More than 10 months after the departure of former Oberlin College Athletic Director Mike Muska, the search for his permanent replacement is kicking into gear.
In the meantime, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics George Andrews, OC ’ 54, has presided as Acting Athletic Director over a department in transition.
With the input of Andrews, Dean of Arts and Sciences Clayton Koppes selected a search committee by mid-February.
“We’ve met three times so far,” Associate Dean Jeff Witmer, who is chairing the committee, said. “The first thing to do was write a job description and get ads out.”
Now the committee is starting to receive applications.
The committee consists of faculty members (biology professor Roger Laushman, English professor T. S. McMillin, religion professor A. G. Miller and politics professor Eve Sandberg), coaches (men’s basketball coach Happy Dobbs, men’s soccer and golf coach Blake New and field hockey and women’s lacrosse coach Deb Ranieri) and student athletes (junior swimmer Meagan Dunphy-Daly, junior frisbee player Molly Ptacek and junior football player Andrew Roebuck).
Witmer said that the committee has already received several applications and is expecting many more before the March 28 deadline.
“We’re hoping to have the finalists on campus before the end of the semester,” he said.
Regarding potential concerns over the amount of time allowed for the search, Witmer said, “It’s a bit of a tight timeline, but we have time to do this. If you look at the timeframe from 1998, which was the last time this search was conducted [when Muska was hired], we’re pretty much mirroring that. We have time to do this without sacrificing quality in the process.”
The new Athletic Director at least should not have to deal with the issues that were swirling at the time of Muska’s departure. In the wake of an administrative oversight regarding eligibility, which forced the men’s basketball team to forfeit its 2001-2002 season, Koppes, quoted in the Review, said that “we will have a fully compliant eligibility system in place before next fall.” This job fell to Andrews and others in the Athletics Department.
“My first charge when I got on the job was to address the eligibility issues,” Andrews said, without explicitly mentioning the basketball situation. “We investigated this thoroughly; there wasn’t any outside investigation.”
Their investigation yielded no glaring problems of the kind that cost the men’s basketball team its season last year, but did uncover problems regarding credit hours. NCAA regulations stipulate that a student athlete must have a full credit load in order to compete.
“We found in the add/drop period,” Andrews offered as an example, “that various students had maybe started with a full course load but maybe dropped a course, and then maybe the next day there was a soccer game. We thought that the rule did not apply during add/drop. We learned later that that was incorrect.”
As a retroactive punishment, the NCAA forced each athlete to miss one game this year for every ineligible game last year.
Having settled things with the NCAA, the next step was to find ways to prevent this from happening again.
“We now get a daily report from the registrar of any student athlete who is not full time,” Andrews said. If any athlete is under hours, he or she is advised to add a course that day, or if there is a competition that day, to sit it out.
The incoming Athletic Director also should not have to deal with the same kind of turnover within the Athletic Department as there was in 2002. Five new head coaches —
Dobbs, Ranieri, women’s basketball coach Christa Champion, men’s and women’s cross country and track coach Jason Hudson and softball coach Tina Wood — were brought into the department, accounting for 11 coaching positions between them, meaning that half of Oberlin’s 22 varsity sports had new coaches.
Andrews and Director of Recreational Sports Betsy Bruce have also been overseeing the construction of the much anticipated climbing wall, which is currently scheduled to go up over Spring Break.
Whoever the committee hires, then, should be able to focus on further improving Oberlin’s developing athletics program.
“The phrase we use is ‘lead our athletics to the next level of competitiveness,’” Witmer said, “recognizing that we’re not an athletic powerhouse, and we don’t expect to be in every sport, but we want to rise above where we are now.”
He said that “the ideal candidate would have some coaching experience and some administrative experience,” but also noted, “It has to be someone who’s sensitive to the type of place Oberlin is.”