It’s Time For a New Basketball Scoreboard

Wake Forest University has built some of the best facilities in the Atlantic Coast Conference within the last few years, and has updated older facilities within the past decade to be top of the line.

BB&T Field has a new state of the art scoreboard that is one of the largest in the country thanks to the generous donation of Bob McCreary. David F. Couch Ballpark also features a nice new scoreboard.

But for some unknown reason, Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum still features a 25,000 pound center hung video board with screens only in standard definition that was installed in 2005. This board wasn’t exactly top of the line even then, and it is woefully outdated at this point. It is more of an eyesore than an asset, and has even been called a “dump” by some.

It features four screens, one for each direction of the seating in the arena, that are probably not much larger than some of the more expensive HD TVs. The screens are not high definition, look like they haven’t been cleaned in years, and are very hard to see at times. Not to mention that permanent ads on the sides take up just as much, if not more, space than the actual screens showing video and stats.

We have without a doubt in my mind or the mind of anyone else on the staff BY FAR the WORST basketball video board in the ACC.

And that is why Jake, our Blogger So Dear Twitter guru, decided to appeal to former Deacon Jeff Teague for a donation upon hearing of his rather substantial new NBA contract:

An interesting string of tweets by the Joel’s Twitter account ensued, including a promise of a new video board if a tweet got to 2,000 retweets:

But then things got really interesting when the account tweeted out this picture:

Many people, including members of our staff, interpreted this as a foreshadowing of the old scoreboard finally being taken down to make way for a new one.

But when I tweeted at them to ask if we could expect an announcement of a new video board soon, I received this disappointing response:

And while I understand that things come in due time, there was no reason to get everyone’s hopes up only to say that they were only making minor repairs to the current one. This made myself and several fans highly disappointed.

Some may ask, “why the need for a new video board?”, and I would say that is a valid question.

But in this day and age where technology is such a huge part of our everyday lives, having a nice flashy video board is almost a must for a proper fan experience. Wake Forest has talked for years about “improving the fan experience”. While there are many ways to accomplish this, a new video board would be a great step, especially now that our team is headed in the right direction again.

Ron Wellman and the Wake Forest athletic department have promised fans renovations to the Joel since the university purchased the coliseum from the city of Winston-Salem in 2013, but so far the only changes we have seen have been a very nice new lighting system. Check out the Joel’s Twitter account (@LJVMColiseum) for some tweets today showing some of the features of the new lighting. A new video board would be an excellent next step, and a nice way of showing that Wake Forest is fully committed to the renovations.

Click here to view Ned’s “5 Things We Want to See in Renovated Joel Coliseum”. One of these is obviously a new video board. Hopefully a new board will come sooner rather than later, and help to improve the fan experience in the process.

Our basketball team has gotten to the point where we are good again, now let’s update the Joel’s video board to reflect this!