By Dan Weber
NKyTribune sports reporter
Northern Kentucky University alum Corey Cunningham wanted to call the new Arena Football team he’s bringing to Truist Arena on the Highland Heights campus, the Bourbons. “I like Bourbon,” Corey says with a big smile.
Only “not for long,” he said, after a conversation with his lawyer. That name’s taken, by like, a whole lot of Kentucky bourbon things. So they came up with the closest thing — the Barrels.
The Kentucky Barrels is the team’s proper name and for all the excitement at the Monday morning press conference announcing another pro franchise for Northern Kentucky along with the Florence Y’alls, the first thought expressed by many of the community leaders was the thrill of one simple word — “football.”
Finally. At last. There will be football on campus, more than a half-century after it was first proposed.
As a personal sidebar here, from someone who worked at the time to secure NKU a spot as a companion entry into the eight-team Ohio Valley Conference along with Tennessee-Chattanooga with NKU as the fifth Kentucky school with Western Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky, Morehead State, and Murray State in an expanded 10-team conference. But there was a catch: NKU would have to start a football program.
Not happening. No can do. The cost of a stadium and all those scholarships. Sure, there might be some 770 collegiate football programs in America now, but NKU was not going to be one of them.
Until this week when Cunningham, a Cincinnati entrepreneur and investor who owns and operates the software company, Prestige Worldwide Network, specializing in infrastructure and retailing with clients all over the world, stepped up and said he had the perfect place for the Arena Football 1 League to play.
“This will be a Northern Kentucky team,” said Commissioner Jeff Fisher, sporting one of the bluest of blue-blood NFL and college coaching and playing resumes, of the Nashville-based AF1 as it heads into its second season. “This one came together so fast, Corey saw an opportunity and he took it.”
Fisher’s 1985 Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl and his 1978 USC Trojans a national championship in addition to his 173 wins as an NFL coach with six playoff teams and one Super Bowl appearance.
“This is going to be done right,” Fisher says of the AF1’s outreach to sponsors and broadcast media and games played as arena dates become available through the spring. Mostly Fridays and Saturdays but maybe even a Tuesday. “We want to be selective . . . and flexible.”
Last season, Cunningham, as an investor, stepped in with the Corpus Christi, Texas, team and ran it for the final seven weeks of the season.
“He got us to finish the season, allowed us to finish,” Fisher says of a league that’s still putting together its franchises for the coming season. Beaumont, Tex., was welcomed into the fold last week. And there’s talk of a Michigan franchise becoming a bus trip for a league with teams now in Oregon and Washington, Kansas, New York State and the Texas Gulf Coast.
Newly named coach Cedric Walker may be a Northern Kentucky newcomer but not to Arena football, where the Lufkin, Texas, native and former Sam Houston State defensive back has spent 29 years of his life as an Arena player in places like Charlotte, Orlando, Arizona, Chicago, Austin and Las Vegas and coached in Bakersfield, Everett (Wash.), Tri-Cities (Wash.), Green Bay, Milwaukee, San Jose, Baltimore, Spokane, Wyoming and Billings, Montana, where he won his most recent championship.
His take on Northern Kentucky?
“A place to call home,” Walker said.
That was Cunningham’s take, as well, on his return to the 15,000-student NKU campus that looks nothing like it did when he was here more than 30 years ago. The team’s offices are already in place in Truist Arena and NKU could not have been more welcoming, Cunningham says, with its offers to make the team a place for a learning experience for students in areas of sports marketing and management, merchandising, ticketing, all of the jobs that come with a pro sports franchise.
“We are thrilled, could not be more excited,” NKU Pres. Cady Short-Thompson said. “This is a partnership that’s about more than football.”
State Sen. Shelley Funke-Frommeyer (R-Alexandria) echoed that thought. “This is a new chapter in the NKU story . . . the Kentucky Barrels are not here just to play games.”
“As soon as we walked in here, we knew this was home,” Cunningham said.
“A family atmosphere,” Walker called it. But also a sport where its fans describe it as a place where “they’re bringing a party and a football game breaks out.”
But not until April. There will be a free-agent signing period in September. And tryouts after that, with special shots for players from Thomas More and Mt. St. Joseph, Cunningham says.
The rosters allow 22 players on game day, with eight on the 50-yard turf of the high-speed game with those 35-feet high and 30-feet wide nets that keep the ball — and sometimes the crowd — in play. The base salary is $400 a game but players can also keep their NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) money for appearances and commercial deals.
So with all that’s ahead of Cunningham the next eight months, does the successful businessman ever ask himself how crazy is this Arena team business?
“Pretty much every day,” he says, but then the entrepreneur adds this explainer to what’s happening here.
“You gotta’ take some chances.”
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @dweber3440.