By Staff
Athletic Management, 18.4, June/July 2006, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/am/am1804/qamchugh.htm
In 19 years as Athletic Director at The College of New Jersey, Kevin McHugh has presided over a program that’s made an art of winning championships. During his tenure, TCNJ teams have racked up more than a score of NCAA Division III titles in five different sports, and another 20 runner-up finishes. The school sat atop the NACDA Directors’ Cup standings after the 2005-06 winter season, and McHugh was honored last year as a GeneralSports TURF Systems Athletic Director of the Year. In addition, the Collegiate Athletic Administrators of New Jersey presented him with its 2005 Garden State Award.
Before arriving at TCNJ, McHugh spent four years each at Yale University as operations and facilities manager and Bowling Green State University as assistant athletic director. Now, in addition to leading a department that sponsors 21 intercollegiate sports, he oversees the school’s intramural, club, and recreational programs, summer camps, and all of the over 180 student organizations, fraternities, and sororities.
As a wrestler at Columbia University, McHugh was twice named All-Ivy League and honored as an All American by National Mat News. He has since served on the NCAA Division I and Division III wrestling committees and the Division III men’s basketball committee, and now sits on the Division III Management Council. In this interview, McHugh talks about bulding a community of great coaches, Title IX’s impact on wrestling, and the future of Division III.
AM: TCNJ is consistently near the top of the NACDA Directors’ Cup standings. Is the Cup a major focus of your program?
McHugh: We look at the standings and we’re conscious of them, but I wouldn’t say it’s a big focus. Our overall goal is to be nationally competitive in everything that we sponsor—to be up there with the very best programs in the country every year in every sport. We certainly don’t achieve that across the board in any given year, but that’s what we aim for.
What is the secret to keeping your programs so successful?
A big part of it is having a coaching staff that’s not only tremendous at Xs and Os, but also genuinely concerned about the development of student-athletes as people. That’s the difference between having a great sport and having a great program. A program includes everything you do for the student-athlete in terms of team development, character building, academic support, and alumni involvement, among other things. All that folds into a complete program, and all our coaches work to cultivate it.
Can you give an example?
Our baseball coach is a perfect example. Every year he gives out T-shirts with a picture of Albert Einstein on them to every kid who achieves a certain GPA. He also has a speakers’ series where he brings in alumni and others in the baseball business to talk to his athletes—sometimes it’s motivational, sometimes it’s about baseball skills, but it’s always popular with the players. He came up with the idea of rededicating our field, with a new plaque and a ceremony involving the family of the former coach for whom the field is named. And he had a new sign installed with the names of the program’s All Americans—he invites those alumni back for a special weekend to keep them involved with the program. He also plans a family day every year where the players’ parents bring a dish to pass, and the team and the families share a meal between the games of a doubleheader.
Each of those things by itself may not be a big deal, but when they’re all part of a package, I think it makes a big difference. When high school prospects look at what our program has to offer, they see a lot more than just a team that wins baseball games.
How do you find coaches who share that philosophy?
We look at experience and what they’ve done elsewhere, we talk to references and other people we know—all the basic stuff. But one thing that really gives me a sense of how a candidate will fit into our community is having them meet everybody in the program, including the student-athletes. I examine the reactions and evaluations of our staff and our athletes, and that helps me determine if that person has the right chemistry to work in our department.
How do you build and maintain a community among your coaches?
It’s partly a natural process that comes from having the right people. But one thing we do is have all our out-of-season coaches serve as site managers for other sports. So when we have a soccer game, another sport’s coach is responsible for greeting the visiting coach and making sure the contest goes smoothly.
That gets taken to another level when we host an NCAA event, particularly a national championship like the wrestling championship we hosted earlier this year. Every coach who was not in-season had a specific function for the event. When I was going around and thanking the staff for putting in the extra time, several people told me they were really proud to have pulled it off. It took a lot of work to adapt our facility for wrestling, and everyone pitched in and really felt good about being part of it. I’d asked people to give up most of their week to help another sport’s championship, and some of them were thanking me for the chance to be involved. That kind of thing really builds camaraderie.
How does your experience as a facilities manager make you a better athletic director?
It gives me a perspective on the day-to-day operations that I don’t ever want to take for granted. Being conscious of everyone’s role in the department, from your athletic training staff to your facilities staff, is really important because their successes and hard work don’t show up in a win-loss column or get covered in the newspaper like coaches’ successes do. I make sure our coaches don’t take for granted that the facilities are ready for every practice and look great on gamedays. And when things don’t get fixed quite as fast as we’d like, I understand the complexities involved.
What is the biggest issue facing NCAA Division III right now?
Easily one of the biggest questions is where we’re headed as a division. We are now up to around 420 institutions with another 40 in the pipeline. Are we going to continue to grow? And if so, how do we make sure there are appropriate championship opportunities for everyone? What is our maximum sustainable size? And what happens when we get there? Division III includes schools of 400 students and schools of 18,000, and we need to take a serious look at whether it’s appropriate for all those folks to be competing under the same umbrella.
I like the fact that if TCNJ is successful nationally, we’re near the top of some 400 institutions, and that’s something to be proud of. If the division were to split in half, our national successes wouldn’t have the same impact for me.
With so many competing voices in D-III, how do you make progress on new rules and policies?
Sometimes the most important thing is looking past your institution’s own provincial interests and taking a broader view. And if the majority is heading in a certain direction and you want to remain part of the division, you have to be open to change. But truly, I think the diversity we have in the division is one of our strengths.
There are a few core principles that everybody in D-III subscribes to—that we don’t offer financial aid based on athletic ability, the focus of participation is on the student-athlete, and we’re not here for the benefit of spectators or the media or anyone else. When there’s agreement on the bigger things, it’s easier to see common ground when there is disagreement on smaller issues. If you understand where the folks who are voting against your position are coming from, you can work together and find solutions.
As an ex-wrestler, how do you feel about the impact of Title IX on your sport?
Title IX and gender equity in general have sometimes been unfairly viewed as a scapegoat for the loss of wrestling programs and other men’s sports when schools cut programs instead of creating additional women’s opportunities, which is what Title IX is really about. I believe there are times when a school sees an opportunity to save money by cutting a sport, or they want to get rid of it for some other reason, and Title IX ends up shouldering the blame, which is very unfortunate.
How do you make Title IX a priority in your department?
It’s pretty easy for me—my outlook is that Title IX is simply about fairness. It’s making sure that you’re treating your male and female athletes the same. Some of the details are a lot more complex than that, but fundamentally that’s what it comes down to.
I’m very comfortable that we’re succeeding in that, from coaching support to facilities to scheduling to budgets to locker rooms—there isn’t an area here where one gender has it better than the other. I was pretty fortunate that those battles had mostly been fought before I got here. TCNJ was putting emphasis on women’s athletics at a time when it wasn’t very popular, and I give a lot of credit to our former softball coach and Senior Woman Administrator, Dr. June Walker, who really fought and clawed for everything we got. A strong advocate like that can set the agenda for equity, and it just developed as part of the culture of how we do things.
What do you know now that you wish you’d known at the start of your career?
If there’s a way I could have trusted my instincts more often, and have known that things would work out, it would have limited my angst and anxiety. In wrestling, there are times when you get a burst of energy and you really go at it, and other times when you hold back and let the other person’s energy kind of work to your advantage. I wish there was a way to apply that directly to my early career. I wish I’d known that you don’t have to be going full speed all the time.
In my first years as an administrator, I used to dream at night that I was still at work, trying to solve problems. If I had learned to relax and be more confident in what I was doing, and hadn’t spent so much time worrying about things that were beyond my control, I would have saved myself a lot of stress.
In your 19 years at TCNJ, what accomplishment are you most proud of?
It’s hard to single something out. I’m proud of the fact that we’ve gotten all our coaches to be full-time, single-sport coaches. I’m proud that we transitioned our women’s soccer team from a club sport to a national-caliber program. And we also brought intramural and recreational sports under the athletic department’s purview, which was a major accomplishment. But I’m most proud of all the kids who have gone on from here to be successful in all sorts of career paths.
At our academic honors brunch, we give out a Distinguished Alumni award, and the winner comes back to speak to the student-athletes. For our coaches and myself, that’s one of the biggest kicks we get. It’s not always someone who was a star athlete, but when they come back and talk about the difference the athletics program made in terms of what they did with their life and their profession, it’s wonderful. A couple years ago, Luis Perez, who played baseball here and is now in upper management of the Baltimore Ravens, came back and said to our president, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but I learned more on the baseball field that I’ve applied to what I do than I did in any classroom.” And I’ve heard sentiments like that more than once over the course of 19 years. I’ve probably forgotten a lot of the names, but when you see the faces of the people who come back and hear those stories, and know you had a hand in it, that’s really what it’s about.