When we broke the news about the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee getting ready to search for its sixth athletic director since June 2009, I saw a couple tweets carry a peculiar hashtag that made me laugh.
#Jimmy4AD
Honestly, my first reaction was a potbelly chortle that one might expect from Santa Claus. Ho ho ho, the gift of a good laugh.
But then again, maybe it’s an opportunity. I have no delusions about being hired as the next Director of Athletics for Milwaukee, even though I’d gladly accept the job if offered (when pigs fly). It is, however, an opportunity for me to lay it all out there - I often say, in conversation with my fellow Panthers, “If I were in charge, this is what I’d do.” Well, right here, right now I’m going to let it all out. Well, about 75% of it - I still would like a job and the magician doesn’t share all his secrets. But act as though I’m letting it all out.
So why me?
In the interest of getting to the point quickly, I should probably state why I’m the best man for the job. Try to think of it as a guideline for the university in what kinds of qualities this person needs to bring, but realize that when you are done reading every candidate compared to me will be left wanting (you know, if you ignore things like experience, great grades and the ability to not yell at Chris Beaver upon noticing he’s in the room).
1. Low pay - Quite frankly, every one of these people will be commanding a salary in the $100,000+ range. They will deserve it, too, after decades of cumulative experience between the finalists at jobs that fit the career ladder. People usually don’t go from “blogger” to “athletic director” so quickly (actually it’s probably never happened), but think of it as a solid investment - well under 30, I’d happily take the job at $40,000 and not ask for a raise for years.
2. Total loyalty - Over the years, we’ve heard it all from new coaches and AD’s. ‘I’m here to put down roots’ or ‘I’m going to build my family here in Milwaukee’ sound all-too familiar, and their words should ring hollow because that’s all they are: words. You know it’s different with me. As long as my family can live on what I make as AD of Milwaukee Athletics, I’m not going anywhere. You’ll have to kick me out the door. I’d be a lifer, the same dream job I’ve had since I was just a wide-eyed 18-year-old kid and learning the hoops chants from Ben Goodhue, Mike Kennedy, Mike McMillan, Josh Bass and Brett Silverthorn. Seriously, is there ever more of a lock than this right here?
3. High-level commitment - I’ve often drawn the ire of athletic department employees who come home from a night on the town, log onto facebook and have an immediate message from me. No small talk, no X’s and O’s, just ideas on how to push the program forward. I offer a high level of commitment to the job because this is fun for me. Heck, it’s not even a job and I still kick around ideas and run this website. Speaking of this website, the name PantherU came from Andy Czekalski, then a student employee in marketing, while we had a 3 am brainstorming session for what to name the site (my #1 choice, PantherNation.com, was taken by UNI fans). I’ve tailgated at track and field events before, for crying out loud.
4. Unbridled passion - So many people will take a job and become bored by the dull nature of it, the tedious tasks and the repetitive nature. I see the Milwaukee AD position as one of excitement and fun. Who wouldn’t relish the chance to meet new people every day, tell the amazing stories of Milwaukee Athletics and build the program the way we want it built? I’m not the AD that sits on his Blackberry and ignores donors or the guy who doesn’t show up at all - I’m there, I’m engaged and I’m ready to do everything needed to build what I love - the Milwaukee Panthers. I mean, I’m a somewhat likable guy, right?
5. Knowledge of the situation - Most candidates are going to come in here with a fleeting grasp of the situation. They’ll know that we have a facilities issue, that we run through AD’s like tissue, and our attendance numbers are well below par for the course. But will they know what most people in the department think about things? Will they know what our problems are in marketing and development, and also who to go see to fix those problems? Do they have a grasp on the history of the past eight years of this program? I’ll have all those things on Day One. Each of these finalists will need months to get acclimated, and even then they probably won’t have it locked up as tight as I do.
So think about these things when you’re deciding who you want to be your next Athletics Director. The last couple hires, particularly George Koonce and Rick Costello, were lacking in serious areas.
Facilities
The problem here is the same as it has been since I came to campus in fall 2005: we have a major facilities problem, and the university hasn’t been able to get its arms around the problem. Basketball needs a game facility and a practice facility, track needs an indoor home, soccer needs a place to practice in the winter, baseball needs a home stadium and practice facility - the list is just as long as the amount of sports we have. They need to be addressed, and I believe that I have the correct solution.
1. Acquire the U.S. Cellular Arena - I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this the champion of the on-campus arena? Isn’t this the guy who has been trumpeting a new arena at home for the basketball program? The answer is yes. But my eyes have been opened, and I feel that experience has taught me a valuable lesson here: Milwaukee does not have nearly the amount of money needed to build a basketball arena that could cost upwards of $50 million, and to get that money we’d have to raise it from people who are angry we came back to campus in the first place.
I get it, it was a cost-cutting move. It was smart in that we shouldn’t be paying the Wisconsin Center District hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent out the Cell for basketball and graduation. The truth is, Milwaukee Athletics isn’t the kind of big-money business we needed to make the jump in the first place, at least under the terms that we were force-fed. But it doesn’t have to be that way when we go back.
The reason that the university paying the Center District to use the Cell is idiotic is because you’re basically making the State of Wisconsin pay money to the State of Wisconsin. It’s like a parent forcing one son to pay another money to ride the bicycle that the parent bought. It doesn’t make sense. The good news on this front, of course, is that this arrangement should be easily remedied for the low cost of state legislature’s time. That’s right. The university should lobby hard with the new state legislature to move ownership of the U.S. Cellular Arena from the Wisconsin Center District into the hands of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A simple piece of paper, passed by the assembly and senate, signed by Scott Walker, would give us our long-lost Division I basketball arena practically free of charge.
It’s in the best interest of all parties. The WCD can focus on bringing conventions to the Delta Center and entertainment to the Milwaukee Theater without having to worry about operations for the Cell. The state gets to help one of its largest entities bring a major part of it above water. The university gets prime downtown real estate on which to put a big “Milwaukee” logo, but more importantly they get a facility where they can raise money through competing with the BMO Bradley Center for concerts and other events.
It doesn’t bode well for students, who had been showing up in much better numbers until the Tennessee Tech fiasco on Saturday night. But they’ll follow winners, and we would go a long way toward bringing back paying customers by making this happen.
2. Renovating the Cell - Once the Cell is under UWM hands, then the real fun begins with that facility. In later years, a lot of improvements were made. A Milwaukee logo skylight danced in the atrium, black and gold tarps covered unused seats, the Milwaukee logo made its way onto a beautiful new floor, the banners were updated and added to, and big screens were added to the corners. But these are just minor improvements, things that the university was willing to do to enhance the experience without breaking the bank. Why break the bank when you still have to pay the WCD to play there? It didn’t make sense to shoulder a large burden when the WCD reaped all the rewards.
Now, it’s game on. Fans wouldn’t really notice major upgrades in space for television production (in case ESPN decides to stop by) or media space, but they would notice if entire sections of the arena were blown up and rebuilt to house luxury suites for expensive tastes. They sure would notice if the Panther Pit were made permanent in a section of the stands overlooking the court.
So many things would be possible, and because the framework of the building is there (great sight lines!) the cost of major improvements is entirely tied to the scope of each individual project. Who wouldn’t want to buy apparel at a “Pounce’s Locker Room” or get their picture taken with a cutout Bruce Pearl and Bo Ryan in the corner? Who wouldn’t want to spend the hour before the game perusing the Bud K. Haidet Hall of Fame or getting a burger and cheese curds at the satellite Gasthaus? All these things have long been possible, but the reason they never came to fruition is the same as it always was - why help the WCD make money and take more out of our pocket? If we own the building, we own the shape it takes.
3. Baseball/Track complex - Really this is second in priority behind acquiring the Cell, but it’s far more important to far more student-athletes than the basketball program alone. I’ve often made mention of the crammed and exhausting amount of crap that student-athletes have to go through to practice in the Klotsche Center. At all hours of the day you will see basketball, volleyball, track and field, baseball and even soccer and swimming working out or practicing inside the Klotsche Center’s arena. That’s not even to mention the intramurals that go on at night.
By building the baseball stadium and indoor track and field facility, the university helps all those programs by cutting down on the amount of time the Klotsche arena is used. And that’s not even taking into account that you’re solving the game day issue for baseball, the program that should be #2 on the priorities list for the school. A real stadium, where we can sell tickets to games and have someone other than the pitching staff raking the dirt (actually, I like that tradition), would be a huge boon for the program. Like renting out the Cell for concerts, we could rent out the new stadium to Old Timers’ leagues, Bar-league softball, youth baseball, high schools in the area, or even a Frontier League or Northwoods League team. That’s all money being brought into the program that didn’t exist previously. In the cold Milwaukee winters, the track and field, soccer, and baseball teams are driven into the 300-meter track indoor palace. Sure it costs money, but the possibilties for such a facility are endless - that’s why Andy Geiger is trying to get the money raised for it while he’s still here.
There’s another, small added bonus to it that makes me think Geiger might be a genius. The building’s track is 300 meters, which allows the track and field team to host indoor meets. But what it also does is provide practice space for a certain program that he knew the second he stepped on campus he wouldn’t be able to add. Football is never far from the casual Milwaukee fan’s consciousness, but realistically it is at least a decade away. However, with this indoor track facility, a full-size football field for practice is built and ready to go long before the first kickoff (if kickoffs exist then).
4. Basketball practice facility - At some point, if the university is going to commit to making men’s basketball a nationally-elite program (think VCU, a very comparable university), it’s going to have to build a practice facility for only the basketball programs. Such buildings exist at UIC, Loyola and Wright State, and exclusive practice space exists at every Horizon League school except Milwaukee. But Milwaukee has institutional advantages, like VCU does out east, that would allow our program to reach a higher ceiling than the rest of the conference.
It costs a lot of money for a facility that will never see a single intercollegiate game, but the university’s level of commitment to athletics will never be questioned if they spend the $10-15 million it takes to build an adequate practice facility. Coaches offices, training rooms, classrooms, academic study halls, player locker rooms, shower rooms and lounges, recruiting areas, weight rooms, all of these are on the list of things to get for a program and they don’t even involve the main practice floor space. Head up to $30 million and you’d be building a nationally elite facility that would make Wisconsin jealous. It sounds like a lot of cash for a practice facility, but when the money isn’t going into building a new arena at $50 million-plus, the price tag just doesn’t seem that expensive. A coach would have to try very hard to fail recruiting to such a place.
5. Wisconsin Paperboard Corporation - At some point, the university is going to need to acquire the cardboard factory by Cambridge Commons. Whether athletics makes its future home there or not is irrelevant; it is a large parcel of land that helps connect the main Kenwood Campus with the growing southern North Avenue campus. A Panther Parkway that includes Riverside High School takes you all the way to University Square, where the UWM community dines at Five Guys and Oakland Gyros and gets sloshed at Axel’s and the Black Rose. It would be a priority of mine to help the university even if it weren’t for athletics, but you know I can see football Saturdays on that parcel of land in the distant future.
Facilities are important. When recruiting a seventeen-year old kid, they see the level of commitment each university has for athletics in the facilities. Right now, we’ve got quite the list to make up. But it’s worth all the effort in planning, fundraising and construction.
Marketing
1. Fix the Milwaukee Brand - You know me. I’ve chirped for years on this issue. Milwaukee needs to settle its brand problem yesterday. The Panthers can’t afford to be known by 15 different names. They need to be known as one name, and one name only: Milwaukee. Without addressing this issue, we continue to let the country decide what kind of program we are - a hyphen school, the little sister to Madison and unworthy of their time. Do you think Wisconsin-Milwaukee gets an invite from the MVC? Or is considered strongly for a home-and-home with Xavier? Absolutely not. Milwaukee, on the other hand, commands more respect. It’s better to be connected athletically in name to schools like Louisville, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Memphis than it is to schools like UNC-Asheville, UNC-Greensboro, UT-San Antonio and UC-Santa Cruz. By continuing to be lazy with this issue, we invite media and the nation to continue to lump us in with all the low-major hyphenated schools that don’t fit us at all.
Whether we do it at the athletics level or university level is up to the chancellor. UNC-Charlotte spent $50,000 in 2005 to go through a rebranding campaign as the Charlotte 49ers. The campaign was successful, although locally media still refer to them as UNC-Charlotte. Up north, the State University of New York at Buffalo is known by the much shorter name of the University at Buffalo - those students only see the long version when they walk through and pick up their degrees. The university needs to consider both options, although it is my belief that academics also would benefit by being known as the University of Milwaukee. Keep in mind that this level of move is only a rebranding, that officially the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee survives and still sits on our diplomas. That also means that the university-level rebranding does not need approval from the student body or the UW System, although it would be nice to let them know first.
2. One set of logos - Just like cleaning up the name, we need to clean up the logos. The current main Panther head logo has been in use, at least in some way, for over a decade. The belt buckle logo, as it was originally called, moved the Milwaukee to the bottom in a wave motion, replaced the Panthers, and simplified the colors. It’s still a very detailed logo, but at least it’s been cleaned up - no more blues and purples inside there, only black, gold, grey and white. The bookstore, soon after the cleanup was finished and the new logo installed on the basketball courts, decided to come up with their own set of logos. Now there is an “M” logo with the Panther perched next to it, a standalone Pounce Panther looking awfully rebellious, and a new Panther head to match the new looks. But Milwaukee Athletics uses those marks sparingly. Why? Because the floor has the main logo and they like it that way.
It’s just a cluster, a total mess that needs to be cleaned up. I propose that the university drops the old, “new belt buckle” logo that you see everywhere and commits to the new marks made by the bookstore. Why? Because they’re newer, they’re more modern, and they’re much more versatile. They say Milwaukee without having to spell it out, and you can see three different logos and tell they all come from the same basic design. The only request I have would be to change the M from the UWM academic block M to something more athletics-oriented, like the logo designed by Nic Waldron that is now in use by the club football program. It’s just cleaner.
3. ”Milwaukee’s Program” - For too long, we’ve ceded ownership of the city to Wisconsin and Marquette. If Milwaukee Athletics is to ever reach the potential that I feel it has, we need to take ownership of the city of Milwaukee. Simply, we need to paint the town Black and Gold. Upon visiting my sister in St. Louis last year, I noticed that you couldn’t drive past five billboards without one of them screaming at you to “Be a Billiken.” Luckily for them they have a unique mascot, but we have a unique name. If we build upon the idea that we are “Milwaukee’s Program,” we can market sports like baseball while still keeping the focus on men’s basketball. Your town, Your School, Your Team. You know, stuff like that. Something that puts it on the community. They may say “the Panthers suck this year,” but at least they’re talking about them. By not trying to take ownership of the city, we’re conceding defeat in bringing in fans without even taking the court.
4. Cut the red tape - A lot of people like to point to the job Levar Ridgeway has done since taking over for Jason Clark as the head of marketing as a place where the program needs to get better. I completely agree, but I also don’t think it’s Levar’s fault things haven’t built as well as he’d like. The truth is, the university’s Division I athletics program is treated like a second class citizen in its own campus. Volleyball players were kicked out of the dorms in 2011 for trying to promote their conference tournament. The department has to jockey with the chess club and College Republicans for table space inside the Union. The Gasthaus once tried to get fans to leave during the televised game at Kansas because the workers wanted to close up shop early.
These things need to stop. If they don’t, we’ll never know how good Levar Ridgeway can be at his job or anyone else who sits in that seat. Not until we cut all the red tape that the director of marketing has to cut through just to promote a volleyball game in the dorms. That begins and ends with Chancellor Lovell. A simple memo to all of student services, and athletics gets what it needs to market the program correctly. Things have started to change in a good way; the big banners on Lapham and the Union are a start. But the campus needs to be painted Black and Gold for real, and were I athletic director I’d be meeting with Lovell until he helped me out.
5. Sports Marketing Class - Right now, there’s a sports marketing class taught every semester in the Lubar School of Business by Doak Geiger (no relation to Andy). Doak has brought the idea of starting another class for these students to work in the field, promoting athletics on campus. It is a win-win situation for everyone, so it baffles me why it hasn’t been done before. Milwaukee Athletics gets foot soldiers to market their programs the way they want. Students get real-world experience in a specialized field. The university, instead of spending money on more workers, actually gets paid by the students who take the class.
6. Explore a Sports Administration degree - Very few schools in the state offer it; with sports growing across the country, Wisconsinites need more than UW-La Crosse and Cardinal Stritch masters programs to field the next round of sports administrators. Offering an MBA in Sports Administration would allow the university to take the lead in a growing field while also helping to staff the university’s athletics program without actually having to pay workers. It’s in the same strain as the sports marketing class, except it establishes an entire program, lasts more than a semester, and covers more than marketing. As far as I know the only time it’s been brought up publicly was by Vince Sweeney during his public presentation in the George Koonce Search and Screen process (I remember because I was on that committee. I’m sorry).
Marketing is the best way to get Milwaukee Athletics’ message out there. It’s meta when you think about it - marketing for marketing - the university’s message is put out by athletics. Athletics’ message is put out by its marketing department. In such a pivotal position, it’s very important to get it done right.
Cutting Costs
We have a lot of money on the books that needs to come off. Here are a few ideas that I had to move things forward.
1. The Pep Band - Right now, students in the pep band make $30 per game, $40 if they’re a section leader. If you just have 25 band members at a game, that’s $750 per game to have the band. At 15 games a year, you’re talking about $11,250. Small change in a budget of over $10 million, but every bit counts. If you were to take that away and instead make it a one-credit class, you would then be collecting money from each of those students for every semester. Then you could start using them for soccer, volleyball, baseball, any sport you desire because they don’t cost you anything.
2. Results-based pay - Right now, ticket salespersons get a commission for every season ticket they sell. But what if you lowered that commission slighty and offered up that money at certain intervals? Say, 100 season-tickets sold gives you an extra $150, and so on and so forth. You may end up spending more money than the current system, but you’ll get more enthusiastic salesmen. The same idea can be applied to marketing - give Levar Ridgeway a bonus if the walk-up attendance reaches a certain level, or give the development person an extra $1,000 for every $100,000 in donations they bring - anything to get people working harder for you.
3. Expand the fundraising base - Too many times I’d hear “well, we only have X amount of dollars we can raise.” That’s poppycock. If you’re not getting the money you need to do what you need, then you have to go outside the current realm. Where’s the money from R.W. Baird? Harley Davidson? Johnson Controls? Rockwell Automation? Miller? We need as many corporate sponsorships as we can get, but we also need to schmooze the big donors who aren’t currently giving money to the program. Once Bud Selig realizes the Badgers are never getting baseball back, we need to get on him to help fund our program. Herb Kohl is generous, perhaps he’s willing to help us renovate the Cell? James Zeamer and Ed Zore have both retired from their CEO positions, the time has long since passed to bring them into the fold. There are donors everywhere, big and small. I’d start by getting what we do know - our current and recent season-ticket base - and getting them to set up annual donations, no matter how little it is. If it’s even just $10, I’ll take it. You need those little four-bump squares to make lego castles, too.
I didn’t mention it because it’s going to happen regardless, but there needs to be an Associate Athletic Director for External Operations. This is the person who oversees tickets, marketing and development. They were hiring for this position (it didn’t exist here before) until the AD job became open. The next AD will make the hire. By the way, I have my own list.
Additional Sports
1. Football - You knew I was going to come to it. How could I not? The program has had so many years without it, so many AD’s asked questions about it, that it would be foolish to not address it. What you may not know is my answer: not today. That’s right, football is a dream, and we can reach that dream but it takes work - years and years of work.
What football needs to be seen as, to borrow from the game itself, is the goal line. Cross the plain, you score the touchdown by adding football. Too many people believe that football is the offensive line, the mode of transport for getting that ball down the field. We’re at the 20-yard line, and sure a Hail Mary might just work, but it’s far more likely that the ball gets knocked down or picked off. We need to see football for what it is: the goal, not the offensive line.
I think the better way to look at it, and probably healthier way for all of us to see it, is to say that our goal is to make the program financially strong enough where a discussion about adding football is feasible and reasonable. Because right now it is neither.
That isn’t to say I wouldn’t go for it if the demand was there. But the demand needs to be there. Students and alumni must get together and make their demands with the money to back it up. To get it done right, you’ll need somewhere around $50 million to get it started, and that doesn’t count the stadium. Should the university community decide it must be done, then I would pursue it - after all, if it’s what the fans want you have to listen to the fans. But not before.
2. Explore hockey - While adding football would have start-up costs in the tens of millions and would cost upwards of $10 million annually to run (including extra women’s sports, marching band and support personnel), ice hockey would accomplish the tall task of adding a revenue sport to our repertoire while being cheap enough to be feasible even today. The fact is, ice hockey is a sport that many people enjoy, especially in the north - while we are not Minnesota-level into the sport, Wisconsin is a hotbed for great programs at all levels, from the junior Green Bay Gamblers to the AHL Milwaukee Admirals to the NCAA Wisconsin Badgers.
It’s a sport that, in comparison to football, is relatively cheap to put on the ice and also relatively easy to make money from. While the Admirals average about 6,200 fans per game, for the NCAA Panthers to turn a profit, they would only need to average about 3,000 fans per game. At $20 a ticket, more hockey in the city would allow the fan base for the sport to grow even further, snowballing the growth of the sport in the one state in the north that hasn’t quite embraced it because of the lack of an NHL franchise.
Unlike football, hockey would have a ready-made home as well as a conference waiting with open arms. Should we accomplish my top goal and acquire the US Cellular Arena, the Panthers would have a perfect home for their budding hockey program. The Cell played home for the growing Admirals for three years while the BMO Bradley Center was being built, and it was a boon for the program. As far as practice is concerned, the team could practice at the Wilson Park Ice Arena or the Pettit Ice Center, as hockey players often travel for practice off campus.
As for a conference, the WCHA is currently looking to fill a Wisconsin-sized hole in the center of their footprint. The Wisconsin Badgers, along with their fellow Big Ten brethren, will be leaving the WCHA and CCHA and forming the Big Ten conference next season as Penn State begins its D-I ice hockey program. The Nittany Lions set off a chain reaction that caused some of the better WCHA and CCHA programs to merge into the new NCHC, which caused the remainders of the CCHA to merge with the remainder of the WCHA. But it’s not like the WCHA is just awful leftovers. Great programs like Alaska Anchorage, Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan and Minnesota State-Mankato will anchor the future of a still-vibrant hockey conference. National champions have come out of the future membership of the conference, and the hockey program at Milwaukee would be welcome with open arms.
Indeed, Milwaukee was approached as recently as last year about starting a program. While the WCHA would welcome us with open arms and the hockey fans in the area would love the program, it was actually donors of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s hockey program that approached us about the addition. Disenchanted with the reign of Mike Eaves, one of Madison’s top donors tried to convince Rick Costello to add the program - and it may have come to pass if Costello didn’t shoot himself in the foot on the way out the door. But ire towards Eaves is only one thing that would motivate Badger fans to switch sides, or at least attend Panther games in the Cell.
Earlier, I pointed out that the Big Ten was forming. Well, like anything else, the move is all about money. It’s about the television dollars that the conference can attract by moving hockey from a Friday-Saturday/Saturday-Sunday schedule to a Tuesday-Wednesday/Wednesday-Thursday schedule. Why play hockey during the week? It should be obvious - nothing draws viewers to the television set like first-run programming, and current Big Ten programs in the WCHA and CCHA play on the weekends. Of all six schools that will make up the Big Ten conference, only one of them isn’t too happy about the new weekday schedule. You see, Minnesota’s hockey fan base comes from the Twin Cities. Ohio State’s comes from Columbus. Michigan is in the Ann Arbor/Detroit area. Michigan State is all around East Lansing, and Penn State’s will be from Happy Valley. But the Wisconsin Badgers? Their fan base - the largest in college hockey - comes largely from Milwaukee. Many donors and season-ticket holders make the trek up to Madison for a game, spend the night and day in the city, go to the second game, and return home. It’s easy for Milwaukee fans to stay overnight in Madison on a Friday or Saturday night, but ask them to stay overnight during the weekday and you have problems - people work the following morning. It’s going to be extremely difficult for the Badgers to maintain their 13,000+ in attendance every year, especially when a significant portion of their fan base won’t buy season tickets to drive up to Madison on back-to-back nights. That’s where the Panthers pick up the pieces, and as Athletic Director I would have the possibility of adding an ice hockey program studied from all angles to see if it’s right for us.
Another big plus stems from the fact that like baseball, ice hockey is a sport that is not sponsored at Marquette - the identity of Milwaukee Athletics would begin to move further away from Marquette, although in a revenue-producing direction.
3. Explore lacrosse - Looking into ice hockey is a no-brainer, but do we have the stones to consider a sport that may not be revenue-producing for years but could down the road? Lacrosse, the fastest-growing sport in the country, is really gaining steam in the Midwest. Marquette begins its program this spring (I would buy season tickets if they had more than one game). Should the Panthers wish, we could consider adding the sport, which is much cheaper than even ice hockey and is a revenue-producer at more than a handful of the 50+ Division I schools.
Recruiting country for the Panthers would be everywhere west of the Appalachian Mountains - only a handful of programs are in that area. ESPN is taking a growing interest in the sport, with more games broadcast every year as the viewership expands. Milwaukee’s program would have free reign of Engelmann Stadium during the season, as NCAA lacrosse plays during the spring season opposite NCAA soccer.
The truth is, lacrosse is a harder sell than ice hockey because the latter has proven to be a revenue-producer for much of D-I - in fact, ice hockey has a higher percentage of D-I programs in the black than football, trailing only men’s basketball in that regard. The possibilities of adding sports come with adding dollars to the budget, but both possibilities I brought up are able to at least pay for themselves and if successful, could even help shoulder the load that now directly lands on men’s basketball.
Milwaukee playing lacrosse or ice hockey would also do something extremely important, which is to separate its identity from Madison and Marquette. Each of the sports would push us further away from one of those high-majors, and it’s important for fans to cheer for something uniquely “Milwaukee.”
Conference realignment
1. Identifying what’s best for us - To me, the obvious answer as to what conference is best for Milwaukee is whatever conference is just below Marquette’s conference in the pecking order. Today, that’s the Atlantic 10. Tomorrow, it’s likely to be the MVC. Down the road, who knows? All I know is that the Panthers need to cut down on the difference between themselves and the high-majors in Wisconsin if we are going to cut down on the difference in perception. If Milwaukee were in the A10 right now playing Xavier, Butler and Saint Louis, people who are familiar with Marquette would have a different perception of our program - below the Golden Eagles, but not that far down.
Today, the Horizon League is the conference that Marquette left behind two decades ago. That’s what we need to recognize. It looks a lot different than when it used to be their stomping grounds, but we should at least identify that the Horizon League as it’s built is not the level of conference we want to be a part of. That isn’t to say that the Horizon League wouldn’t be that way in the future, but at the current nine-member set-up, it does not look good. We need to help shore up the Horizon League - romancing Belmont should be a top priority, and perhaps Saint Louis as well if they’re left out of the new Big East.
2. Making us as attractive as possible - When I say that we need to be as attractive as possible, what I really mean is that we need to get our facilities situation in order as fast as humanly possible. No conference is coming to the Klotsche Center and extending an invite. The U.S. Cellular Arena as currently built is just as nice as Carver Arena at Bradley and would be fine for a team in the MVC. Building a practice facility is key - it launches our facilities beyond the MVC/A10 level and makes us look like a shoo-in for whatever conference we try to get into.
3. Finding running mates - Marquette was able to leave the Big East because they had their fellow non-football buddies to file away the bars and give them a boost out the prison window. A similar arrangement helped them escape Conference USA before that, and the MCC before that. Milwaukee needs to identify its running mates, who we’d only leave behind if we were offered something we couldn’t refuse, like the last spot on the MVC ferry.
To me, there are two schools that we need to attach ourselves at the hip - UIC and Valpo. The Flames because they are everything we are, and Valpo because they are our new, natural rival and everything we are not. To one we are kin, to another we are complementary. UIC, with its big public enrollment and research and urban setting, is almost like a twin for us. Valpo and Milwaukee have too many connections to ignore. If Chicago elite go to Marquette and Notre Dame, than in the same thread Milwaukee’s Lutheran population chooses Valpo. The success of the two is important but not as important as the capacity for success - Valpo’s facilities are behind but they own the Northwest Indiana base and would get a stronger hold upon it if they were to join us in jumping to a bigger conference (or making the Horizon League stronger). UIC has the facilities that we wish we had, and with the defeat of Northwestern became the unofficial kings of Chicago basketball (wouldn’t an NIT or NCAA game against DePaul at the United Center just be amazing?).
Whatever we do as a program, we need to make sure that the steps we take are the best we can do to increase our standing and that of our conference to make it so we don’t even want to leave the Horizon League. It’s possible, but just in case we do leave, we’ll have helped make the old League more viable for the friends we will have left behind.
Hiring Coaches
Luckily I’ve kept in touch with Bud Haidet, because I don’t think anyone has come close to batting 1.000 on hiring coaches than Bud. Seriously, the list is insane. Laura and Michael Moynihan, Louis Bennett, Kathy Litzau and Susie Johnson, Jerry Augustine and Scotty Doffek, Pete Corfeld, and those are just the ones I could name off the top of my head without mentioning Bo Ryan and Bruce Pearl. The guy just knows how to hire winners, and even with some bumps along the way (Ric Cobb, Jon Coleman), he’s been far more successful than not.
Whoever is our next AD should know how to harness that amazing ability to hire winning coaches. I plan on picking Bud’s brain the second I take the job. If it’s not me, I hope the next person is just as good at hiring winners as Bud.
1. Alumni get special consideration - Like hiring myself, you want people who can coach but you also want to be sheltered from early departures. Has any out-of-left-field coaching hire done better than Fred Hoiberg at Iowa State? It’s because he has the passion and commitment for the Cyclones that I have for the Panthers. Luckily we have alumni in most sports coaching at a high level that we can look at, and because they love this program they’ll be less likely to jump to the next big thing. If Bo Ryan or Bruce Pearl were alumni, do you think they’d have made their jumps as quick as they did? I doubt it.
2. Contract policy - Norwood Teague, currently the AD at Minnesota, made his bones as the AD at VCU hiring guys like Jeff Capel, Anthony Grant and Shaka Smart. The coach made some innovative moves, such as bringing contract buy-outs to the mid-major level and signing coaches to contracts that had clauses protecting the school when they inevitably left.
With Capel, the coach signed a deal with VCU guaranteeing the university a large sum of money or a 2-for-2 series with the hiring school if it belonged to one of the six power conferences. When Oklahoma came to take Capel, the Sooners were stuck giving VCU a 2-for-2 deal, which the Rams promptly used to run wild all over the program for which Capel left them. If I were AD, these clauses would be a part of every major coaching hire.
3. Attend Villa 7 - One reason Teague was able to hire Smart was from the Villa 7, an annual symposium of athletic directors and elite assistant basketball coaches that helps AD’s identify the “next big thing” and helps the coaches understand what it takes to be that next big thing. It helped Rob Jeter get the job at Milwaukee, but it also helped such names as Buzz Williams, Anthony Grant, Shaka Smart, Eric Reveno, Ed Cooley, John Groce, Chris Mack, Cameron Dollar, Leon Rice and a slew of other men’s and women’s basketball coaches get to their current jobs.
It would be my duty to attend the conference every year to keep the networking alive for whenever we need to hire a new men’s or women’s head basketball coach. It’s all about finding the right fit for us, and the Villa 7 symposium has proved itself as a way for universities to find their next great coach.
Scheduling policy
1. Adopting a policy for the conference - While the Horizon League has lost Butler, they have the opportunity to renew their ability to be a conference in the 10-12 RPI level. How the conference does it is by adopting guidelines for its conference in scheduling. This is one of the most difficult tasks for every Horizon League school, and it wasn’t made easier with Butler’s departure when some schedules were already done (Green Bay was reportedly done with their schedule for a couple months when Butler’s departure forced them to look for more games).
That does not, however, mean that the conference cannot try to make scheduling better in the interest of ensuring our basketball programs finish as high in the RPI as possible. That means limiting games against low-majors, taking 2-for-1’s and less guarantee games from high-majors, and establishing as many home-and-home series with good mid-majors as possible.
2. Annual series - Were I athletic director, I’d have several schools eyed for annual series. With the changing conference landscape, it is important to get the university’s fan base as many familiar names as possible on the schedule so, in essence, they “know what they’re buying.”
Before his departure as a scapegoat in the sexual assault matter, Steve Cottingham signed a 2-for-1 deal with Green Bay, where the Golden Eagles were in Green Bay once every three years. He reportedly expressed interest in doing the same situation for Milwaukee. However, I have a way to take it further. If we could sign a 2-for-1 with Marquette it would be nice, but to make it ideal would be to make it rollover - that way, we don’t have to draw up a new contract every few years, and if one school wants to get out, all they need to do is exercise that clause at the end of each 2-for-1. If they’d like to end it before the 2-for-1 is up, then the canceling school would owe the other a fee, say $25,000 to cover expenses for backing out of the deal. I doubt that fee would ever be paid, but it would be security for Milwaukee in case Marquette wanted out.
I would offer the same deal to Wisconsin, and if Bucky Badger decided not to take a 2-for-1, I’d say sorry and look elsewhere for games. We’ve had 2-for-1’s on the table in recent years with Missouri and Cincinnati, and I’d rather take games like that then have a 9-for-2 forced down my throat by the Badgers. Adding an ice hockey program could create some help for the basketball program in signing a deal, where we may accept a 4-for-1 series in ice hockey if they accept a rollover home-and-home in men’s basketball.
Should the Panthers ever split from the Horizon League, I’d be interested in keeping ties with Green Bay with a rollover home-and-home series. I would not pursue a 2-for-1 because I feel that we can set an example by giving smaller, inferior programs the opportunity that we wanted when we were at their level.
Even though they’re looking ready to move up to the big private conference, I would also exploit my relationship with the coaching staff at Butler to renew that series as a home-and-home to replace the Xavier series that has become a conference game. We may now no longer be in the same conference, but we can recognize that we were great rivals for a decade and renew a partnership with a home-and-home series that the fans of each school can get up for in the non-conference season.
Apart from all those prospective series, we have one right now that absolutely must continue. The current 2-for-2 with UNI is a great series, an easy drive for fans of both schools with a strong fan interest in continuing the series indefinitely. The Milwaukee Panthers and UNI Panthers should play each other as much as possible; there’s no way I wouldn’t renew the series. You want quality, midwestern home-and-homes. UNI, Bradley, Drake, Missouri State, North Dakota State, Oakland, keep ‘em coming.
3. Lobby for home-and-home legislation - A lot of people who are fans of the Milwaukee program, as well as mid-majors everywhere, have this belief that because UNI gets an inordinate amount of home games against Iowa and Iowa State, it’s because the state of Iowa has a rule forcing all Division I teams in the state to play home-and-home in all sports. This law isn’t real, although it was talked about back in the 1990’s. The idea rings true, however.
Forcing Wisconsin (I don’t think it could apply to private Marquette) to play home-and-home with Green Bay and Milwaukee would only hurt Wisconsin’s feelings, not their bottom line. The Badgers already make tons of money bringing in a parade of low-majors to feed upon. Spreading the wealth out to the less fortunate would do a lot more good for the Panthers and Phoenix than it would bad for Bucky. This, along with moving the arena to university ownership, will keep me on the road, bringing the message of Milwaukee Athletics and UWM to the state of Wisconsin.
Closing Statements
In the end, we all know that there’s no chance that they hire me to be their next athletic director. I’m almost completely lacking in intercollegiate athletic experience (I was on the Athletic Board and Search and Screen Committee that hired George Koonce), I was an English major and let’s be honest, I’m pretty outspoken.
But this wasn’t about putting me in the Athletic Director’s chair, it was about painting the UWM community a picture of what they should be looking for in their next AD. In a time where the program is under siege, with a state of uneasiness across the department and the fan base, Milwaukee Athletics needs strong direction and a strong leader to take us in that direction. Whether that’s the next AD or a different entity isn’t clear, but the coming months will lead us in the right direction.
We are Milwaukee
Be heard, #PantherNation
#Jimmy4AD
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