“Lauren Daigle came off the stage and talked about how much she loved the room and how close the fans were.”

We recruit students from all over the country. I think it’s really beneficial for the university to bring entertainment options and excitement and energy to Waco as we’re recruiting students from Southern California or the Denver area, which have a multitude of entertainment options. We think it’s important that Waco is seen as vibrant and exciting, with things to do, and live music is a key component of that.

I think the push for new revenues for colleges and universities is part of it, but also, stewarding our fiscal resources that we have. It doesn’t make sense to have these wonderful facilities sitting vacant half a year. The cost of running a college or university is increasing significantly. We’re in the talent business and it’s a very competitive environment for talent. It’s very competitive to recruit students, provide services that students demand — whether it’s mental health services or living environments, things of that nature, it’s an expensive business. Baylor historically has been very tuition-dependent, so we’re trying to look at what are some new revenue streams that we can introduce for the university overall. I’ve quickly learned in the concert world, it’s a river of nickels and everybody gets a cut. I think at the end of the year, it’s being able to drive some new revenues to the central budget and then that goes into the pot that’s distributed, whether it goes to athletics or merit increases for faculty and staff, new benefits, to help pay for current and future buildings. It all goes into one big pot.

One of the great things about Foster Pavillion is that 5,700 seats make a very intimate concert experience. Lauren Daigle, (the Contemporary Christan singer/songwriter who played a sold-out show at Foster on Sept. 12) came off the stage and talked about how much she loved the room and how close the fans were. It’s a very intimate setting, but the disadvantage to that is we don’t have a lot of scale in terms of number of seats to drive down ticket prices. A lot of the guarantees that we’ve been looking at with some artists, our base ticket price would be in the $300 range, and we just don’t think the Waco market could support that.

For select shows, we’re selling beer and wine at Foster Pavilion, and that was a desire within the city as part of our discussions with them to make sure that Foster Pavilion was also a community resource. I think that selling beer and wine will allow us to attract some national acts who just would not even consider us if we did not offer that. It’s very show dependent. For Forrest Frank and Lauren Daigle, both Christian entertainers, we didn’t. For Jeff Dunham, we are. Tucker Wetmore, we are offering beer and wine but we’re also bringing in some premium concessions related to that. For Jeff Dunham we’re doing charcuterie boards, macaroons, chocolate-covered strawberries, cheesecakes, things of that nature. We’re allowing more premium concession offerings depending on the show. We sold beer for the Boys from Oklahoma concert at McLane Stadium, and we did that well. It went well financially, but also, we had zero arrests with the crowd as part of that, so it was a great learning opportunity for us.

The president came to me and said, ‘Jason, I want you to make sure that that we hit these milestones, that we do it the right way, that we bring national acts here to Waco.’” “I think that in the past it’s just been a portion of someone’s responsibilities. But institutionally we’re putting a very big strategic focus on this. And if you look around the country, colleges and universities are doing this kind of thing. I have a feeling we would be in the concert business even if we didn’t have Foster Pavilion.

Jason Cook has been vice president for marketing and communications and chief marketing officer for Baylor University since December 2016. And for the past year or so, at the request of Baylor President Dr. Linda Livingstone, he’s overseen concert bookings at Foster Pavillion and McLane Stadium.

Before coming to Baylor, Cook was senior associate athletics director for external affairs at Texas A&M University and was previously A&M’s vice president for marketing and communications. He was also previously assistant vice president of media and communications for HealthSouth Corp., in Birmingham, Alabama. / Photos by Breanne Johnson