At 2 p.m. Saturday, the football teams from Ouachita Baptist University and Henderson State University will begin play in a stadium alongside U.S. 67 in Arkadelphia. For three hours each autumn, Arkadelphia plays host to what’s perhaps the most unique rivalry in college sports. The road team doesn’t fly or take a bus to the game. The players walk.
One can sit in the stands on the home side of Ouachita’s A.U. Williams Field and look across the highway to Henderson’s Carpenter-Haygood Stadium. Saturday’s game is at Ouachita. Early Saturday afternoon, state troopers will stop traffic on the highway for a few minutes, and the Reddies of Henderson, having suited up in their own dressing room, will walk across the road and play the game. About 5 p.m., the troopers again will stop traffic as the Reddies trudge across the highway so they can shower at home.
I grew up a block from the Ouachita football field. For years, I watched from afar as people in Arkadelphia tried to come up with an event to bring in visitors and attract media attention. What they finally realized is that just such an event-the football Battle of the Ravine-already existed.
Now, a whole series of activities is built around the football game. There will be a Friday night concert. Beginning early Saturday morning, a large joint tailgate party will be held on the open fields that adjoin the highway on the Henderson side. That party will include music, carnival rides, a 5K run for adults, a competitive run for kids and even a Baggo tournament (for the uninitiated, that’s a game popular at football tailgate parties across the country).
A committee of business and civic leaders, with Arkadelphia-based Southern Bancorp as the corporate sponsor, decided several years ago to transform game weekend into a festival that would attract people from across the state and region. Finally, Arkadelphia was doing what I had preached across an eight-state region during the four years I worked in the economic development arena for the Delta Regional Authority. My message: Identify your strengths and then play to those strengths.
It was frustrating to watch so many communities try to be something they weren’t-and would never be-from a community and economic development standpoint. Arkadelphia could have served as a case study of just such a place. It’s fine to continue the effort to attract manufacturing jobs. But I had seen too many towns spending far too much time and energy chasing jobs that likely were headed to Mexico, China and India anyway. They had failed to identify their existing strengths. Arkadelphia’s strength will always be the fact that it’s home to Ouachita and Henderson. Its niche in the 21st Century should be this: An attractive Southern college town-a smaller version of Oxford, Miss., if you will.
The economic development goal should be to position the city as the educational, cultural, literary and artistic center of south Arkansas. When I was growing up in Arkadelphia, there was a weekly newspaper that no longer exists called the Southern Standard. Its masthead declared the city to be the “Athens of Arkansas.” Such a niche would help attract students to Henderson and Ouachita. For college students, quality of life is an increasingly important part of the equation. The concerts and lectures the schools attract are important to them. So are the quality of restaurants in town and the nearby recreational opportunities.
If a plan to position the city as the south Arkansas “Athens” were properly executed and publicized, the effort also would attract retirees, writers, artists and others looking for just such a small-town oasis offering a dose of culture, a low cost of living and a safe environment. Studies show that rather than moving to planned communities in the mountains or on the beach, an increasing number of well-to-do retirees now find college towns to be attractive places to live. They like the steady dose of sports events, theater productions, lectures and concerts-many of them free-that these college towns provide. With their need for medical care, the money they spend in restaurants and retail establishments and the time they have for volunteer efforts, retirees can mean a great deal to a local economy.
Arkadelphia’s leaders also must recognize that they live in one of the state’s oldest, most historic cities. It’s also home to one of the South’s best bed-and-breakfast inns, the Captain Henderson House. Other old river towns such as Camden and Helena don’t have the benefit of being the home of four-year universities. And university towns such as Fayetteville, Jonesboro, Searcy, Magnolia and Monticello don’t have the benefit of being historic river towns. Arkadelphia has the best of both.
We don’t often associate football with economic development, but building an entire festival around a college football game is a start down the proper path. It shows that community leaders in one Arkansas town have identified their city’s strength-two universities in this case-and begun building on it. It’s time for other business and civic leaders across Arkansas to take a step back, assess who they really are and then build on that foundation.
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Freelance columnist Rex Nelson is the president of Arkansas’ Independent Colleges and Universities. He’s also the author of the Southern Fried blog at rexnelsonsouthernfried.com.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 11/13/2013