Connect with Michael and Bob

The Climb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-climb-podcast/
Bob Wierema: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wierema/
Michael Moore: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelpmoore/

Connect with Eric Hyman

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-hyman-8861658/

Eric, welcome to The Climb. We appreciate you joining us today.

Well, thank you for having me. 

And this is a fond one for Michael and I in that we have a great relationship with your son. Ryan is a partner of ours and a close and dear friend of ours. So, we’re looking forward to the conversation. We won’t spend too much time talking about Ryan because there’s probably not enough time here to record all the issues with him, but we appreciate the time and have heard and learned a lot about you. I think maybe for the audience, just start with, what’s the background, where’d you come from and then, walk us through today and Michael and I’ll just bother you and interject with some questions.

Sure. I’d be glad to give you a little bit of a background. I was in college athletics for 40 some years and as an athletic director for 28 of those 40 some years. But anyway, prior to that, I lived all over the country. My dad was in the service and I was recruited NAF out of Northern Virginia and went to the University of North Carolina as a football player and I was there until I graduated.

And then I started from a university and I got my master’s degree. At one time I wanted to be a superintendent of school systems, so I’ve got my administrative master’s in administrative education. And then while there I coached football and then I coached for women’s basketball with my wife on the college level, and so one thing led to another. So, I ended up coaching football for nine years, got my degree, and then was a full-time coach. Very fortunate, wonderful experience for me. Then I went into administration. For a couple of years, I worked with the individual that was going to be the President of the one athletic directors’ association. I worked with him at Furman for two years. He was AD and then I became – at the ripe old age of 33 – an athletic director. I learned what to do and what not to do. That’s what I always say to young people. Life is full of experiences for success and people learn from them. 

So, I learned a lot, I made a lot of mistakes and I learned from those mistakes. And then I went to NC state and worked there for five years as the number two person, and then AD at Miami of Ohio and the athletic director at TCU, where I was fortunate to hire Gary Patterson, but I was also fortunate to hire a guy named Jim Schlossnagle who is a baseball coach. 

So, then I went to South Carolina as the AD ­– I was the AD at TCU for seven years, South Carolina for seven years, and then I went to A&M and I was athletic director there for about four years. So that’s been my professional path. I’ve done a lot of things, have been associated with a lot of people. I’ve had a wonderful, wonderful life, wonderful professional experience. Has it been easy? No. It has been challenging, obviously, because from a political standpoint and just the changes that are going on in college athletics, not only when I started but today. I feel that’s probably the most challenging time being an athletic director ­­– today, because of what’s taking place. 

To a certain extent I’m glad I’m not AD anymore. I can sit back and armchair quarterback, ‘why didn’t you do this? What did you do that?’ I feel for the athletic directors today. So anyway, that gives you a little snapshot of my professional career. That’s a very Reader’s Digest, condensed version.

And Eric, are you still consulting?

Well, I was consulting until COVID. Then it came to a dead stop. If you’ve seen what’s taken place in college athletics and obviously having to deal with the budget issues they’re having to deal with is a major, major challenge. So, there’s not a lot of financial flexibility to hire consultants and those kinds of things. 

Being a consultant was very enjoyable. I enjoyed doing it, I had a lot of fun doing it, but then again, I could walk away from a situation. I did this in a couple of places as walk in, and the problems are somebody else’s problems after I was finished. So, in answer to your question, no, that’s really backed off an awful lot and rightfully so, based on the economic challenges that college athletics are faced with. 

I want to go back. I do want to come back to some of that stuff. One of the things you had mentioned earlier was, did you say you coached with your wife?

Yeah, it was a really interesting story. When I was getting my masters at Furman, back in those days as a DA you made, you’re going to laugh when I say this, $1,800, and then I was a Dean, we’ll make it $3,600 a year, and that was $5400. I felt like I was rich. My wife was a college professor. Well anyway, she played college basketball and they didn’t have women’s basketball. They didn’t have any women’s sports. So some of the girls came to my wife and started up the team and she came to me about it and asked me, you know, I played high school basketball and I’ve been involved in coaching and those kinds of things, and she asked me if I would be willing to help her out. I said, ‘yeah, I would be glad to’. 

And we started a team from scratch, but I said ‘you deal when you deal with women, you deal with the socialization, the relationships with people – I’ll do the coaching’. So I read Bobby Knight’s book Help Side Ball Side and I read Morgan Wooten – who is a very famous basketball coach at the math of high school and Washington DC called The Red Book. I read those two books, and so we started the team from scratch and the last year, and this is back in the AAW days, which is before the incident of late days for women’s athletics, we went all the way to the final four. In the third year of the program, we finished seventh and it’s a little bit different. They brought 16 teams from around the country and it was in Temple, Texas. It was an interesting story. 

The school didn’t have money towards women’s athletics, so we had to do a lot of the fundraising ourselves. So, we drove two station wagons from Greenville, South Carolina to Temple, Texas which is a long way. We had two station wagons with a full women’s basketball team and a manager, and we just packed everybody in. So we got to the Mississippi River, and one of our players had a panic attack. She didn’t want to go over the river and she was a starter. I said, ‘Debbie, you’re going over to the river. We didn’t work this hard to go this far and for you to not’. And she said, ‘well I want to go back home’. And that was Travelers Rest, South Carolina. She says, ‘well I’m going back home. I’m going to walk home if I have to.’ And here we are at the Mississippi River, hundreds of miles away from Travelers Rest. And I said, ‘gosh, what are we going to do?’ I’m panicked because not only is she panicked, but she panicked me. 

So what we ended up doing was my wife and I got together and we put her down on the floorboard and put the wint...