BG: Well, we had to make some extremely difficult budgetary decisions the past several months - really agonizing decisions - anytime you have to look at job elimination, and whenever you have to consider all cost cutting measures, it is very tough. Coming out of all of that, and relatively speaking, I would say our department is in good shape right now. We were very careful with these economic decisions not to mess with our infrastructure; not to impact men's basketball which is our flagship sport, the lone sport that has the ability to generate revenue for us. We've made some changes in the department, but I think we are more efficient than we were a year ago, we are forced to be more efficient.

Men's basketball's is obviously our leader. They look very, very good on paper. Right now baring injury, they should have a very good season. We are doing extremely well in other sports. Baseball made the NCAA tournament last year, women's soccer is now perennially at the top of the league, and softball has been tremendous. Mike Larabee left us for Arkansas, he was replaced by Linda Garza. But those are the kind of things you want; you want other folks that want your coaches. So, I think the state of the department is very, very good. I think we are in excellent shape..

BG: Well, the budget is going to continue to be a challenge for all of us and that's not unique to Wright State, athletics or the State of Ohio or even the country at this point. It is certainly a world-wide issue. But I'm an optimistic person by nature and I think we are through the worst of it, but I tell my staff every meeting we are in, hey, keep watching things. We have to be responsible fiscally now, more than ever and we have to plan carefully; if we have to do more, we'll do more for the university. Our job is to make the university look good but also be good stewards from a fiscal standpoint.

Our challenges, are very similar to those of most mid-majors challenges. You know I still want to add on to our facilities and I want to make our facilities better. Fundraising is more of a challenge right now in this economic time but it's not impossible; we are chasing several leads right now for projects would help many different sports. Obviously the pavilion was the initial building we did several years ago that was entirely privately funded and I think there are more opportunities for things like that.

Other challenges? We lost Mike Larabee to Arkansas. A tremendous job for him in the SEC, it tripled his salary, he went to an multi-million dollar stadium softball only with a jumbotron and corporate boxes. And, a underground hitting facility! So it's a challenge to hang on to our coaches, but my philosophy has always been to emotionally invest them, and if you do that you, are going to keep them a little bit longer than you maybe should. For most of these folks, it's not about money, it's not necessarily about prestige. I think it's more about them being in a place where they are comfortable and in a place that cares about them. That's going to keep them here a little longer than you should keep them probably but, as I tell people all the time, having coaches that other folks want is a problem you want to have. There are only two kinds of coaches you can have, a coach somebody else wants or a coach nobody else wants, there's no in-between. And it does not matter anymore the level that your at, if someone wants your coach, there's a danger of your coach getting poached any given year. Look no further than Memphis and John Calipari or Rick Pitino and his sort of annual dance with the NBA that he does. So the fact is, we are very fortunate to have many young coaches that are highly sought after. That is a challenge and you have to do the right things to keep them a long as possible.

BG: Except the economic downturn! I'm guessing that no one anticipated that. It doesn't matter if I were a banker, a real estate person, a stock broker, whatever, nobody saw that coming. As far as the actual nuts and bolts of the job, nothing has really snuck up on me, probably because I've been in the business 18 years, I've literally had experience in virtually every facet of the business so I felt extremely prepared coming in and I still feel very prepared. I was very fortunate growing up here to have exposure and experience in many, many different areas.

Nothing has really surprised me, outside of the economy. Now, part of that is we are very fortunate - we have a delightful group of student-athletes - we really do. Our coaches do a great job of recruiting the right kind of kids - now you are always going to make mistakes - with 250 student-athletes, there's always potential for problems. There are always going to be some problems. But by and large, one of the reasons I've had very few surprises, if any, is we have such a great group of coaches and great group of student-athletes who really have their priorities in order.

BG: I think that, in the next three years, I'd like to take Mike Cusack's Raider Village concept and work on a few pieces of that project - Mike's vision was for an athletics area on the campus that started at Nutter Center and went all the way back to the soccer fields, encompassing the Pavilion, baseball, softball, tennis.

There are areas that need work right now. For example, we desperately need to get electricity to softball and lights at softball; that would be a goal of mine in the next three to five years probably.

Turf on baseball. Baseball has clearly done very, very well for us. I think turf on baseball in the next three to five years is something we'd love to accomplish. Now, can we do that or not, I'm not sure. It's an expensive venture. UIC is sort of the bully on the block in the conference in baseball, along with us. They have turf and it gives them a great advantage, getting on the field early, playing games, not having weather issues. It does away with problems of wear and tear in the summer and things like that. I don't think turf at softball is something Coach Garza would want, but we definitely want lights down there eventually.

Our tennis courts probably eventually need to be moved. They are not in great spot right now when it comes to drawing fans. They are not in a very aesthetically pleasing spot. That area probably does not need to be the tennis area; there are other spots for tennis.

We've talked about turf at soccer, again for the very reason we talk about turf at baseball. That's really to allow folks in open rec, intramurals and club sports to use our fields more. We try to collaborate as much as possible but Mother Nature does not always cooperate and those fields tend to get abused if you give them too much use. Those are the facility issues that we are looking at.

Even shorter term than that, I want to brand the Nutter Center better. My goal is for folks that come to the events in the Nutter Center like high school basketball or high school graduations, I want them to know that they are at Wright State and this is Raider Country. We started that last year with murals on the walls; this year we had hoped to add to the murals but what I decided to do instead was have them stretched. John Seihl at the Nutter Center has been great about helping with this. They are now being permanently affixed to the wall instead of hanging, which make them look a lot better. That will be the short term fix for this year to make things look different in here. Now, we will continue tweaking the arena setup for basketball but I really think it's important to keep adding to facility and keep freshening things. Pavilion is the same as the Nutter Center, the second you don't stay on things, things start to look stale. We've done a good job in the last year and a half of freshening things a little bit and I want to continue doing that on an annual basis if we can.

BG: It's hard to prognosticate out ten years in this kind of economic climate. I would just say to you I'm not sure what things will look like in ten years. Certainly it would be tremendous to have a natatorium here; that's been talked about for many, many years. The problem is that we are literally talking ten's of millions dollars to do it and do it right, you know, something similar to what Miami has. Can that be accomplished in the next ten years? You have to have things like that out there in your vision but you have to be realistic too. I don't want to ever oversell and under-deliver for our fans or the student-athletes or friends of our program. In ten years, if we could accomplish all the things we talked about for the three to five year period, we'd be really doing well. Clearly swimming needs help from a facilities standpoint but so does track. Tennis, as we mentioned before. Baseball needs turf; that really needs to be a priority for them and their program. I think some of the things I've given you for the three to five year period some will bleed out to the 10 year period.

I think ten year goals for me would be to continue building our fan base and to keep moving toward more revenue generation streams whether it's additional bodies in the Nutter Center for basketball, additional Raider Club members or additional fundraising events, additional donors - all those things I think are more key to us in the next ten years than facility building. It will allow us to do different things financially and give us some freedom and flexibility. If ten years from now, I think we can average eight plus thousand people a game in the Nutter Center. That's probably, I think, realistic based on the age of the university, based on our alumni base growing and getting older becoming more established in the community. Are we going to go from five thousand to eight thousand in two years? Probably not. Now, we are going to bust our butts trying but I think filling the Nutter Center over the next decade, well, you know, it basically took a decade of a downturn in attendance to get us to where we are at now. It may take us a few years to get us back up. Brad is taking care of business from a winning standpoint; we have to take care of business marketing ourselves the right way, communicating properly with our constituents, and breaking down the barriers that stop people from coming.

I'm rambling but most of our facility goals I think are three to five year, I really do. I think our facility goals can change depending on the priority of your sports and what the competition is doing and things like that. But, I think that our true north is going to generating more revenue and that starts with putting more people in here, getting more people in the Raider Club, getting them up into higher levels, getting more donors interested, more collaboration, etc. All those sorts of things.

BG: Last time I checked last week we were at about 90% renewal rate from last years numbers which I think, in this economic climate, is fine. Now, I've not told my staff it's fine, I want 100% plus. Things we are doing? I mentioned this a minute ago, we are trying to concentrate on better communications. We are going to communicate better with our current season ticket holders. We've got a refer-a-friend program - if they refer somebody, we are going to give them food vouchers for Ovations. We are going to let them know how much we appreciate them more than we ever have. We really need them. These season ticket folks are the backbone of our operation. There will be a premium giveaway just for season ticket holders this year. They'll be given a voucher, you'll come to the window or a certain place in the arena and you'll get a gift. We'll do special things for our folks, the reception at Halloween Hoops. My hope is that will allow those folks to speak more proudly about their experience and help us bring more people on board.

We've got a huge emphasis this year on group sales; working with various non-profits on a game-by-game basis or on a season ticket basis. Our collaboration with the Alumni Association will continue - with 45,000+ alumns in the area, that is a real area of potential growth for us. We'll also do the "Raiders Represent" at the first game again this year - I thought that worked out really well for us last year. I really think groups will allow us to go from 5000+ a game to 6000 this year which is our goal. Our schedule is not necessarily conducive to that however. We've got 6 games, basically starting with our first home game, our first six home games, where our students are not here. That's a huge challenge for us, still on the quarter system, to really build any sort of atmosphere. That's going to hurt us this year. That's about as many games as you can have without students around.

Speaking of the students, I really think that getting the students here, getting them to sit in the student section, is going to be a huge emphasis this year. Last year I was fit to be tied at the Northeastern game, it looked like there were no students here. We pulled the report and I think there were 400 student tickets scanned and very few in the student section. We are going to incentivize students to sit in the student section with some different giveaways, different promotions were are going to do for them, not the least of which is a dollar menu stand only for the students in the student section. They'll swipe their card, they can get a hot dog, soda, pretzel, popcorn, and everything's a dollar. Bribe them with food! (said smiling).

We will have a stronger than ever (or first time ever) presence on Facebook, Twitter with the students. We are probably behind the curve on that actually, but ahead of some and yet behind others. We've got a student we hired on a part time basis that's really doing all our Facebook, Twitter, social networking things. Texting, we'll do different things like that. We started doing things like that last year but not to the extent that we needed to. I think we just need to get the students here and that creates an atmosphere that causes people to want to be here more.

We'll do half-time promotions, other giveaways throughout the year but generally just try to build on some of the stuff we did last year. We led the league last year in increase in attendance (additional fans per game) per game despite the fact that we are playing in the league with Butler who was a top twenty program all year. We darn near got them for attendance and then the Northeastern game really killed us at the end and we finished second in attendance. I want to build on a lot of stuff of last year. The kid's corner on the concourse was wildly popular, that'll be back. The "light-outs" introductions will be back. Main things we did last year that were successful, we'll do them again this year.

BG: Well, we still get a fair number of what I call I call non-traditional students and that results in them not necessarily wanting to sit in the student section. You know, it's someone on base that's taking a class or two; it's someone who works during the day and take a class at night. But, that's the great thing about Wright State is that we serve so many different folks in this community. It's not ever going to necessarily look like the typical student lineup. Just because someone doesn't look like a student at Duke doesn't mean it's not one of our students. We just want to make sure they come to the games; my hope is there's not many seats left in the Nutter Center on any night and they are forced to sit in the student section.

Our demographics, generally speaking, trends to being younger, age wise. The university is only 42 years old and so, we have a little more energy, like a younger person, that is where we are in our life-cycle as a university which I'd like us to build on. That energy can be difficult in an arena that is all lower arena with 10,000 seats and many empty on any given night - it's harder to hide those empty seats than in other arenas out there that we compete with on a nightly basis. So, I think we are a younger group, relatively speaking but higher energy relatively speaking.

BG: Here's what I'll tell you. I work for them and I tell them that every day. My job is to support them in their efforts and to be available to them. We can't always do what our coaches want done, but if it's within reason we are going to bust our butts trying. At the end of the day, my job it is to help them be successful. And that's why I tell them that I work for them and support them. I think, it's a double-edged sword; I was never a coach and I tell all my coaches this, you'll never hear me second guess a time-out or substitution, a recruit. It's their program to run from top to bottom. It's my job and my staff's job to support that. Now obviously, we've got to be doing everything from a legal standpoint, from an NCAA standpoint, from a behavioral standpoint, from a health standpoint - all those things are givens. But at the end of the day, our admin team works to support the coaches and the student-athletes - if they're successful, we're successful. We come at them as a support group not, hey, we're up on the mountain, you're gonna do what we tell you to do. That's not my style, it doesn't work in my opinion in any business and it doesn't work here. I think the style of being visible and available and supportive and again, harkening back to that emotional investment, is well, it's amazing how much coaches appreciate just your presence as an administrator, whether it's an assistant AD or associate AD at an event, at a practice. That's ultra-important and believe me the athletes know that too. And that's really important in the bad times; when you have to call an athlete or a coach in and you've got bad news or an issue to deal with. If they know you genuinely care about them, it's much, much easier to deal with those issues.

BG: We would love to play them. Absolutely love to play them. We've played them eight times I think, they've won 5, and we've won 3; five at UD arena, 3 here - check me on that. They've made it clear that right now, we do not necessarily fit into what they want to do from a scheduling standpoint. I don't know that I understand that. I think that three straight years with 20 plus wins, an NCAA appearance and our RPI shows that we are certainly a worthy adversary for anybody. We play other A-10 schools home-and-home, Duquesne and St Bonaventure. The thing that's I think missed on this is, what a game like that would mean for Dayton, Ohio. I think as a Daytonian, it's a shame that game's not played. I've lived here my whole life and this is a community that needs things to get excited about; it needs philanthropic support that a game like that could provide, a ton of… From my perspective as a Daytonian, and obviously, I'm biased I think the game should be played every year. It's good for the community. I think rivalry games like that don't matter a hill of beans come January, February or March. No one remember who won UC-Xavier, who won VCU-Richmond. But, it's exciting when it happens. So, I think for that reason, it's a shame the game is not played right now.

BG: No, not now they are not. And that's not to say we didn't talk about every possible scenario for the last 10 months about how we were going to trim our budget. Certainly the thoughts/ideas of elimination were discussed openly. I'm going to end up doing what David Hopkins, Steve Angle and Dan Abrahamowicz want done over here. But I think we all agree that cutting a sport right now does not make any sense at all for us; we don't want to do that. Many schools around the country are faced with that. We could be faced with that someday in the future. I hope and pray that doesn't happen. To wipe out a sport, any sport, it doesn't matter which sport we are talking about, you are affecting alums, you're affecting student-athletes in the program, you're affecting coaches, you're affecting parents. For ADs, it's really a last resort. And I think that we are fortunate here, the way our sports are structured. We don't have an excess number of sports necessarily. We don't have sports like football that generate gigantic numbers of participants, coaches, training staff and things like that. So, I think most of the schools you see cutting sports now have a larger number of sports, have football. I hope the economics are such that we don't have to talk about cutting a sport ever. But, in this economic climate, things could change 6 weeks or 6 months from now, you never know.

BG: What that means for us honestly, is probably a cleaner setup in the main arena because you do not have to put things on top of ice. It means more time for our players to shoot in the arena because the floor will be down a lot more than it was in the last ten years. Now, having said that, I hate the fact that the Bomber are not here anymore. You hate to see any organization leave or leave an area. I consider Costa Papista a friend. I don't like to see anybody not succeed at the level they want to be succeeding at. But for us, it'll be a little bit cleaner setup for basketball and time for our players to be on the main arena floor.

There will be less teardown/setup cycles and the associated costs; less wear and tear on the building in general. Again, I hate the fact that the Bombers aren't here. I think it's a shame for hockey fans and that organization. But for us, it will not make a huge difference but you'll see small differences.

BG: I don't think people realize, and we put it on our Raiders Represent billboards last year, is that Raider Represent really means that there are 45,000 alums around this area and we've got a lot to be proud. We've got a lot of reasons to "represent" and not the least of which is academics. I give all the credit in the world to Judy Chivers and Megan Watson. And really, credit to Mo Cooper and Rod Perry for shepherding that area. They've done a great job. We are now, I believe, at 8 straight years with a student-athlete cumulative GPA of 3.0 or higher. Now that's really difficult to do. It's close some years and some quarters but Judy has done a great job. She's been the one constant those 8 years. We added Megan Watson who helps with men's and women's basketball specifically and also softball. We'll keep building those areas.

You asked about a ten-year vision, I'm thinking about things like feeding our athletes better, training them better, tutoring them better, making things more available to them. Things you probably don't see that are more behind the curtain, that help show a commitment to them and their parents and coaches in making them better academically, better from a life perspective and certainly better athletically.

BG: If we could clone them we'd have a sold out building (laughing). We'd be in great shape. You know what? We just need more of them, that's all. Our fans are terrific; they are tremendously loyal. I've been around long enough that, I know most of them by sight and that's really odd for an AD. I still insist on calling or emailing back any fan that reaches out to me. I hope some day that I won't be able to do that - there will be so many thousands of them; I won't be able to do that. We owe the fans; they don't owe us anything. They've been terrific; they've stuck with us through thick and thin. Now, I think we are in a thick time right now and we just need more people. I still say we are one of the best kept secrets around. We play a tremendous brand of basketball here. Our coaches have their priorities straight. Our student-athletes are excelling in all areas.

Talk about our fans. Look at our Chicago bus trip that sold out in a week basically. It's over New Years! We debated - should we do it or not? Will people want to go or not? Now, we are turning people away. I'm getting grief from people that it's sold out but that's a position you want to be in. That's why our golf outing sells out every year. They are why! When we've done the auction, it's been ultra successful. Our fans continue to step up whether its coming to games or taking trips or supporting the Raiders at the radio shows. I mean, look at Brad's and Bridgett's radio shows. There are some nights when it is standing room only at Frickers. Most mid-major programs don't have that support. We are very fortunate.

BG: This was an auction year actually, this fall, but there was a large event in town that one of our donors was shepherding and it was to go at the same time as our auction, so I said, out of respect, hey we'll pause and not do one this fall. Whether we'll do an auction in the spring or next fall, I'm not sure. Sometimes, things run there course and you say, that was great but we are done doing it. We might be close to that with the auction or you might see the auction reappear yet. It's been ultra successful. I think we've 12 or 13 of them now. So, we'll see.

BG: I appreciate what you guys do at RaiderRoundball. I frequent the site often. I know what people are thinking and saying. I get ideas from them.