As Rock Hill continues to grow and expand, the city is slated to get even more busy and crowded in the coming years, due in part to the Carolina Panthers moving their operation South.
While there is no definitive date for when the team will move to York County, Winthrop University is already in talks with the Panthers about how the two institutions will work together.
Winthrop Provost Adrienne McCormick said that Winthrop and the Panthers have been “having conversations since the news went public that they were going to be bringing their training and support facilities here to Rock Hill.”
“We started to put together teams to have conversations about what we might do to leverage that relationship because we have a lot of other examples where we partner with entities in the community to the betterment of both,” McCormick said.
McCormick said that Winthrop has the “Carnegie classification for community engagement.” She explained that all institutions of higher learning are variously classified by the Carnegie Foundation according to different factors, including whether or not a university or college is a research institution and what types of degrees are offered at a given institution. She said that those classifications are not chosen by the institutions and come directly from the Carnegie Foundation, adding that Winthrop is a “comprehensive institution,” which means that the university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees.
McCormick said that the Carnegie Foundation’s classification for community engagement is an elective classification and it means that an institution is “committed to having a lot of opportunities that build that community relationship and the key aspect of the relationship is that they have to be reciprocal.”
“The community partner gets the talent from Winthrop University [and] Winthrop University gets the experience for its students and faculty,” McCormick said.
McCormick said that Winthrop’s college of education was a “perfect example” of the community engagement. She said that partnering with local school districts helps to get Winthrop graduates into those schools as teachers and that the public schools benefit by having teachers that have graduated from Winthrop.
“We would like to see all of our students have some kind of an opportunity,” McCormick said. “So we just started thinking ‘if we’re going to have the Panthers here, what are the programs and the student opportunities we would have? What are the faculty opportunities we would have?’ and there’s a wide array of possibilities.”
There has already been a precedent set for institutions of higher learning partnering with NFL teams and McCormick said that Winthrop looked to one of these partnerships to see how it works.
“One team actually travelled to Texas to look at what the University of North Texas does in partnering with the Dallas Cowboys, so we’re just look at other models for ways to build relationships when you have a partner like that who moves into you community with certain marketing and selling advantages of [an NFL] team like the Panthers,” McCormick said.
In terms of how the partnership is unfolding, McCormick said that “all of the denas” from the colleges at Winthrop are working on finding opportunities for a mutually beneficial relationship. She said that the CBA is looking at opportunities in terms of marketing and that the CBA is considering expanding/developing the hospitality management and entertainment management track(s) for business majors with the reason being that there are talks of the Panthers opening a hotel at or near the new facility. She said that this new development in the Panthers move to Rock Hill has led Winthrop to consider if the university will “go in a different direction with our program development for new programs, now that we know this is happening” which she said will be part of the planning process for Winthrop’s Academic Master Plan.
“When you have a new opportunity like that [where] there are so many paths we can walk down, it makes sense to tailor some new program development to really maximize that opportunity,” McCormick said.
While aspects of business, economics, sports, human nutrition, exercise science and athletic training could obviously be part of the partnership, there also exists a potential for artists to get involved.
With a large new facility being built, McCormick said that Winthrop is looking at the possibility for public art installations.
“[The Panthers] don’t think of themselves as just football, they’re an entertainment company that has a football team at the core of it. They’re going to be opening this training facility but it would also be something that the community could schedule events in. They’re always thinking about ways to market the brand of the Panthers and it’s a lot more than just a team and a game,” McCormick said.
Photo courtesy of Winthrop University
