ODU game-day surprises officials - by going so well

NORFOLK

Football sounded like the thwomp of a beanbag hitting a wooden Cornhole board, like guitars playing on porches and in front yards, like spontaneous school cheers and shouted greetings in the neighborhoods surrounding ODU on Saturday.

It smelled like charcoal and fried chicken, like salsa and ribs and potato salad.

That was what residents had hoped for.

Some had feared that, instead, it would smell like trouble.

They had worried about traffic, street parking, public drunkenness and loud parties. But just after kickoff Saturday evening, organizers cautiously declared the school 's first football game in 69 years a logistical success.

"No problems with traffic, no problems with getting people in the stadium; we got everyone in their seats for kickoff.... It's been a great night," said Doug Higgons of Global Spectrum, the company handling game-day operations for ODU.

"Everything has been running like clockwork," Larchmont/Edgewater Civic League President David O'Dell echoed. O'Dell took the concerns of his neighborhood, which is just north of the campus, so seriously that he spent several hours riding with police officers before the game.

"I was surprised at really how uneventful it was," he said.

Police and university officials early Saturday night said they'd had no incidents on campus or in the surrounding areas. O'Dell said he had received only one complaint from a home-owner, about parking.

But any parking issues in the community were caused by other residents, many of whom hosted their own elaborate pregame parties at their homes. On every street around campus, tents and grills and tables dotted front lawns that were decorated with banners, flags and balloons.

On Melrose Parkway just a block from the stadium, Walter "Duck" Lloyd and Ray Jennings sat on the front porch of the home Lloyd has lived in since 1948. The men had downed grilled hot dogs and corn on the cob and had walked to campus to see the players make their march to the stadium.

Next door, a student party raged, as undergraduates gathered around a beer pong table on the front lawn. Down the street, a rock band played in another yard.

"Everybody's having a tailgate!" Jennings said. "There's stuff going on everywhere."

The students, he said, weren't a problem - yet. What football means to the neighborhoods around ODU might not be determined until hours after the game, he said.

"It won't really happen till around midnight," he said. "They're just getting primed right now."

Across campus in the Lambert s Point neighborhood, Romcalli Campbell spent the afternoon mowing her lawn, uninterested in the festivities nearby.

"They don't bother me; I don't bother them," she said, shrugging her shoulders at the student parties going on in the neighborhood. But she said residents, especially those whose older homes don't have driveways, were concerned about losing street parking.

"The parking really is a problem," she said.

A block away on 42nd Street, parking already was hard to find hours before game time. A string of student rental houses hosted parties that spilled over porches and driveways into the street, where Will Landay, 22, tossed a Frisbee to a friend.

Landay, who transferred to ODU from West Virginia University, said the school and students were "doing pretty good" at tailgating. His time at West Virginia made him one of the few ODU students who had experience with college football. He wasn't about to miss Saturday's game.

"I wanted to go to the first one," he said. "That was big for me."

Along with the students who live in the three neighborhoods around campus, nearly 1,000 residents there have season tickets to the games.

Meghan Hoyer, (757) 446-2293, meghan.hoyer@pilotonline.com