 Hi, everyone. Welcome to our first episode of Mike's and My Stings. Mike's and My Stings is a podcast for Stevenson University Athletics and features student athletes, coaches, and staff. What's your name? My name is Jaheem Anderson. I'm a senior wide receiver here at Stevenson. My name is Jaden Harris. I'm a junior guard on the women's basketball team here at Stevenson. Okay, so now we're going to introduce the man that needs no introduction. That would be the athletic director here at Stevenson University, right, Adams. Hi, welcome. Thank you very much for having me here. I'm really pleased to be a part of this show. Pleased to have you. Yeah, so today we'll be diving into a little bit of your background and your history, a little bit in your college career, how and why you began coaching, and a little bit into how you transitioned into becoming an athletic director. So if you don't mind diving into your college career. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I played college. I mean, I played college basketball initially in Vermont. I grew up in Vermont. I'm a native of Bells. I went to Bells Free Academy, native of St. Albans in Fairfield, Vermont, and was honorable mention all state and basketball. I was recruited by a number of schools, but in particular, Johnson State College, which is now Northern Vermont University. They were dual members back then. They were NAI and NCA, and so I was on a small, out on the back, athletic scholarship there. And a great freshman year is really a great experience. I went through a coaching change that year. Actually, in the middle of the year, the athletic director stepped down, who was also the basketball coach and the assistant coach. Coach Selkowitz took over, and he was actually a great coach. But at the end of the year, they changed athletic directors and coaching staff. So he had a new coach and went from a really great freshman experience to experience that wasn't really fantastic. We had retention issues on the team and so on. And I got into basketball in the high school. We grew up in a really big hockey community. Actually, John Leclerc, the Hall of Famer from Philadelphia, Flyer is actually from my high school. But hockey was expensive, and so basketball was not expensive. So our family didn't have a lot of money, so basketball was my sport. So again, in college, I didn't have a lot of money either. And so I ended up taking a year off. And during that year off, I worked at a correctional center as a main control and operator and security guard at 11 o'clock to 7 o'clock in the morning. I was a substitute teacher at a middle school, and then I coached a freshman high school basketball team and saved all my money to go back to school. And so then I was looking for a division three school because there was anyone offering me an athletic scholarship at that time. And I landed at York College of Pennsylvania. Very pleased I did that. I played for a coach with a legendary coach there, Coach Gamber. I had to sit out a year and was a manager that year. And then I played my junior senior year as a captain my senior year and was fortunate enough that they offered me an opportunity to be an assistant basketball coach. And I was a math major and a computer's major in college and graduated with honors and all that stuff. And I thought I was going to get into the world of insurance. So I actually started working for all state while I was a part-time basketball coach. And I didn't particularly care for that that much. In addition to that, they didn't have a women's tennis team, but they offered me the head women's tennis position while I was there because the assistant basketball coach paid all of $792 a year, which I split with another assistant coach. But they paid me $2,400 to be the head women's tennis coach. And of course I played for Coach Gamber, who was also the athletic director. And I said, well, Coach Gamber, I didn't know we had a women's tennis team. He said, well, we haven't had women's tennis team for the last five years because of a lack of interest. And I said, well, what's the expectation? He said, well, if you have a team at the end of the year that'll be more than any team in the last five years, that'll be a success. And again, they paid me $2,400 for that position. So I was like, oh, yeah, I'll take it. And it gave me my first head coaching experience at 24 years old. And I learned very quickly as an arrogant college basketball player that I had a lot to learn about women and women's sports. And because when I went to the tennis practices, the women on the team very much cared about what they're doing. They love and worked really hard. They're very coachable. And yet no one came to see them. And basketball, everyone came to see us. And Jaheim and football, you can probably imagine that everyone comes to see you play. But it really made sure I made my commitment and attention to that team because it was really important. And so when I became an athletic director, women's sports are really important to me because I know all the values that we get for the men's, the women get as well. And all the challenges too. Women have all the challenges too. So two years into working at Allstate and being a part time coach, a position to open up an admissions at York and I full time so I took the full time position. That was three years. And by then our women's tennis team after my we won the team GP award every year for five years with the women's tennis team. After the third year, we were regionally ranked in their fourth and fifth year, we had a couple players nationally ranked. And so I was actually known as the women's tennis coach. And oh, by the way, the assistant basketball coach. So then Mark Hurgin, who's the vice president and dean of enrollment management here was the new director of admissions at Villa Julie College was what we Stevenson was known before. And he knew me through admissions because Villa Julie College and York College on the tables at the college fairs were right next to each other. And he knew how I was recruiting and stuff like that. So he referred me to the president to be the first athletic director at Villa Julie and Stevenson. So yeah, so that's how it all came about. So I thought it was going to be this actuarial math genius work in corporate America. And I fell in love with coaching fell in love with college athletics. And I really didn't initially what didn't really have the desire to be the athletic director. Initially, I just wanted to coach and make a difference. And so my first year here as the first I've been the athletic director for 30 years, but I've been a D from day one, but I was the men's women's tennis coach, as well as started the men's basketball program here. Wow. So Oh, yeah, how fun is that? You guys are the celebrity. We're just making it work. I had no idea you started off at York. Yeah. So when you were offered that head coach to be the head coach for women's tennis, did you have to go out and recruit or were they absolutely? Well, no, so I recruited on campus first. But then I took a lot of the basketball. Because back then there weren't a lot of full time tennis coaches. I mean, that a lot of the ADs were actually basketball coaches or football coaches too. So back then a lot of division threes, they had double duty. So with with that, I knew how difficult basketball recruiting was, and coaching philosophies. And if you're a really good coach, you're a coach that you continue to learn. If you're done learning, you're probably not going to last in coaching very long. And you, you learn from everyone else. So I took a lot of basketball, recruiting strategies and philosophies. And then in two years later, I'm working in admissions. And so then I'm my full time job is in recruitment, and then building the team. So but now we finished the team the year that year with 13 players, and which was a huge success. And we only needed to finish with six. And and I think they had a really great experience. And yeah, it's very fortunate to have really great athletes who bought in and were committed and really excited about women's tennis, making it, you know, meaning something on campus. Yeah, I mean, are only 80, like ever. Yeah, that's kind of crazy. I just think about it. What was the span from being the assistant coach on the basketball team in York to becoming the athletic director at Villa Julia? So I got hired as the assistant basketball coach in head women's tennis coach in 1989. Okay. 1994, five short years later, I'm the new athletic director at Stevenson. I was 28 years old. So actually less than five years. And I was the youngest athletic director in the nation at the time, and the NCI get away. Celebrity indeed. Well, I mean, be really candid though to Villa Julia at the time had just started, we only had 54 athletes, we had a budget of $84,000. That included my salary and eight part-time coaches salaries with 54 athletes. And we only had what they had eight sports before they hired me. I added three that year, including men's basketball and mentors tennis and so on. Think about 54 players. Well, if you have 20 some on on a soccer team, and lacrosse 20 some on and I mean, I had the athletes had to play all three sports, and they had to play all three seasons or else we couldn't have met sports sponsorship. So how did that go about it? You guys have to have conversation with that. Yeah, so I made the basketball team because we didn't have a gym at the time I made the basketball team run cross country. Because I needed to fill out the cross country roster, you want to play basketball, you run, which helped them get in shape. We had a couple of cross players rank cross country, but most of the soccer players also played the cross and field talk we had field hockey for women, women's soccer, and many of them played women's across in the spring. We had indoor track even back then, even though we had no import door facility. So the fall sports had to participate in indoor track. So we could use it as a sponsor sport because you had to sponsor a men's and women's sport one in each season. And you had to have minimum of four men for women. So you had to have one in each season. So indoor track for the women was our first and then the following year added women's basketball, because men's basketball was such a success. It was in regulations, you have math degrees. Do you utilize that at all? Well, so I finished with a degree in computers and of course, computers, I thought it was going to be my profession, but I use it every day. And then of course, math and their budgets and projections and then also the creative ideas of, you know, building something from scratch. That's very mathematical in mind. But I was surprised because I was not a strong English student. I was a strong math student. But as an athletic director, you learn how to write and you learn how to communicate and so on. So both have served me well, both computers, math and later on English. And when you came over to Villa Julie, was it still all females or? So when I was higher, we were 92% female. We had about 35% of our students were two degree, two year degree students, because we still had two year degree programs. So we've roughly had about 105 males on campus. So trying to fill out rosters and so on. But and that was part of the goal. So part of the reason they hired me to was I understood about recruitment and admissions. I also understood about athletics too. And in York was very good at the time. We were nationally ranked in basketball and we had a couple players nationally ranked in tennis as well. So I knew about the athletic piece, but I also knew that I needed to help Mark Hergen, the admissions group and the institution build the enrollment. So little story too that you didn't know I was also the first resident director. So when I so when I came here on campus, I needed a place to stay, but I also knew that we needed to recruit outside of the region. And at the time we had no housing. We had 28 students living in extended stay residence at a comfort end, which was right off from Rysers Town Road. And you know where the target is on Rysers Town Road is 695. There was extended stay residence back there. So I was the first full-time employee who was the resident director. We had 28 students the next year. We had 42. The final year 96. And then 125. And so and we were growing it through recruiting and athletics. As you know, in athletics, you can't just recruit students within 30 minutes. Yeah. I haven't led you guys talk at all. I just keep you rambling on. It's all great. It's great information. What's the wrong with that? So when we got to Villa Julie, there were eight sports. Yep. We have now currently have 29 sports. NCAA varsity sport. Or 28 NCAA sports, 29 varsity sports. And then we have 10 club teams as well. Wow. So we have about 700 NCAA athletes now and about another 180 club sport athletes. Wow. If you don't mind, we'll just do that journey of adding a new sport, what it takes, what are the requirements for males and females. Like how does that all work? So if you can't tell, I'm really a strong believer of Title IX and gender equity. Just my experience as the women's tennis coach, I knew how important it was in. Quite frankly, we had a really large female population on the campus. We need to serve all of our students. So how do we add a sport? So some of the biggest misconceptions that I think a lot of athletic directors have is that you have to have all the pieces to the puzzle before you start to build it. And that's not necessarily true. We started basketball. We didn't have a gym. The gym on the other campus, that wasn't built yet. I actually helped design that gym. We actually started at Marigold Prep and St. Paul's School for Girls was our practice facility. Wow. And that's where we played our games and we had to rent the gym. We started baseball and softball without fields. We were down at Joe Cannon Stadium down in Annapolis or in Arundel County and Bachman Field and so on. We started baseball and softball without facilities. Actually, the only few facilities that we had when we started was football. We built the stadium because of football and then volleyball. So when we built the gym on the other campus, we were building a gym, so we were going to add men's and women's volleyball. Wow. But in that, so the first thing is make sure we have the interest in the market. If it's not on campus, we can like we started hockey without having any ice hockey players on campus. But we have to look at the market. Is the market right for students who want our education and play a sport? Second, you hire a coach. Third, ideally you get in the league because being an independent is really, really hard. So then you build the schedule and then you figure out your practices. I mean, right now we have swimming but we don't have a pool. We have great neighbors in the McDonough and so basically schedule, coach, budget, facilities and you start building it. I believe that entrepreneurial spirit is a really important part of our student-athlete's experience. Just because it hasn't been done doesn't mean we don't do it. Just because it's hard doesn't mean we don't do it. And just because it wasn't there, it's important that you get other people to buy into it because then they can see that part of it. And it's not just my vision, it's our campus' vision. And I think that's really powerful for you as students when you have that entrepreneurial disposition of course we can do it. And it's not there and then it is there and all of the impact that that makes. Athletics has clearly, you know, grown its dominance. It seems like you built a huge brick house, brick by brick. What was your support system like as you developed this big house? Well, well, the first, I have to say, I have always had to support over the upper administration because I was hired to build an athletic department with an academic component. We talked about winning the academic award each year and how empowering it was for our student-athletes and I really believe that when student-athletes get strong grades and they feel self-respect, I believe that people look at them different, I believe faculty respect them, and that is so empowering that never leaves you. So I felt that I could build the academic component as their main structure of building athletic. I really believe smart people don't fail. If you want to start, you're going to figure it out because smart people are just, it's just another puzzle. They're going to figure it out. So I felt that I built the foundation that way. I knew I'd have the faculty support and administration support, plus I believed it. That was my philosophy as a student. I wanted to be known as a smart student-athlete. The second is I've had a great family support, both my parents and my brothers and sister, but most importantly my wife Linda, who I met a couple years into taking the job here and then shortly thereafter a year later we had our daughter Emma and then Emma's grown up with Villa Julie and Stevenson, and of course my wife has been really supported as well. It's really hard to coach basketball, men's and women's tennis, and run an athletic department if you don't have support behind you. And a little secret, she's a 1981 graduate of Villa Julie College, so long before they had sports. So I've had that support both on campus. I've had the support at home. And then many of you know that my daughter Emma actually ended coming to Stevenson and was a field hockey player, but I didn't know when I was building all of this that my daughter would come here and that she would be proud of her dad of how we built women's athletics and on how we respect both men and women's sports here. Love that. Well, also I want to know about a favorite story that you have during your career with college basketball or men's basketball, women's tennis, and also cross-country. Oh, well I had guys run cross-country. I was in coaching cross-country. Carol Zimmerman was coaching cross-country. Wow, lots of stories. Probably, so one when I first started the field that's on the Greenspring campus was not level. If you stood on one corner of the field and then you would look diagonally on the other corner field, if the player was five foot or shorter, you can see them. That's how much of a dip there was. And there you put our flag in the middle of the field and we had to blast the flag, you know, because it had a concrete base in stone. We had to blast the rock and the flag out. And then we, so we didn't have the money to redo the field, but so we found some money to get it graded and then we got the sod and not just me, but Scott Duncan and our rest of our staff and the students helped lay the sod on the field on the other campus. That was one. We had no money either to, I mean our budget was $84,000. We played three tournaments in basketball because they gave us guarantee money and then we drove the vans. So one of the tournaments we played our first year was in Kentucky. So we drove out to Kentucky to play two division or NAI division two schools. One of them had the Mr. basketball of Kentucky on their team from before we were transferred from Louisville. We drove out there because they guaranteed money, drove in vans, and then because there was a storm coming and we didn't have the money to stay overnight, again, as soon as the game was done, we shower, change, got in the vans and drove all night to stay ahead of the storm. We rolled into campus at eight o'clock and I told the guys they all need to go to class. The class started at 8 a.m. No way. He told them to go to class. Well, they had to. We built an academic program. Academic all the way. So later they told me that they went into class and made sure that they walked to class because I was watching them because we only had two buildings. I could see where they went. And as soon as they walked in, they waited till my car left and then they walked out and slapped me. Anyway. Wow. Wow, really seeing it, like starting to come together about break by break, like didn't say it. Yeah. Last but not least, I know as a player you have coaches that influence you. And you taking that step from becoming a basketball player to an assistant coach to becoming a hate coach and then becoming an athletic director. Which of those philosophies throughout that time you used to kind of build your Wow, I think you take something from every part. You know, as a player, I was very fortunate to make the varsity but I made the team because I had a great attitude and I worked really hard. I made it my junior year and I was one of my best friends was Mike Johnson. Mike Johnson led the state in scoring at 32 points a game. I guarded him in practice every day and he was my best friend. And so I ended up learning how to play defense and then my senior year had a very successful senior year and a very successful freshman year but when I transferred to York they had a lot of really good recruits at York and so they didn't have a spot for me so I ended up basically getting cut that year but I stayed on as a manager had to sit out anyway but and I went from not making the team to being in the top eight the next year but I didn't get the playing time and I worked really hard. I stayed there during the summer. I played in the summer league. I got up every morning at 7 a.m to work out in the gym because I knew Coach Gamber showed up at eight and I where I only won my workout and actually that summer only three other times did another player meet me that morning because I invited him every day come work out with me I'll give my skills and whatever. One player came twice one player came once and they like they're not doing that again and then in the afternoon they had pick up and then of course I was a math student and computer so I worked at York hospital doing biostatistics and research for the obstetrics and gynecology department because I needed money and then I was also taking classes but one of the big and the other influences that I failed and I got back up again and to the point where my senior year I was a starter and captain at York but it was from being cut to being making the team to being a starter and captain so I don't when students come to me and they are concerned they're not getting playing time well change that coaches our coaches want to play players we're going to help them win and if you're going to help them win and you're coachable that was a really important piece and so in this day and age I actually guide a lot of students who are concerned about playing time and stuff it's part of the process failures just part of the process it's not defining so I think that failure as an athlete really helped me because we've had a lot of failures as coaches we've had a lot of failures I mean I had a 2 and 21 season I had a 2 and 23 season after going to the nc tournament and back to back I had a 2 and 23 season but it doesn't define you it you get back up and you go at it and you start to solve another puzzle um so um as athletic director I feel like I've been able to make a difference in a lot of student athletes lies I do miss coaching but I miss the impact I've had on the students but I have a different impact at this level well thank you for tuning in and thank you for joining us so we thought we'd have a celebrity here no it's a legend here so we definitely appreciate you and your time make sure to follow us on boom mustang sports on instagram threads x and tiktok subscribe to steven's athletics youtube channel and last but not least look out for more mike's and less things coming your way