As travel soccer parents, Jeff and Heather Lanier have spent years on the sidelines of lots of soccer pitches cheering on their daughter, Leila.
When he started coming to games, this Michigan State alum found the experience a little, well, spartan. In trying to address this, he opened a door that would lead to major changes to Detroit Mercy’s athletics.
“Leila really likes the school and loves her team,” Lanier said. “But the experience for fans, I felt, needed a little help. It was clear the field’s been neglected and that it was because it was a funding issue.”
As a senior consultant at SME, Lanier’s responsibilities include managing large-scale brownfield redevelopment projects in urban areas, but he says his specialty is problem-solving.
“I started asking questions,” Lanier said. “Inserting myself in conversations and learning about the facilities and how things get done at UDM and finding out who should be involved in these conversations.”
It turns out University of Detroit Mercy President Donald B. Taylor was one of those people.
“When I heard the new president said he wanted to focus on athletics, I knew we could get some things done,” Lanier said.
His first idea was that some landscaping at Titan Field would help make the northeast corner of the McNichols Campus a little nicer for both players and fans. Part of the project included a scrim covering for the fence surrounding Titan Field, and it grew from there.
He next realized something needed to be done to improve the atmosphere at Titan Field for fans and families, so he started reaching out to parents, which led him to Titan Club President David Fitch ’79.
The Titan Club is a booster organization for Detroit Mercy Athletics and has a spot inside Calahan Hall where members can watch basketball games. But fans watching events at Titan Field and Buysse Ballpark didn’t have anything similar. Fitch said there had been talk about addressing that and, once Lanier found the right people, they did.
The Titan Tent — really two large tents side by side — has heaters for cold weather, fans for warm weather and food served by volunteer Titan Club members. Fitch said fans love it.
“It creates a great atmosphere for the fans,” Fitch said. “And Jeff was really instrumental in that.”
But now it was time to do something for his daughter’s team. Their locker room was outdated and badly in need of a facelift. Heather Lanier is president and owner of NBS (Navigating Business Space) and tapped the company’s interior design and construction talents to create a locker room that has other teams looking for ways to update theirs.
Other donors contributed to make the new locker room possible and it officially opened at the start of this fall season. The project involved demolition, new painting and flooring, plumbing, new lockers, a player’s lounge area with seating, a beverage center, an LCD monitor and a large space that enhances player operations and collaboration.
“The players are happy and I’m glad we were in a position to help,” Lanier said.
Lanier has since joined the Titan Club board, and he’s not out of ideas yet.
“I see all the potential in the world,” he said. “I’d like to see more projects that will help connect the campus to the community. It’s all about creating a vision and finding the right champions.”
To help support University of Detroit Mercy Athletics, go to udmercy.edu/giving/donate/athletics.
