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Gill Interview

SFspidur

SFspidur

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More of a general thing, but sticking it in this forum for visibility. Highlights:

- Gill has no plans to go anywhere, loves UR.

- No further comment on Rocco departure.

- Elevate campaign slowly bearing fruit...tennis upgrades start in two weeks, football/lax locker rooms and main weight room upgrades in the RC planned to start January 1, depending on how experts recommend scheduling things for minimum disruption. No timing on Pitt Field upgrades...money still needs to be raised.

http://www.richmond.com/sports/coll...cle_50674ff0-8471-5c75-9fa3-21976bed1668.html
 
Glad to see some progress being made with improving facilities. Raising money to fully fund scholarships for the "secondary" sports is another must in my opinion.
 
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think we take some borderline kids Carolina, just not every one that comes along. rocco wanted to recruit like unwcah and we don't do that. glad that KG took the high road on rocco, nothing needs to be said or rehashed. rocco should have taken the same road.
 
spiderman said:
can you say why you think that's a must?
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Because that's the best way to incentivize student athletes to come to our school. For sports like tennis or golf or even lacrosse, the emphasis for the students who are ranked the highest in their respective sports isn't as much that they want to go pro (like we see more with football and basketball) as much as they want to use sports as a way to go to school and receive an education at a very low cost or free. Richmond is a great academic school, with a great campus, in a great city. So the initial appeal is there, but money can be a huge factor in a student athletes decision and giving students the maximum in which the NCAA allots will allow us to compete on par with other top schools. That's why schools like Stanford and Duke always win national championships in the "secondary sports". Because those kids want to use their talents in sports to go to a great academic school on the maximum scholarship they can get.
 
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spiderstudent17 said:
Glad to see some progress being made with improving facilities. Raising money to fully fund scholarships for the "secondary" sports is another must in my opinion.
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Not sure how likely that is. What I would love is to send every single one of our coaches to Wake Forest and sit through a recruiting clinic with Dave Clawson. Guy was a master of recruiting of need based financial aid. It was crucial for a school like us due to the cost of programs. He seemed to embrace the challenge of recruiting at UR.
 
spiderstudent17 said:
Because that's the best way to incentivize student athletes to come to our school. For sports like tennis or golf or even lacrosse, the emphasis for the students who are ranked the highest in their respective sports isn't as much that they want to go pro (like we see more with football and basketball) as much as they want to use sports as a way to go to school and receive an education at a very low cost or free. Richmond is a great academic school, with a great campus, in a great city. So the initial appeal is there, but money can be a huge factor in a student athletes decision and giving students the maximum in which the NCAA allots will allow us to compete on par with other top schools. That's why schools like Stanford and Duke always win national championships in the "secondary sports". Because those kids want to use their talents in sports to go to a great academic school on the maximum scholarship they can get.
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it certainly is the best way to attract student athletes. but there's a limit to how many student athletes we can try to attract. we're a pretty small school. we have a ton of scholarships for the revenue producing sports. we already have a lot of female scholarships to offset football for Title IX. we have academic scholarships. we have the Richmond guarantee.

bigger schools can reasonably spread these costs across the general student population. they have enough paying students. at some point, as nice as what you propose sounds, you don't have enough kids paying to make it work.
 
Let's try being competitive with our grants, scholarships, and financial aid packages for the non-athletes first. Our peer institutions/competitors seem to do a much better job of this than we do (our high percentage of 1%ers and other wealthy applicants means that many middle-income kids get shorted). Then we can ensure that the "olympic/non-revenue" sports are funded to their full NCAA allowances. The current financial aid situation means we are missing out on a lot of academically talented middle-income students, the ones that will improve our academic profile.
 
stanford and duke are in power 5 conferences where millions and millions of dollars flow in so that the olympic sports can be fully funded. none of our sports make money or make enough money to even cover the costs of having them. comparing us to a power 5 school is meaningless.
 
There are many non P5 schools who are "fully funded" with respect to their olympic/non-revenue sports. It's primarily a donor-driven fundraising process, even at the bigger schools. However, given our size, resources, and overall institutional goals, I'd prefer to see us provide more financial aid/grants/scholarship dollars for non-athletes at the level that our peer/competitive institutions do before investing more money in funding scholarships strictly for olympic sports.
 
I'm not sure Duke is fully funded. It was only a couple of years ago they moved to fully fund a few of their women's sports to help with their Title IX imbalance.
 
without title IX, a much different landscape, not a fair one but different
 
Thanks for posting the interview with Keith Gill. Keith has been at the receiving end of quite a bit of criticism on this board, as all of you know. I do have to give Keith positive credit for the hiring of RH, who appears to be a fine football coach. And, I believe that good hiring (and fund-raising) are the two primary jobs of an AD.

On the negative side, I did not come away impressed by the text of this interview. It includes mostly "glittering generalities" (which I do not love) and includes far to many uses of "kind of." I counted at least six, after a friend said he had noticed that our AD seriously overused this term. Someone should perhaps provide feedback to Keith that "kind of" is a great way to undermine whatever you are saying. To say that UR "kind of" comes close to matching Keith's "values" is another way to say that those values, in fact, do not match up very well. To say that this was "kind of" a good interview is to say that it was truly not a very good interview. UR either does or does not match Keith's values and this either was or was not a good interview.

If Keith can ditch the too frequent use of "kind-of," his interviews could become much more effective. Nice job with the hiring of Russ though!
 
David Walsh was reportedly the one who landed Russ. He has had a major hand in most of our coaching hires.
 
SFspidur said:
David Walsh was reportedly the one who landed Russ. He has had a major hand in most of our coaching hires.
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We are lucky to have David Walsh. Heck of a nice guy and is at every game. Does all the dirty work for Gill.
 
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Don't understand the Gill bashing. While personally not a favorite of mine, I cannot fault the job he has done. IMHO, his sometimes silence is pretty classy.
 
Who bashed Gill? All i'm saying is the timing is odd. What made JOC wake up and write that piece today ... more than a month after basketball ended ... and 5 months after football ended?

Just random? I think we all know better that JOC is pretty calculated.
 
Mo, you may have a point. I just always considered JOC's columns to be a bit bizarre.
 
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop."
[New Statesman interview, 7 January 1939]”
― Winston S. Churchill

Ulla, take note lest you become the cause of such a distemper.
It has been my observation that for the most part, those on this board criticize where necessary because they care -- just a much as you. You would do well to temper your auto-reactions and consider that some of your commentaries can at times be more harmful than helpful.
 
iSpider said:
“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body; it calls attention to the development of an unhealthy state of things. If it is heeded in time, danger may be averted; if it is suppressed, a fatal distemper may develop."
[New Statesman interview, 7 January 1939]”
― Winston S. Churchill

Ulla, take note lest you become the cause of such a distemper.
It has been my observation that for the most part, those on this board criticize where necessary because they care -- just a much as you. You would do well to temper your auto-reactions and consider that some of your commentaries can at times be more harmful than helpful.
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iSpider, not sure I see its relevance, but I love you quote from Churchill, one with which I was unfamiliar. Thanks.
 
Well, Ulla, with all due respect, it seemed to me that you were jumping on Moliva's case when the implications of his statement seemed to me to be well founded and at the very least worthy of consideration. It is harmful to the Athletic Department to have a sycophant rather than an objective observer write articles about our program, and I think that we should all demand that such articles are timely and relevant in a current context.
But really not a big deal.
And I may have gotten carried away a bit because I have long felt that a trained monkey could produce the same level of work that JOC does when it comes to writing about UR Sports.
 
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The article, itself, is a bit insulting to our intelligence. Let's see. We lost the football coach that got us the last 5 winning seasons to a conference foe because of "lack of vision". We haven't been to the NCAA in 6 years in hoops and we get smoked by our cross town rival all the time. We are circling the toilet bowl in women's hoops and baseball.

We have some things to be proud of but if we're satisfied with our present athletics success, we have a pretty low bar of expectations. It reads to me like an addenda to the Gill "interview" last week. There, I said it.
 
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I believe JOC has accomplished his goal -- get UR people talking and doing a deeper analysis of where we are.
 
Other than the timing and topic, what strikes me as odd is that the article feels half-written. I expected a big "but" right where the article instead ended.

Johns pieces are just weird sometimes. I don't know if as a beat reporter on UR he has to come up with a specified number of pieces or words per cycle but they often are retrospectives that don't register to me as news. Part of that may be that UR is possibly just be a neutral news generator. Still, strange piece.
 
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When does the BOT meet on Gill contract?Someone in Gill camp feeding JOC with goofy,untimely,irrelevant and extraneous information in an attempt to keep the myth alive with another 5 year deal.
 
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32counter said:
Someone in Gill camp feeding JOC with goofy,untimely,irrelevant and extraneous information in an attempt to keep the myth alive with another 5 year deal.
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Well, either that or just getting some printed materials together for activists to be mobilized if there is not a new deal.

"Goofy, untimely, irrelevant" pretty much covers it.
 
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This thing wasn't even long enough to be called an article. It reads like part of a larger feature looking at the past decade of every college sports program in the state or something. Did anyone see the print edition? I'd be curious to see the context of it there, but it appears to have run alone. In that case, it is truly bizarre.
 
the school year, sports year is winding down, kind of time to recap, not sure i see anything else in either of these pieces.
 
keefusb said:
There are many non P5 schools who are "fully funded" with respect to their olympic/non-revenue sports. It's primarily a donor-driven fundraising process, even at the bigger schools. However, given our size, resources, and overall institutional goals, I'd prefer to see us provide more financial aid/grants/scholarship dollars for non-athletes at the level that our peer/competitive institutions do before investing more money in funding scholarships strictly for olympic sports.
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There seems to be a comparison based on the size of the school, or the level that they participate.
I would suggest that this is a totally bogus argument without knowing the per student, per student/athlete each school is spending. If Richmond is spending the same amount as a Stanford or Duke, or whomever, then this negative argument has no merit.

And the nonsense about JOC's articles by the same people that say that the TD is in bed with VCU really makes me laugh. His articles are better than no articles at all. What should he write about, how iSpider runs on and on in his posts without saying anything?
 
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AnnapSpider said:
His articles are better than no articles at all. What should he write about, how iSpider runs on and on in his posts without saying anything?
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The argument that his arguments are better than no articles at all is debatable, and if you had read the article before you posted (giving you the benefit of the doubt), you would know that he did run on without saying anything.
Maybe he is reading my posts. If so, I would expect his articles to improve over time, though what is said may be lost on some which is Q.E.D. by your post.
 
iSpider said:
The argument that his arguments are better than no articles at all is debatable, and if you had read the article before you posted (giving you the benefit of the doubt), you would know that he did run on without saying anything.
Maybe he is reading my posts. If so, I would expect his articles to improve over time, though what is said may be lost on some which is Q.E.D. by your post.
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I read the article and it was a waste of newsprint with the exception that it wasn't negative or critical which seems to be the standard on the board. It was good puff when there is no news.
 
Gill to me just comes across as a tad "tone deaf" in his media interviews.

Not that you want ever air dirty laundry in the press but their is an appropriate balance in acknowledging that we need to do better with our baseball team which is not that competitive and with our hoops teams, haven't sniffed the NCAA's in a long time. He just never wants to rock the boat, even when the boat might need a little rocking and a good honest media interview would be the appropriate forum to do it.
 
97spiderfan said:
Gill to me just comes across as a tad "tone deaf" in his media interviews.

Not that you want ever air dirty laundry in the press but their is an appropriate balance in acknowledging that we need to do better with our baseball team which is not that competitive and with our hoops teams, haven't sniffed the NCAA's in a long time. He just never wants to rock the boat, even when the boat might need a little rocking and a good honest media interview would be the appropriate forum to do it.
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Are you suggest that Keith would do well to be critical of certain events wherein the university is perhaps not supporting our athletic endeavors? Making your superiors at work look bad is generally not a great plan to get what you want changed.

Not sure if that's what you were intimating, I may have it wrong.
 
agree, you don't air dirty laundry or criticize your workers in front of others. if needed you call them in and let them know and am sure he meets with his coaches regularly. it is difficult to call for one to have his coaches' backs and then say he needs to come out publicly and scorch them.
 
97spiderfan said:
Gill to me just comes across as a tad "tone deaf" in his media interviews.

Not that you want ever air dirty laundry in the press but their is an appropriate balance in acknowledging that we need to do better with our baseball team which is not that competitive and with our hoops teams, haven't sniffed the NCAA's in a long time. He just never wants to rock the boat, even when the boat might need a little rocking and a good honest media interview would be the appropriate forum to do it.
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In cases like this, actions speak louder than words. Words only matter after actions. If Gill took action instead of offering words, then we would know he is in charge. The two big actions that have happened in the past few months (Huesman hire, Chemotti extension) don't really seem to have Gill's fingerprints on them. They seem to have happened because of outside sources and organized by others. I think Gill was briefed on all of it after the fact, but never initiated any of it. Not sure what his purpose is here except to be a figurehead and show off his Duke diploma.
 
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