Kennesaw State athletic director Vaughn Williams discusses how the addition of football has changed the university and the community. The Owls were given the go-ahead by the Board of Regents earlier this year. They will play their first game in 2015.

Going on my third year, football was something that was in the background. I don’t know if people understood really what it was about and what it would do.

There’s no doubt that football has brought a greater sense of energy than we’ve experienced on campus or off campus. People were asking about it before, but everybody is asking about it now. And that’s from the academic side, from the staff side, from the community side, from the alumni side. It is in the air, and everybody knows.

Doors have opened wider now. People want to talk about how they can help, how they can assist. I think that’s a great thing.

We are getting calls from all sorts of people: vendors, trucking companies and corporate sponsors that we hadn’t been able to get in the door with before. I think they all understand what football is going to do for the community.

It has given us this platform. We had it before, but we had to work for it, and it did not come as quickly as we have right now. That’s the value of it, and now we have to utilize it to the best of our ability for the university and for athletics.

A lot of people are happy that football is going to be an option on a college campus. That’s what it is, trying to add great options for the college experience.

There have been a lot more meetings, a lot more speaking engagements. People want to help.

Our letter-of-intent program started in April with a very soft sell. We have close to 1,000 tickets committed in our letter-of-intent program. I think that speaks volumes. So it has been really well-received. The number of young men who have come here with their families on unofficial visits gives us another chance to talk about the campus. They are coming from all over Georgia.

That’s a part of the overall scope of that job. We are trying to get high school students to want to come to Kennesaw State. We want Kennesaw State to be one of their first two choices in higher education, especially in the state.

This is helping us spread the word, no doubt.