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Thread: It takes a village

  1. #1

    It takes a village

    If you want to bring up attendance, the most relevant anecdote you can highlight is also the best post-spring example of why Amanda Braun needs to lose her job, pronto.

    Eric Becker started his current job as Assistant Director of Ticket Operations at Pitt on August 15th. If we assume that Braun had the minimum two weeks notice (it was longer), that means she knew we needed a new Director of Ticket Operations on August 1st.

    Since then, Braun has failed to fill the position of selling tickets. Center to the problem is that many jobs are switching from salary to hourly, and the AD is fighting to hire someone in the position at a salary. But they haven't won that fight in the six months since Becker started at Pitt, and the job opening is posted through the end of this month.

    So instead of hiring someone to cover the job for the year (almost all AD employees are on an annual basis), the AD failed to fill the job of selling tickets to the fan base for LaVall Jordan's first year.

    Essentially, the AD failed to capitalize on the excitement of a new coach by filling the job of the person who is

    What should make this even more infuriating is the fact that Becker himself was a fill-in. He came on board as Assistant Ticket Manager to Brian Morgan. When B-Mo left for Marquette, Becker took over the job duties on an interim basis. But he never got officially promoted, and he never got bumped up on pay. So really, the Director of Tickets has been vacant since Brian Morgan started at Marquette. So the job has needed to be filled for over a year and a half.

    Ticket manager. The guy who sells you the tickets.

    So believe it or not, it's not just Braun's incredible bungling of the basketball program that has gone into the ridiculous drop in ticket sales. She's also screwed up the ticket office, and in doing so has done LaVall Jordan an awful disservice by fumbling the transition.

    Athletics didn't capitalize on the transition to sell tickets because there wasn't anyone in the ticket office to do it. They've had a student doing the lion's share of the work. Other work has been heaped on Leah Thyne, who has gotta be stretched thinner than just about anyone in that department. I feel terrible for her.

    Fact is, the moment Amanda Braun is fired, we'll go a long way toward bringing a lot of people back. Mark Mone needs to go catch Pokemon on some other campus, because he essentially gave a big middle finger to David Nicholas, athletics' biggest donor and someone who is suddenly the patriarch of his family. I'm sure David has no plans to keep writing the checks Ab was writing to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he won't be writing any to Milwaukee until Braun and Mone are history.

    This university deserves better leadership. Once those two are gone, we can all get behind LaVall Jordan and make sure he has all the support and opportunity to take this program to unprecedented heights. Rob Jeter dealt with a lot of stuff standing his way, but the truth is there were even things that held back Bruce Pearl and Bo Ryan. Those things had to factor into the decisions from both coaches to depart earlier than a lot of fans would have hoped.

    People want to keep pivoting the argument to Rob Jeter. That's the past. We need to learn about our program's shortcomings and missed opportunities from Rob Jeter's tenure off the court if we're going to support LaVall Jordan and the team on the court.

    Games are won on the court - this is true. But so much more needs to be done at the mid-major level to move forward. Part of the reason people wanted Rob Jeter gone is because they wanted the team to achieve at the level of Butler, Gonzaga, VCU, Wichita State and George Mason. That's a noble goal, but the problem is that our fans are conditioned to only consider the play on the court. They don't see the immense effort that goes into building an elite mid-major. They think an AD hires a basketball coach, the coach hires a staff, they recruit players and they build up a winner. There's so much more to it then that.

    Look at Bruce Pearl's program. He took a mid-major on the rise and continued building on that foundation, turning the team into a winner before leaving for Tennessee. How did he do that?

    It wasn't started when he was hired. It started when someone else was hired - that person was Nancy Zimpher. She was the one who had the vision for the future. She was the one who understood what athletics could be, which is something that inexplicably escapes most university CEO's. She knew basketball was about outreach - to the students, to the alumni, to the community - and that basketball was how we could drive the future of the university.

    What do you guys remember from Nancy Zimpher? I was still in high school when she left, but the stories I've been told by others who were there - of her gold power suits, her ceaseless cheerleading, her constant positive presence - paint a pretty clear picture of who Zimpher was as chancellor.

    She was the one who made it possible for Bruce Pearl to do the things he needed to do to build a winner. We don't need to get into all of those, and to be honest there are a couple that I think we'd all prefer don't get written into the annals of the internet - but the point is that Zimpher did everything she could to support Pearl's work. Basketball was never far from her mind.

    After she left, Pearl left. But her impact was felt. The ~$60 million Klotsche Center Pavilion was an enormous positive move for athletics, even with its bevy of problems in serving the program. It's the servant of too many masters - athletics, kinesiology, parking, recreation - and probably would be built differently today. That doesn't change the fact that Zimpher got it done.

    In fall 2005, the first semester after the Sweet 16, we had 26,000 students. Our selectivity rate was at 92% - more than 9 in 10 students who applied to UWM got accepted. In just a couple years, UWM topped out around 32,000 students and had a selectivity rate of 65%. Not only did we add around 6,000 students to the enrollment, but we actually accepted a far smaller percentage of applicants. Out-of-state enrollment skyrocketed.

    Why is that relevant here? Because they hadn't built the new dorms yet or added the Schools of Public Health and Freshwater Sciences. They didn't have any major advancements in research or academics that grabbed national headlines. Why was UWM all of a sudden an option for so many more students?

    It's because the success of basketball put this university on the map for so many people that never would have considered us before. But after Zimpher left, Carlos Santiago and his successors failed to continue the push from Chapman Hall to support athletics.

    That push is incredibly important, because that's where champions are built. All departments of a university not only need to be involved, but they need to feel that they're integral to the success of the basketball program. They need to know that if basketball succeeds, it will help them succeed.

    If the people in admissions believe basketball is going to help them recruit kids from out of state, then they need to make the exciting basketball program a bigger part of their recruitment. If the Lubar School of Business needs a rather large donation - let's say, $5 million f*cking dollars - then they need basketball to succeed. They sure as hell don't need the athletic director to go and screw things up for them. They don't need the athletic director to sabotage the program, because if that donor found out their donation might be in jeopardy.

    This is true up and down the entire university.

    People talk about how they loved Bruce Pearl because of how he made them feel. The winning is never the first thing people bring up about Bruce Pearl. He made them feel attached to the program, like they were part of something bigger than themselves. Pearl made every single person with whom he came in contact feel like they were not only a fan of the team but essential to the team's success.

    But guy's like Bruce Pearl are few and far between. Mark Few, Brad Stevens, Jim Larranaga, Shaka Smart and Gregg Marshall are not like Pearl. They're not cut from the same cloth. They're not used car salesmen.

    At Butler, none of them were like Pearl. Barry Collier, Thad Matta, Todd Lickliter and Stevens were not the Pearl personalities. They were coaches and builders.

    How did they build Butler? They didn't do it alone. Pearl and Zimpher were larger-than-life personalities, the kind of people that you couldn't help but be drawn toward.

    Without people like that - and keep in mind, LaVall Jordan does not absolutely not have a Bruce Pearl-type personality - you need to have leadership who can convince people throughout the community that Milwaukee Basketball is essential, and that we need them to succeed.

    It takes a village to win at a mid-major, and that means all hands on deck. If half of the village is completely detached, you're not going to be productive. If they're detached because the witch doctor poisoned some of the crops to get rid of the head farmer, and they want the witch doctor banished from the village, WHAT THE HELL IS THE CHIEFTAIN THINKING BY KEEPING THE WITCH DOCTOR?

    That's why we can't move past this. That's why Amanda Braun needs to go. Mark Mone, he can join her. But they need to start with Braun, and they need to start as soon as humanly possible.

  2. #2
    An even better example is actually UW - Madison. For the entirety of my childhood, the Badgers were a joke athletically. The were awful on the football field and on the basketball court. They were never ranked in either. They were a joke.

    That all changed with one hire - Donna Shalala. When Ms. Shalala arrived she made a point to elevate the profile of the entire athletics program, starting with football. She hired Pat Richter. Richter hired Alvarez. Richter also got the Kohl Center built, renovated Camp Randall, and turned a deficit of $2 million into a surplus reserve of over $6 million. Rose Bowls, Final Fours and perrenial national ankings followed. Now they are among the elite in the two most important college sports.

    None of that happens without Shalala first. She had the vision, and provided the leadership. Once UW had become a full fledged member of the Super Majors, there is instituional pressure t stay there, so even is a new chancellor is brought in, they must continue to serve Ms. Shalala's vision and prioritize athletics.

    Meanwhile, UWM is rapidly becoming the University of Phoenix, and we hire chancellors who are more interested in the Library and the Drama department than sports, and conduct social justice experiments in the athletic department.

    Does anyone think that a certain US Senator could call the UW chancellor and demand that her "personal favorite" be named the athletic director. I think the phone would be slammed down before the entire sentence was finished.....but at UWM, it's "yes ma'am. anything else I can do for you?"
    Class of 1998
    Lubar School of Business - BBA Management Information Systems
    Formerly known as Nighthawk
    The Dark Hawk arose in a time of great turmoil to fight for truth, justice and the Panther way.

  3. #3
    All I'll say on this matter is that this most recent episode is the final straw for me until something changes at the top. I've grown exhausted of the well-chronicled, institutionalized antipathy of those in academics toward athletics, especially men's basketball.

    One of the many, most glaring examples is that it took the school 31 freaking years to induct Larry Reed into the athletics hall of fame. Look it up. Now look up Larry's accomplishments with the program and beyond. He is exactly the type of player whose number or at least his jersey should have been hung from the rafters on Senior Night of his last year. Not only is his jersey still not retired, but neither is anyone else's. Not one. In 120 years of the sport. Larry's omission for all those years while others from so many lower-profile, individual sports is mind-blowing.

    In short, it's taken me 25 years -- much longer than many others -- to receive the message, but I've now received it in spades: this school doesn't give a damn about having a great men's basketball program.

    And judging from the attendance numbers and absent any organized movement, it's evident that I'm not the only one who feels this way.
    Last edited by dylanrocks; 02-17-2017 at 05:28 PM.

  4. #4
    This article does a great job encapsulating what I'm trying to say here.

    Obviously there are not many parallels between the two schools, but there are important things to draw from this article and apply to our university.

    http://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/02/gran...cs-dan-majerle

  5. #5
    This article does a great job encapsulating what I'm trying to say here.

    Obviously there are not many parallels between the two schools, but there are important things to draw from this article and apply to our university.

    http://ftw.usatoday.com/2017/02/gran...cs-dan-majerle

  6. #6
    What a nice sentiment, Jimmy!

    But before we can get this school behind men's basketball, we first have to get it the hell out of the way!

  7. #7
    I get how important athletics are to people on this board, and on the other board.

    I get and can understand how disappointed people have been in campus leadership with respect to how they have handled the Athletics department.

    But i am going to have to dissent when it comes to the matter of getting rid of Mark Mone as Chancellor. During his entire tenure as Chancellor, Mone has faced a budgetary situation that has required him to focus on the most important aspects of UWM, and athletics have not been as high on his list of important things as it is on the lists of Panther fans. i understand that difference upsets some people. But since he has been dealing, and continues to deal, with challenges to the existence of UWM as an institution of higher education, i think people need to cut the Chancellor some slack.

    State support for the UW System has been declining for decades, but the cuts imposed on the system in the past seven years are unprecedented. Far and away the highest proportion of expenses in UWM's budget are personnel-related, so budget cuts largely become exercises in personnel management. Jimmy has been commenting on the open position in the ticket office. i can agree with him that it's an important position. As little as i like saying it, it is entirely possible that the position has not been filled not because Amanda Braun is incompetent, but because a request to fill the position was not granted. Offices all over campus have to request permission to fill vacancies, and have to make a case for why a particular position needs to be filled. i would think that a strong case would be made that the ticket manager position is important because it is a vital part of getting income for the athletics department. Especially, if the money that pays the salary and benefits of the position comes from "program revenue" (in this case, ticket sales), the position should be filled because tax dollars are not being spent on it; filling it does not affect the budget. If that is the case, and Amanda Braun has failed to make that argument in an attempt to fill the position, or has, as Jimmy suspects, just decided not to even try to get the position filled, that is indeed further evidence of her incompetence, and/or misplaced priorities. But that is not evidence of a lack of support for athletics on the part of Chancellor Mone; it is evidence that he is being forced by politicians to make really hard choices to try to keep UWM from moving backward, and has been doing a pretty good job of it.

    Chancellor Mone is a good person to have at UWM for another important reason: his professional and research interests have to do with organizations, and what makes them succeed, knowledge which he has had to put to use in face of the budget cuts.

    i am fully in agreement with the people on this board who think Amanda Braun is unworthy to hold the position she holds. i'd be happy to see her leave, as indicated by the signature on every one of my posts here and on the other board. But if you're going to get rid of Mark Mone, you'd better have someone lined up to take over who is going to be as good at or better than him dealing with the university's budget situation. And i don't think you're going to be able to lure Nancy Zimpher back here, or hire Donna Shalala.
    A panther is like a leopard. Except it hasn't been peppered.
    Should you behold a panther crouch, prepare to say "ouch."
    Better yet, if called by a panther...don't anther (Ogden Nash "The Panther")

    Ceterum censo Amanda Braun debet esse accensa.

  8. #8
    'Heap, I say this in the most respectful, genial way possible: where was our chancellor last spring when Eva came under spectacularly public fire for the way in which she handled the termination of our men's basketball coach? Shouldn't he have responded by taking a very public position -- one way or the other? Wasn't that precisely the type of situation that called for bold, decisive leadership, the kind of leadership he boasts on the resume that got him his job?
    Last edited by dylanrocks; 02-19-2017 at 03:59 AM.

  9. #9
    Lot of good stuff in this thread. Skrap, I mostly agree with you about Mone, but only mostly. I agree that with all the other stuff he's dealing with, he is not paying significant attention to athletics. I understand that. It's also terribly shortsighted, for the reasons Jimmy (and I and others) have stated for years. Like it or not, the athletics programs at major American universities (and many minor ones) are THE driver of fundraising, community support, political support, media attention, etc. Once again in the current political climate we find ourselves the red-headed stepchild, and there's no doubt whatsoever that our incompetent athletics situation isn't helping. We get essentially no press coverage as it is for athletics -- and what we do get is all bad, because our TEAM is so bad! (And by the way -- weren't we the dominant program in the League in terms of McCaffery trophies until just a few years ago?)

    Trust me, I care much, much more about our Tier One research status and the great academic programs at Milwaukee than I'll ever care about our sports wins and losses. But only fools or the willingly myopic don't see the connection, and therefore the critical importance of having a high-functioning athletics program. And it can't be repeated enough: there's only ONE sport at Milwaukee that can drive the bus. Ultimately, it's the chancellor's responsibility to make sure that good decisions are made about that program. Instead, he has stood back while the AD has trashed the program. That's on him. And he didn't even choose this incompetent, so why the loyalty?

    I'm fine with Mark Mone continuing as chancellor. He's done many good things. But his inattention to the debacle in the only sport that can raise the University's profile is maddening. Does he have a lot of other stuff on his plate? You bet. Does that excuse him from this situation? Absolutely not. I know something about being the chief executive of an organization. He wanted the job. So do the job, Mark. And it couldn't be more obvious what the first order of business should be.
    "She would constantly try to throw [Coach Jeter] off and create distractions," said another source who worked in the athletic department and no longer is at UWM. "All the time. It was bad. I felt bad for him all the time. I told him, 'You're a bigger man than I am.' It was brutal. Sabotage was in the cards." -- From the JS story, March 17, 2016

    "Baldwin! Get in here and grovel!" "Right away Ms. B!!"

  10. #10
    I have little sympathy for the "but he is really busy" argument. He is supposed to be busy. He took the top job. Did he think it was a 9-5 M-F gig? That he would sit in on a few meetings, run a few conference calls, and then head home? No leadership role, especially on for a huge organization, is free from "lots of things on your plate".

    If he cannot handle a full plate, resign. This is what happens when a theoretician is put in charge of an actual thing. Paralysis by analysis and complaints that there is just too much going on. True leaders do not need research reports for every decision. They use their instincts, quick deductive capabilities, and their gut to make a decision and move the organization. Sometimes they make a bad call, and that is to be expected, but they MAKE A CALL.

    Mone has acted like he is doing a long term study. Collect reams of data and pick it apart. Come to a conclusion. Except that when you do that in the real world the decision is uselessly late and events have already spiraled out of control.

    The budget issues are not new this year, or for his entire tenure. There is no reason to continually act caught off guard by them. He should already have put in place measures to account for that and moved on to other things.

    With the AD issue last year, as soon as it was clear that Braun was, at the very least, toxic to the alumni community and major donors, she should have been shown the door. One of her primary responsibilities is alumni relations and public perception. The AD is in charge of the MOST public element of the entire university, and in that role she has failed utterly. There is NO excuse for ignoring that reality while we "wait for more results to come in".

    Mone needs to go because he is an academic, not a functional leader. He should go back to academic pursuits and the Regents should find a functional leader to put at the helm. There are many to choose from (I could name about 4 people I would approach) in the private sector who know how to lead. Go get one and get someone at the rudder who can make a damn decision.
    Class of 1998
    Lubar School of Business - BBA Management Information Systems
    Formerly known as Nighthawk
    The Dark Hawk arose in a time of great turmoil to fight for truth, justice and the Panther way.

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