• By SCOTT RABALAIS
• Advocate sportswriter
• Published: May 5, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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When Ted Stickles traded in his swimming coach’s clipboard for a game management checklist back in the early 1980s, it didn’t take long to get to the bottom of it when the games were played at Alex Box Stadium.

“If we had 300 people in here, we were doing great,” said ticket taker Nancy Salemi, who has been manning the main gate at Alex Box beneath the grandstand since 1985.

“Then Skip started winning and honey, it was over.”

Winning naturally brought more fans. More fans required more seats. Soon metal bleachers were bracketing the original concrete grandstand built in 1938 and wrapping around the left-field wall like Wrigley Field ivy.

A new scoreboard in right field. The Tiger Terrace behind the third-base dugout. A fresh coat of paint all around. In gradual quirky fashion, Alex Box grew in steps, homey touches to the home of what became a five-time national championship baseball program.

“It’s like a set of Tinkertoys,” said Stickles, who retired from his full-time event management job at LSU five years ago but was persuaded to stay on for baseball. “We added one thing, then another and another and we just outgrew it. But that’s kind been kind of the atmosphere.”

The little old ballpark, dwarfed by its older (Tiger Stadium) and younger (Pete Maravich Assembly Center) siblings across Nicholson Drive also grew into a home away from home. Not only for the ballplayers who made it college baseball most fearsome address, but for the family of people who came to work the games season after season.

This weekend marks the final three regular-season games at The Box, a place where they have lived and worked and laughed and been thumped by the occasional foul ball for decades now. Barring the awarding of an NCAA regional for the suddenly torrid Tigers, Sunday’s game against Mississippi State will mark the end of a 70-year run at the old ballyard, and a significant chapter in these people’s lives.

Most of them say they’ll be there to work at the new Alex Box Stadium, currently under construction less than a mile south of the original one, in 2009.

It’ll be bigger and grander. State of the sports venue art.

But, Stickles said, “It’s not going to be the same. Surely it’s going to be a lot better and a lot more comfortable. But it’s going to be different.”

Assistant chief marshal Joe Civello definitely has some mixed feelings about the move.

“I know why they’re doing it,” he said. “I know everything here is for football and everything else is a stepchild. I know where the money’s going. I understand it, but I don’t like it.”