Hansen's Sunday Notebook: Frank Busch as Arizona's next AD? Reunion may not hold water
- Updated
Star sports columnist Greg Hansen offers his opinion on recent sports news.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Seven years ago, UA swimming coach Frank Busch wanted to replace Jim Livengood as the school’s athletic director. Some might’ve blown it off as the old way of college sports: a successful coach moving up the chain to the top chair.
Busch, then 59, was already among the Mount Rushmore of modern UA coaches, with Jerry Kindall, Lute Olson and Mike Candrea.
Was he qualified to be an AD? Busch had not done any significant fundraising or infrastructure construction, but he operated two teams, the men’s and women’s swimming programs, and also was fully vested in perhaps the nation’s top club swimming operation, Ford Aquatics. Busch was so good at what he did that six times he was selected the NCAA coach of the year.
Rather than seriously consider Busch, Arizona hired Greg Byrne from Mississippi State. A year later, Busch became the director of USA Swimming’s men’s and women’s national teams, which dominated the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games.
It was Busch’s athletic directorship, wrapped in red, white and blue.
When he announced last week he was retiring from USA Swimming, the timing seemed too coincidental: Busch would be available at the time Arizona was searching for Byrne’s successor.
The man directing the search, Cedric Dempsey, hired Busch away from the University of Cincinnati in 1990.
At 66, would he return to Tucson for four or five years, become the AD and serve as a mentor for interim AD Erika Barnes, who would ultimately replace Busch?
Doesn’t that sound like a positive scenario?
At Arizona, Byrne was a people person and communicator of the first rank, but that, too, is Busch’s strength and then some.
When Tucson auto dealer Jim Click recently sought someone to provide a motivational message to his employees, he flew Busch in from Colorado Springs to do so.
But that’s where the Busch-returns-to-Tucson story ends.
He will almost certainly not be offered the AD job at Arizona, and I don’t think he would accept it, if offered. (Although he is likely to relocate here from Colorado.)
I don’t think the workload would be too much, but why would anyone with a Hall of Fame career in the bank agree to the responsibility of stewarding 500 student-athletes day-to-day, taking on the challenge of raising about $150 million to get a football stadium up to modern code, and work a 24/7 schedule?
I suspect Arizona will tempt Kansas State’s exemplary AD John Currie. He earns $775,000 annually and has a $1.5 million buyout. He might be first on any list in the AD job market.
Why Currie? Dempsey has always sought those not thought to be available. He got a Final Four basketball coach from Iowa (Lute Olson), and when Arizona’s football coaching job opened in 1987, he offered the job to head coaches from Ohio State, Baylor and Boston College before finding a gem at Hawaii, Dick Tomey.
Dempsey’s discovery of 38-year-old Byrne at Mississippi State, an athletic director at an SEC school with greater resources than Arizona, was also in that vein.
And one more thing: If Arizona can’t land (or doesn’t fully pursue) Currie, Central Michigan AD Dave Heeke provides an intriguing backdrop.
Heeke was the senior associate AD/chief of staff at Oregon for 18 years as the Ducks emerged as an athletic program on the national scope. He then moved home (he is from East Lansing) to run his own shop.
At 52, Heeke has the Pac-12 roots and background in fundraising to take on the challenge at Arizona. He declined the AD’s job at NAU in 2004, and is likely ready for a bigger job.
And remember this: Dempsey and iconic Arizona athletic director Pop McKale both are graduates from Albion College in Michigan. That’s where Dave Heeke got his degree, too.
Stay tuned.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona senior infielder Sawyer Gieseke didn’t play in Friday’s season opener at Hi Corbett Field. He had just 11 at-bats last year.
But the film and television major from the Bay Area already went deep last week. His 3 minute 10 second promotional video/spoof of the 1980s movie “Major League” was exceptional. Or maybe better than that. (See the video below).
“Sawyer is a special talent,” said UA coach Jay Johnson. “The video caught more attention than anyone could’ve anticipated, in a good way.”
By Friday, more than 400,000 views of Gieseke’s work had been linked on social media, and hundreds of thousands more on ESPN and other cable TV platforms.
Gieseke’s video, the brainchild of former Star football beat writer Daniel Berk, now a UA media relations official, was shot in about two hours. Gieseke did all the casting and filming.
Some of the 1989 movie, starring Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes, was filmed at Hi Corbett Field. Gieseke got all of it right, including Jay Johnson’s crusty deep-voice as Cleveland manager Lou Brown, played in the movie by James Gammon.
About the only thing Gieseke missed was having a part for former Arizona outfielder Mike Thorell, who was among the ballplayers cast during Hi Corbett Field filming sessions 29 years ago.
Thorell, who remains a strong UA baseball follower, is now president/CEO of Pinnacle Bank in the greater Phoenix area.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
P.J. Ponce was inducted into the San Manuel High School Hall of Fame in 2014, an overdue honor for winning back-to-back wrestling state championships in 1987 and 1988. He was later a two-time NAIA All-American in North Dakota, and helped coach San Manuel to a state title in 2002.
Last Saturday, he coached Mountain View to the Division II title, first in school history. Ponce earlier coached Empire High’s wrestling team for seven years.
Mountain View produced two state champs, 120-pound Jayce Cunha, who was 32-4; and 132-pound Marcus Castillo, who finished the season 42-2. Ponce’s team lost to top-seed Queen Creek by 32 points earlier in the year, but outscored them by 6 ½ points in the state finals.
If Sunnyside’s three-time state wrestling champion Roman Bravo-Young can win it again in 2018, he will join an exclusive class of Tucson wrestlers as four-time state champs. Seven have done so; Salpointe’s Nick Frost was the first in 1996-99. Frost won 98 consecutive matches; Bravo-Young is now 140-0 in his Blue Devils career.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona’s 1993 All-Pac-10 outfielder Robbie Moen and Blake Eager, both Flowing Wells High School Hall of Famers, are going to Moscow, Russia, in June to coach the Russian National baseball team.
Moen and Eager will be in Moscow for about three weeks before traveling to Prague for an international tournament, likely in preparation for the 2020 Olympics.
Blake has had extensive experience internationally as pitching coach for the Swedish National Team. Moen has coached at Kansas State and Loyola Marymount.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Division I college football recruiters will be making many stops to see Matt Johnson’s Ironwood Ridge football team next year. Senior-to-be defensive lineman Brayden Smith, who made 30 tackles last year, has developed into a top prospect. He’ll be joined by Titus Tuiasosopo, a touted sophomore-to-be defensive lineman and son of USC defensive analyst Mike Tuiasosopo, an Arizona coach from 2004-10. IRHS recently added Preston Helu, a first-team all-state linebacker from Reno who transferred to Ironwood Ridge. He will be a junior.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Salpointe Catholic senior-to-be offensive lineman Matteo Mele has now received scholarship offers from Arizona, Oregon State, Colorado and Nevada defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel since Lancers coach Dennis Bene posted a video of Mele’s highlights on Twitter two weeks ago. Talk about the power of social media.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Stanford football coach David Shaw last week hired ex-Santa Rita High School defensive back Ron Gould to be part of the Cardinal coaching staff. Gould most recently was head coach at UC Davis, after 11 years coaching at Cal. Stanford now has four Tucson-connected coaches: secondary boss Duane Akina, linebackers coach Peter Hanson, special teams coach Pete Alamar and Gould.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Thursday’s announced crowd of 3,448 for Arizona’s basketball game at Washington State might’ve been the smallest crowd ever to watch a UA game in the Pac-10/12 years. The actual attendance was probably closer to 2,000. The smallest listed crowd in UA league history was 2,552 for a February 1983 game at Stanford. That Arizona team under Ben Lindsey, which would finish 4-24, lost 86-69 and Lindsey got two technical fouls in 20 seconds, his eighth and ninth technicals of the season by Feb. 7. By comparison, Sean Miller has two technical fouls in the last 2½ seasons.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
La Fiesta de los Vaqueros, the Tucson Rodeo, has a field of 719 cowboys and cowgirls for this week’s event, including 31 Tucsonans and 179 athletes who have been in the National Finals Rodeo and 31 world champions. You can’t beat that for a quality field.
I have long considered the Tucson Rodeo the top sports event for spectators in Tucson, year after year, but I am also drawn by the rodeo-centric names, the Clints, Codys, Coles, Caseys and Dakotas.
Here are my Big Five leading names entered in this week’s Tucson Rodeo:
1. Autumnrain Chey, barrel racing.
2. Cutter Parsons, calf roping (part of the four contestants from Parsons family of Marana entered in the rodeo).
3. Pistol Preece, bronc riding.
4. Cimarron Boardman, calf roping.
5. Shayde Tree Etherton, steer wrestling.
More? There are Tucson rodeo contestants named Bronc, Roper, Rainy, Timber, Legend, Shank and Kash. Can’t beat that.
- Greg Hansen Arizona Daily Star
- Updated
Arizona opened spring football practice Saturday afternoon; there will be no true “Spring Game.” Rich Rodriguez instead prefers a “showcase” on March 2, four weeks before the end of spring drills.
It’s likely RichRod will fill his assistant coaching vacancies for a receivers coach and a special teams coach by the football showcase, a Thursday night event.
What if he swung for the fences and hired Chuck Cecil as the UA’s special teams coach? It would be a Ruthian home run.
Cecil, who is currently out of work after 16 years as a defensive coach (and coordinator) for the NFL’s Rams and Titans, was perhaps the greatest special teams player in Pac-10 history. He blocked six kicks and twice tackled punters before they could punt.
RichRod has a modest coaching tree.
Arizona State coach Todd Graham and Tennessee coach Butch Jones, who coached QBs for RichRod in 2005-06, is basically it. Except for his successor at West Virginia, the late Bill Stewart, no other RichRod assistant at West Virginia, Michigan or Arizona has gone on to be head coach or a high-profile NFL or college coordinator. Most of those he has employed in Tucson have been behind-the-scenes role players. No Sonny Dykes. No Mark Stoops. No Homer Smith or Larry Mac Duff.
Last year, RichRod declined to interview Arizona Hall of Fame linebacker Ricky Hunley, who hoped to be the Wildcats’ defensive line coach.
For a program reeling from two bad seasons, persuading a Wildcat legend and college Hall of Famer like Cecil to return to his alma mater — to fix a broken special teams system — might give Arizona a badly needed image change and a better football team.
Seven years ago, UA swimming coach Frank Busch wanted to replace Jim Livengood as the school’s athletic director. Some might’ve blown it off as the old way of college sports: a successful coach moving up the chain to the top chair.
Busch, then 59, was already among the Mount Rushmore of modern UA coaches, with Jerry Kindall, Lute Olson and Mike Candrea.
Was he qualified to be an AD? Busch had not done any significant fundraising or infrastructure construction, but he operated two teams, the men’s and women’s swimming programs, and also was fully vested in perhaps the nation’s top club swimming operation, Ford Aquatics. Busch was so good at what he did that six times he was selected the NCAA coach of the year.
Rather than seriously consider Busch, Arizona hired Greg Byrne from Mississippi State. A year later, Busch became the director of USA Swimming’s men’s and women’s national teams, which dominated the 2012 and 2016 Olympic games.
It was Busch’s athletic directorship, wrapped in red, white and blue.
When he announced last week he was retiring from USA Swimming, the timing seemed too coincidental: Busch would be available at the time Arizona was searching for Byrne’s successor.
The man directing the search, Cedric Dempsey, hired Busch away from the University of Cincinnati in 1990.
At 66, would he return to Tucson for four or five years, become the AD and serve as a mentor for interim AD Erika Barnes, who would ultimately replace Busch?
Doesn’t that sound like a positive scenario?
At Arizona, Byrne was a people person and communicator of the first rank, but that, too, is Busch’s strength and then some.
When Tucson auto dealer Jim Click recently sought someone to provide a motivational message to his employees, he flew Busch in from Colorado Springs to do so.
But that’s where the Busch-returns-to-Tucson story ends.
He will almost certainly not be offered the AD job at Arizona, and I don’t think he would accept it, if offered. (Although he is likely to relocate here from Colorado.)
I don’t think the workload would be too much, but why would anyone with a Hall of Fame career in the bank agree to the responsibility of stewarding 500 student-athletes day-to-day, taking on the challenge of raising about $150 million to get a football stadium up to modern code, and work a 24/7 schedule?
I suspect Arizona will tempt Kansas State’s exemplary AD John Currie. He earns $775,000 annually and has a $1.5 million buyout. He might be first on any list in the AD job market.
Why Currie? Dempsey has always sought those not thought to be available. He got a Final Four basketball coach from Iowa (Lute Olson), and when Arizona’s football coaching job opened in 1987, he offered the job to head coaches from Ohio State, Baylor and Boston College before finding a gem at Hawaii, Dick Tomey.
Dempsey’s discovery of 38-year-old Byrne at Mississippi State, an athletic director at an SEC school with greater resources than Arizona, was also in that vein.
And one more thing: If Arizona can’t land (or doesn’t fully pursue) Currie, Central Michigan AD Dave Heeke provides an intriguing backdrop.
Heeke was the senior associate AD/chief of staff at Oregon for 18 years as the Ducks emerged as an athletic program on the national scope. He then moved home (he is from East Lansing) to run his own shop.
At 52, Heeke has the Pac-12 roots and background in fundraising to take on the challenge at Arizona. He declined the AD’s job at NAU in 2004, and is likely ready for a bigger job.
And remember this: Dempsey and iconic Arizona athletic director Pop McKale both are graduates from Albion College in Michigan. That’s where Dave Heeke got his degree, too.
Stay tuned.
Arizona senior infielder Sawyer Gieseke didn’t play in Friday’s season opener at Hi Corbett Field. He had just 11 at-bats last year.
But the film and television major from the Bay Area already went deep last week. His 3 minute 10 second promotional video/spoof of the 1980s movie “Major League” was exceptional. Or maybe better than that. (See the video below).
“Sawyer is a special talent,” said UA coach Jay Johnson. “The video caught more attention than anyone could’ve anticipated, in a good way.”
By Friday, more than 400,000 views of Gieseke’s work had been linked on social media, and hundreds of thousands more on ESPN and other cable TV platforms.
Gieseke’s video, the brainchild of former Star football beat writer Daniel Berk, now a UA media relations official, was shot in about two hours. Gieseke did all the casting and filming.
Some of the 1989 movie, starring Charlie Sheen and Wesley Snipes, was filmed at Hi Corbett Field. Gieseke got all of it right, including Jay Johnson’s crusty deep-voice as Cleveland manager Lou Brown, played in the movie by James Gammon.
About the only thing Gieseke missed was having a part for former Arizona outfielder Mike Thorell, who was among the ballplayers cast during Hi Corbett Field filming sessions 29 years ago.
Thorell, who remains a strong UA baseball follower, is now president/CEO of Pinnacle Bank in the greater Phoenix area.
P.J. Ponce was inducted into the San Manuel High School Hall of Fame in 2014, an overdue honor for winning back-to-back wrestling state championships in 1987 and 1988. He was later a two-time NAIA All-American in North Dakota, and helped coach San Manuel to a state title in 2002.
Last Saturday, he coached Mountain View to the Division II title, first in school history. Ponce earlier coached Empire High’s wrestling team for seven years.
Mountain View produced two state champs, 120-pound Jayce Cunha, who was 32-4; and 132-pound Marcus Castillo, who finished the season 42-2. Ponce’s team lost to top-seed Queen Creek by 32 points earlier in the year, but outscored them by 6 ½ points in the state finals.
If Sunnyside’s three-time state wrestling champion Roman Bravo-Young can win it again in 2018, he will join an exclusive class of Tucson wrestlers as four-time state champs. Seven have done so; Salpointe’s Nick Frost was the first in 1996-99. Frost won 98 consecutive matches; Bravo-Young is now 140-0 in his Blue Devils career.
Arizona’s 1993 All-Pac-10 outfielder Robbie Moen and Blake Eager, both Flowing Wells High School Hall of Famers, are going to Moscow, Russia, in June to coach the Russian National baseball team.
Moen and Eager will be in Moscow for about three weeks before traveling to Prague for an international tournament, likely in preparation for the 2020 Olympics.
Blake has had extensive experience internationally as pitching coach for the Swedish National Team. Moen has coached at Kansas State and Loyola Marymount.
Division I college football recruiters will be making many stops to see Matt Johnson’s Ironwood Ridge football team next year. Senior-to-be defensive lineman Brayden Smith, who made 30 tackles last year, has developed into a top prospect. He’ll be joined by Titus Tuiasosopo, a touted sophomore-to-be defensive lineman and son of USC defensive analyst Mike Tuiasosopo, an Arizona coach from 2004-10. IRHS recently added Preston Helu, a first-team all-state linebacker from Reno who transferred to Ironwood Ridge. He will be a junior.
Salpointe Catholic senior-to-be offensive lineman Matteo Mele has now received scholarship offers from Arizona, Oregon State, Colorado and Nevada defensive coordinator Jeff Casteel since Lancers coach Dennis Bene posted a video of Mele’s highlights on Twitter two weeks ago. Talk about the power of social media.
Stanford football coach David Shaw last week hired ex-Santa Rita High School defensive back Ron Gould to be part of the Cardinal coaching staff. Gould most recently was head coach at UC Davis, after 11 years coaching at Cal. Stanford now has four Tucson-connected coaches: secondary boss Duane Akina, linebackers coach Peter Hanson, special teams coach Pete Alamar and Gould.
Thursday’s announced crowd of 3,448 for Arizona’s basketball game at Washington State might’ve been the smallest crowd ever to watch a UA game in the Pac-10/12 years. The actual attendance was probably closer to 2,000. The smallest listed crowd in UA league history was 2,552 for a February 1983 game at Stanford. That Arizona team under Ben Lindsey, which would finish 4-24, lost 86-69 and Lindsey got two technical fouls in 20 seconds, his eighth and ninth technicals of the season by Feb. 7. By comparison, Sean Miller has two technical fouls in the last 2½ seasons.
La Fiesta de los Vaqueros, the Tucson Rodeo, has a field of 719 cowboys and cowgirls for this week’s event, including 31 Tucsonans and 179 athletes who have been in the National Finals Rodeo and 31 world champions. You can’t beat that for a quality field.
I have long considered the Tucson Rodeo the top sports event for spectators in Tucson, year after year, but I am also drawn by the rodeo-centric names, the Clints, Codys, Coles, Caseys and Dakotas.
Here are my Big Five leading names entered in this week’s Tucson Rodeo:
1. Autumnrain Chey, barrel racing.
2. Cutter Parsons, calf roping (part of the four contestants from Parsons family of Marana entered in the rodeo).
3. Pistol Preece, bronc riding.
4. Cimarron Boardman, calf roping.
5. Shayde Tree Etherton, steer wrestling.
More? There are Tucson rodeo contestants named Bronc, Roper, Rainy, Timber, Legend, Shank and Kash. Can’t beat that.
Arizona opened spring football practice Saturday afternoon; there will be no true “Spring Game.” Rich Rodriguez instead prefers a “showcase” on March 2, four weeks before the end of spring drills.
It’s likely RichRod will fill his assistant coaching vacancies for a receivers coach and a special teams coach by the football showcase, a Thursday night event.
What if he swung for the fences and hired Chuck Cecil as the UA’s special teams coach? It would be a Ruthian home run.
Cecil, who is currently out of work after 16 years as a defensive coach (and coordinator) for the NFL’s Rams and Titans, was perhaps the greatest special teams player in Pac-10 history. He blocked six kicks and twice tackled punters before they could punt.
RichRod has a modest coaching tree.
Arizona State coach Todd Graham and Tennessee coach Butch Jones, who coached QBs for RichRod in 2005-06, is basically it. Except for his successor at West Virginia, the late Bill Stewart, no other RichRod assistant at West Virginia, Michigan or Arizona has gone on to be head coach or a high-profile NFL or college coordinator. Most of those he has employed in Tucson have been behind-the-scenes role players. No Sonny Dykes. No Mark Stoops. No Homer Smith or Larry Mac Duff.
Last year, RichRod declined to interview Arizona Hall of Fame linebacker Ricky Hunley, who hoped to be the Wildcats’ defensive line coach.
For a program reeling from two bad seasons, persuading a Wildcat legend and college Hall of Famer like Cecil to return to his alma mater — to fix a broken special teams system — might give Arizona a badly needed image change and a better football team.
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