of Arizona Marching Band will be allowed to play more frequently in 2018. For the last few years, the UA band was seen but not often heard. Good move.

• The volume of the PA system will be dialed back a bit. Those 25,000 people in the West grandstands, most of them long past their college days, will appreciate not going home with a ringing in their ears.

• The massive video board will be used for more than the Kiss Cam and endless advertising. Heeke promises that updated scores from other Pac-12 games and statistics from the UA game will be displayed. Just like a real football stadium.

As usual, UA fans will be asked to do the night shift.

The Pac-12 last week announced the UA-BYU game will start at 7:45 p.m., and the Sept. 25 UA-Southern Utah game will kick off at 8 p.m. The league further announced the Nov. 2 game, a Friday, against Colorado will be played at 7:30 p.m.

But if Tate remains healthy and is productive, the UA’s home schedule — Oregon, USC, ASU, BYU, Cal and Colorado — looks to be as attractive as any at Arizona Stadium the last 25 years.

Some schools don’t have it as good.

When Arizona plays at Houston on Sept. 8 — Kevin Sumlin’s return to his old school — kickoff will be at 11 a.m.

The average high temperature in Houston on that day is 92 degrees. Humidity? Don’t ask.

And Houston’s TDECU Stadium does not have a roof.

After Cesar Salazar moved from Hermosillo, Sonora, to Tucson in the summer of 2012, establishing residency at Sahuaro High School, the Arizona Interscholastic Association did not allow him to play baseball in 2013 or 2014.

Finally, as a senior in 2015, Salazar played 18 games and hit .613 before the AIA changed its mind and declared him ineligible at midseason. Salazar continued to attend Sahuaro workouts and gained the admiration of Cougars coach Mark Chandler.

“I really think Cesar will be in the big leagues one day,” Chandler told me in 2015. “He is as good a kid as you’ll ever come across.”

Last week, Pac-12 coaches voted the Arizona junior catcher to the all-conference team for the second year in a row. UA coach Jay Johnson sounded a lot like Chandler, telling reporters Salazar is “the favorite player I’ve ever coached. There’s not a better human being on the planet than him.”

Chandler, now at Sabino, won the 3A state championship while Salazar was in California with Arizona. One of the first things Chandler did was to text his former catcher a photograph of the state championship trophy.

Now, as Salazar awaits this week’s MLB draft, his legacy is coming into focus. The UA has 14 all-conference catchers from 1950-2018, and Salazar is certainly among the 10 leading catchers in school history. Here’s my list:

1. Ron Hassey. His 235 career RBIs are tops in UA history. First-team All-American in 1976.

2. Alan Hall. A two-time All-American, 1959 and 1960.

3. Alan Zinter. He hit 18 home runs with 81 RBIs when Arizona rose to No. 1 in 1989.

4. Willie Morales. The Tucson High product was an All-American as a junior, 1993, and ultimately played for the Baltimore Orioles.

5. Cesar Salazar. As good a defensive catcher as I’ve seen at Arizona. Hit .339 with 42 RBIs this season.

6. J. Ray Rokey. A two-time All-WAC catcher, 1970 and 1971, when it might’ve been the best baseball conference in America.

7. Steve Strong. En route to the 1986 national championship, a Sabino grad, hit .396 and was the All-Pac-10 catcher in 1987.

8. Nick Hundley. The All-Pac-10 catcher of 2005 has enjoyed an 11-year MLB career.

9. Lloyd Jenney. His three-year cumulative batting average was .399, with a high of .484, a school record, in 1951.

10. Dennis Haines. Led the 58-6 Arizona team of 1974 with 14 homers.

About six weeks before NFL training camps open, Tucson’s Ka’Deem Carey remains unsigned. He’s only 25. He has carried just 102 times in three NFL seasons and did not carry the ball at all in 2017. It makes you wonder what his college workload — 743 carries in three Arizona seasons — did to his body. Over the last 10 seasons, the Pac-12’s three most prominent ball-carriers were Carey, Oregon’s LaMichael James and Stanford’s Toby Gerhart. All had disappointing NFL careers after carrying such a heavy load in college. Gerhart had 671 carries at Stanford; James 772 at Oregon. James’ NFL career ended when he was 26; Gerhart was done at 28.

A pro football career can be so fleeting. Four weeks after signing as an undrafted free agent with the Green Bay Packers, three-year Arizona starting guard Jacob Alsadek was released by the team last week. Alsadek spent just two days in Green Bay’s organized team activities session before being released.

How did college sports’ finances ever get so warped? The UA last week announced it is in the process of purchasing a 3,756-square-foot home for president Robert C. Robbins in the Sam Hughes district. His salary is being raised to $675,000 per year. Yet former Arizona football coach Rich Rodriguez, whose compensation in 2017 was close to $3 million, lives in an 8,916-square foot home near Ventana Canyon. It has eight bathrooms and six bedrooms. SMH, right?

The Pac-12’s newest athletic director is Utah’s Mark Harlan, who enrolled at Arizona in 1987 and became close friends with football coach Dick Tomey’s son, Rich. That friendship helped Harlan get a spot as a graduate assistant and recruiting aide in the early 1990s. Harlan advanced through the UA athletic department, bit by bit. He was in charge of game-day management at Arizona Stadium and McKale Center. He coordinated the ticket-takers and ushers. He was responsible for the visiting locker rooms, you name it. Harlan then struck out on his own, working in athletic departments at Northern Colorado, San Jose State and UCLA before becoming AD at South Florida four years ago. He was strongly interested in replacing Greg Byrne at Arizona, but the timing wasn’t right for him. Now, at 48, Harlan has one of the top 50 administrative jobs in college athletics. Talk about working your way to the top.

ESPN’s telecast of the Rockies-Giants baseball game last week included a feature on the way the Rockies prepare 12 dozen baseballs before every game in a special humidor to keep the balls from “hardening” in the dry climate and mile-high altitude. The man who guided ESPN on the tour of Coors Field was Shane Gillooly, a Sahuaro High grad and son of Sabino High state championship pitching coach Tim Gillooly. The Rockies hired Shane in a wonderful piece of happenstance about 10 years ago while he was at a Rockies spring training game at Hi Corbett Field. Gillooly was picked at random to be a “ball boy” and he impressed the club by staying after the game, shining the players’ baseball shoes, helping with laundry and equipment. He stayed until 9 p.m. A year later, the Rockies hired Gillooly for the entire spring training session, and after that asked him to move to Denver to be a visiting clubhouse manager at Coors Field, a job he has held for 10 years. Right place, right time.

Sad news: Chris Corral, a key member of 1991-93 Desert Swarm-era football teams, was involved in a horrific car wreck May 6 and broke his neck, ribs, a hip and a leg. He suffered lung damage. Corral was placed in a medically-induced coma for seven days and was fitted with a halo apparatus to protect his broken neck. A former wrestler and football player at Cholla High School, Corral is the father of two children and has worked the last 19 years for a Tucson kitchen and cabinets firm. Many of Corral’s UA teammates have helped to pay medical bills, including Tedy Bruschi, Mani Ott, Tom BoBo, Joe Smigiel, Beau Ralphs and Courtney McElroy.

Tucson High grad Craig Bjornson, who is now the Boston Red Sox bullpen coach, was honored before Thursday’s Houston-Boston game at Minute Maid Park. He was awarded his 2017 World Series ring in a ceremony at home plate with Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who also coached for Houston a year ago. Several Astros players and coaches walked to home plate to embrace Bjornson, a member of Tucson High’s 1987 state championship team.

As Arizona rebuilds its swimming program under coach Augie Busch, one of the most pressing needs is to hire a diving coach. The UA recently parted ways with former Wildcat All-American diver and Olympian Omar Ojeda. The new diving coach will inherit sophomore All-American Delaney Schnell of Tucson High. Schnell was the Pac-12 freshman of the year and placed fifth and second in the two NCAA diving events.

Tucsonan Kerri Strug, who became a global star by helping Team USA win the 1996 Olympic gymnastics gold medal, is 40 now, but continues to command an audience. She will be the featured speaker Sunday night at the Las Vegas Thomas and Mack Center at the Best of the Nevada Preps night, honoring the 90 top boys and girls high school athletes of Nevada from the 2017-18 school year. She is now married and the mother of two young children.

On the same day that upscale Golf Club at Vistoso suspended operations last week, the Nogales-area’s Kino Springs Golf Club announced it will shut down at least until October. A month ago, Blanchard Golf Club at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base closed.

All three of those courses have financial problems, but more direct, water problems. Inescapably, the cost of water in Southern Arizona is as much an issue as a diminishing field of golfers. Don’t expect it to get any easier for golf courses to pay for water rights.

But there was one piece of very good news for Tucson golfers: Arizona National Golf Club, tucked into the Catalina Foothills near the road to Mount Lemmon, will not close, as feared.

The Sabino Springs HOA, which has been working with Canadian mortgage firm Romspen, owner of both National and Vistoso, will enter into a five-year lease with Romspen to run Arizona National, effective July 1.

“This is the end result of over eight months of research, negotiations and education by the HOA and it’s ad hoc golf committee,” said Bob Hornack, president of the HOA. “This will preserve our community and property values but we also feel that with the proper management and marketing this can once again be one of the premier courses in Tucson.”

Hornack said 80 percent of the homeowners approved the lease negotiation, which includes a monthly fee of $100 per household.

The golf model in Southern Arizona, 2018, has totally changed the last decade. The Sabino Springs HOA has pioneered a new way of golf business.