I believe there is a list of candidates already in the mix and it would be naive not to think that various coach's agents haven't been sniffing around the inevitable rotting carcasses of PP and GD. Will Warde and Susan pull the trigger this year? Who knows, but don't ever think that public opinion and media outrage can't turn the tide on a prior strongly stated and public pronouncement. As I recall, wasn't there going to be a marathon today in NYC?!!
For a look at process, it might be instructive to look back at what was reported after the hiring of WM.
STORRS -- It only took a single interview.
"He's a rock star," Herbst said. "He's the whole package. He's charismatic. He was a great student-athlete. He's been at terrific, top universities. Georgia Tech . The University of Michigan. Buffalo. He's funny. He's interesting. He had all the characteristics we were looking for. But, more importantly, he's got a lot of gravitas. He's very, very serious about both the academic side and winning. He's a very, very competitive person. But he's competitive about the classroom and also what goes on on the field and on the court. To me, he fulfilled all of what I was hoping for in an athletic director."
Even though University of Connecticut President Susan Herbst had never met Warde Manuel before the search for a new athletic director began last month, she knew when her meeting with him ended Friday that he was her pick to lead the university's athletic department. Bolstering Manuel's case were the glowing recommendations she received from his colleagues in the industry who painted a picture of the ideal candidate. Manuel was offered the job later that day and he accepted it immediately.
He will sign a five-year contract with UConn, with the option for a two-year extension at the discretion of the university. He will earn an annual base salary of $450,000 and is eligible for an annual $100,000 performance incentive if certain academic and athletic goals are achieved and for $100,000 in deferred compensation, to be awarded at the conclusion of his current contract. Manuel, who will be UConn's first black athletic director, is a burly 6-foot-5 1990 Michigan graduate, where he played defensive end under legendary football coach Bo Schembechler He is the son of a 6-foot-2, 290-pound former U.S. Army sergeant who taught him about sports and toughness growing up in New Orleans. "I know that the role of AD at UConn is a role of a lifetime," Manuel said. "We're not coming here to be in and out. This is a great university with one of the most enviable athletic programs in the country."
Manuel succeeds Jeff Hathaway. Manuel was first approached by a search consultant at the NCAA national convention in Indianapolis during the second week of January, one of eight finalists for the position. Herbst had initially thought that the search would span three months before Hathaway's successor would be named, but Manuel and the rest of the candidates made it easy for her to cut the process short. "When I started to see the pool, then I thought it would it go very fast because I knew that we weren't going to have to go back out in the field and look more,'' Herbst said. "Like within the larger pool, we had so many stars that I knew it was going to go pretty quickly."
Prior to leading a 20-sport program at Buffalo, Manuel served as the assistant (February 1998) and associate director of athletics (September 2000) at Michigan.Manuel was honored by the Sports Business Journal as a 2008 national 40-Under-40 honoree after receiving the same honor from Business First of Buffalo in fall 2007. He was one of only three athletic directors asked to serve on the Collegiate Model Rules committee in September 2011, a working group of the Division I Committee on Academic Performance charged with broad overview of current NCAA Rules. Manuel, who earned a Ph.D. in social work and psychology at Michigan and a master's degree in social work and an MBA from Michigan's Ross School of Business serves on the NCAA Division I Championships/Sports Management Cabinet.
"He's very thoughtful, I think in part, because he's so incredibly well-educated," Herbst said. "He just brings a lot of intellectual focus to the discussions, and that's very important to me. But the reception from around the country from the people in the college sports business has been overwhelming. We knew he was the right person, but to get that confirmation from people at truly great places has been terrific."
