By Staff
Athletic Management, 17.4, June/July 2005, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1704/qawollmering.htm
For the past six years, Athletic Director Jerry Wollmering has overseen a culture of athletic and academic success at Truman State University. Truman student-athletes’ graduation rate has consistently been among the top 10 in the nation in NCAA Division II, and in 2003-04, the school earned a third place finish in the NACDA Directors’ Cup.
This past winter, the Truman women’s swimming team secured a national title (its fifth straight) by the largest point margin in Division II history. Truman’s volleyball team has been in the national championship match two out of the past three years, and the softball team has earned a bid to the NCAA tournament for the past six years. The men’s soccer team went undefeated in 2003 and advanced to the quarterfinals of the NCAA tournament, while the men’s swimming team finished the 2004-05 season 10th in the nation. Truman also boasts a Walter Byers Scholarship finalist in swimmer Sarah Marie Dance.
Life at Truman also has its challenges. Tight budgets and dated facilities mean Wollmering and his coaches often have to do more with less. In this interview, he talks about losing coaches to competing schools, balancing work and family, and why it’s great to be in Division II.
Many of Truman State’s teams are consistent winners. To what do you attribute the ongoing success?
Excellent recruiting. To be at Truman, student-athletes need to be highly motivated, not only athletically, but also academically. We’re Missouri’s only highly selective state institution and we have an average ACT score on our campus of 27.3. U.S. News and World Report has ranked Truman the number one public institution in the Midwest for the past five years.
To succeed here, student-athletes have to be very motivated and very focused. Our coaches do a great job of finding students who have that kind of drive, and that leads to success on and off the field or court.
Truman sponsors 21 sports, while some schools in your conference sponsor only 10. Why the emphasis on offering so many opportunities?
That philosophy goes back 30 years to the beginning of Title IX. Because we sponsor football, we’re committed to offering a wide range of women’s programs to balance our opportunities. And if you look at our success, our women’s teams definitely lead the way for us.
What challenges are created by offering so many sports?
Overall, our athletics budget is comparable to other institutions in our conference, but we’re spreading it out a lot more. So individual teams often don’t have as many resources as their competitors.
Our biggest challenge is facilities. Our facilities were built in the 1960s when we sponsored four teams. We’re using the same facilities 40 years later with 21 teams, so we ask our coaches for a lot of flexibility on practice times. They collaborate to find ways to make it work. For example, although we sponsor men’s indoor track, we don’t have an indoor track, so basketball might practice on our main floor while track athletes run the straight-aways beside them.
Several of your coaches have been at Truman for decades. As a new, first-time athletic director six years ago, how did you approach working with them?
Coaches who have been in place a long time can be leery of change, so my first priority was to build relationships with them. When I got here, I spent time getting to know each coach. I met with them, learned what their programs were all about, and asked what their concerns were. I didn’t promise we could fix everything immediately, but I made sure they knew I was willing to listen.
How did you help first-year Head Football Coach Shannon Currier through a 2-10 season this fall?
The answer starts way back in the hiring process. We made it clear to our alums and fans that we were looking at the job as a long-term building process. We told every candidate we talked to, “We know it’s going to take a few years to build the program up and we’ll support you through it.”
The most important thing is that we improved a lot at the end of the year, so we feel the future is bright. We couldn’t be more pleased with Coach Currier. So we just keep telling him, “You’re doing a great job and we’re going to do what we can to support you.”
We also focus on off-the-field successes. Coach Currier has initiated a lot of community outreach that I believe will translate into the community coming out and supporting us more. This spring, the football team held a community clean-up day. They ran advertisements inviting community members to call the football office if they needed help with their yard work or other projects, and the team went out and did the work.
Last fall, during freshman move-in day, Coach Currier had the team put on their jerseys and as cars pulled up, a player immediately started unloading it and taking stuff up to the new student’s room. Residential Living said it was the fastest move-in day Truman has ever had. And the players told the freshmen, “We have a game in two weeks and we hope to see you there.”
Three of your head coaches resigned this spring to move on to positions at other schools. What will be on your mind as you fill these positions?
Definitely finding the coach who is the right fit. I look for coaches who can recruit to a highly selective institution, because if they just look for great athletes and don’t pay attention to academics, they won’t succeed.
Coaching here has its positives and negatives. We have great student-athletes and very successful programs. But campus-wide, Truman has historically paid lower salaries than institutions we compete against. There are also employment issues in Kirksville, Mo. Truman is the biggest employer in town, and if you have a spouse who doesn’t work on campus, opportunities are limited. So in interviews, these are the discussions we’ll have.
There is no doubt that a lot of coaches have seen Truman as a stepping stone. And I don’t have a problem with that. I tell our candidates, “Come here and do your best and I will help you get to where you want to go.” Some administrators wouldn’t want to hire a coach who was only going to stay for a short time, but my philosophy is, if they come in here for four or five years and take us to a national championship, why wouldn’t we want them?
You were an associate athletic director at Bowling Green and an assistant athletic director at Southeast Missouri State. Do your goals involve getting back to Division I?
When I was at Bowling Green as an associate, my aspiration was to go to a major Division I institution to be an assistant athletic director for finance or business. I really didn’t know a lot about Division II. Then the Truman job opened, and I am very fortunate to have ended up here. Division II is a good fit for me.
I really like that I have so much interaction with our athletes. Not having many assistant directors, I do a lot of the hands-on stuff. Our student-athletes know me and they know that if they have any concerns or questions, they can talk to me at any time about anything.
As a father of three young daughters, what have you learned about balancing family and career?
Accept that you can’t do it all. Learn to rely on your staff. Be honest with them about what you can and can’t do, and encourage them to do the same.
Know that you’re not always going to make everybody happy. Practically every decision you make is going to please someone and disappoint someone else. If you’re trying to make everyone happy, it is going to be a struggle and you are going to burn yourself out. As long as you are trying to do what is best overall for the program, the university, and the student-athletes, and you explain why you did what you did, most people will understand.