This is Erika Barnes in her element.
Schmoozing and cruising, working the McKale Center crowd like a mayoral candidate works a local union hall. She’s done this before once or twice, a Wildcat come back home. She has re-created her hometown, a small community within a community, both inside the UA and out.
Team Barnes, as they call it.
Just days after being named interim athletic director at one of the top departments in the country, she became point guard on a fast break to extend Sean Miller’s contract.
But tonight, at McKale, she’s still mostly known for her smiling face. An Arizona fan extends a hand and pulls her close. Then another. And a third.
“This is the fun part of the job,” she says, positively beaming in a place that she says still gives her goosebumps.
“You get all these people who are so supportive. Look at the ovation they gave the baseball team, they gave Allonzo (Trier). To steal a line from Greg Byrne, there is no one bigger than the Block A, and that’s what makes it great.”
He’s right.
Not even Byrne himself.
The athletic director is now off to Alabama to join Nick Saban and the Crimson Tide.
Arizona will press on in his absence, with Barnes, a former Wildcats softball national champion, leading off until a permanent athletic director is named. Wednesday was her first day.
Erika Hanson,
Lancers legend
A quick aside. Call it a story within a story.
Every weekday of the second semester of my senior year at Thousand Oaks High School, I stared at Erika Hanson.
As a teacher’s assistant for Gary Walin, the long-time Lancers softball coach, my job consisted primarily of helping Walin fill the ice buckets for the team. We’d talk softball strategy and theory, upcoming pitchers, when to bunt and why. Hey, anything to get out of calculus.
I served as the team’s public-address announcer. I already knew that I wanted to be a sportswriter or sportscaster — I started reading the Ventura County Star, my bible, at age 6, and muting Dodgers games at 9, pretending to be the next Vin Scully.
Local high school sports stars were my heroes. There was quarterback Keith Smith — you might know him — and his favorite target, Leodis Van Buren of mighty Newbury Park High School. Westlake’s Billy Miller would go on to play for USC and in the NFL for a decade. Camarillo’s Joe Borchard was a dual-sport star for Stanford who played in the big leagues; then there was Thousand Oaks basketball and track star Marion Jones, who would go on to fame at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, and Rio Mesa twins Bob and Mike Bryan, perhaps the greatest tennis doubles duo of all time.
These are legends we’re talking about here.
And on the wall of Coach Walin’s office hung a copy of a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, celebrating the high school softball all-area team. I must have looked up at that article 1,000 times. The girl in the middle looked so cool, so confident, so, just … good.
Erika Hanson was her name then. Legend.
In her blood
Barnes, then Hanson, always had a passion for sports. She’d go to Chavez Ravine for Dodgers games with her dad and grandpa. Forget Mariah Carey or Julia Roberts; Barnes’ heroes were Orel Hershiser and Fernando Valenzuela. Magic Johnson, too.
“Did I expect now to be good college friends with the head Lakers coach?” she jokes. “No, didn’t see that one coming.”
Who would figure that her college classmate, Luke Walton, would so quickly move up the sports ladder?
Who’d figure she would, too?
Her father, Richard, had an inkling way back when she was 10.
“We went to practice one day, I think I was 10, and I told him I thought nothing smelled better in the world than a leather glove,” she said.
“I thought, ‘All right, she likes this,’” her dad says now.
Her senior year in high school, Barnes set a school record with a .457 batting average and tied fellow Arizona great Amy Chellevold’s Lancer record for hits. She was named first-team All-CIF and to both the Los Angeles Daily News all-area team and the Cal Hi Sports all-state team.
Arizona coach Mike Candrea was interested, to say the least.
“I remember going to her home back then, meeting Rich and Dale and being very impressed with her as an athlete, but more importantly, as a person,” Candrea said. “You knew she was a very high-character individual.”
Barnes became an integral part of Candrea’s lineup, if not a superstar. As a freshman she saw spot time, but contributed 11 runs as a pinch-runner. As a sophomore, she batted .236 with 25 runs scored, and as a junior, she hit .254 in 51 games.
She’d cap off her career with a flourish, though.
In the 2001 Women’s College World Series, Barnes was a catalyst.
She had a crucial sixth-inning leadoff single and scored on Toni Mascarenas’ three-run home run in UA’s 3-2 win over Cal in the opener. Her sixth-inning slap hit two days later sparked a rally and helped the Wildcats beat Oklahoma, 5-4.
She added another hit in the national championship game, a 1-0 win over hated rival UCLA.
“Because I contributed in that series — I went 4 for 7 — I felt like I finished my career on a positive note,” she said. “I was called upon to get the job done. That was a great way to go out.”
Barnes was invited to join Women’s Pro Fastpitch after college and spent two years trying to help the league get off the ground. She remembers being on the field at Fenway Park before a Yankees-Red Sox game and watching the crowd look down with blank stares, wondering, “Who are these women out here?”
Barnes considered returning to the Los Angeles area after two years in New York. She had marketing and internship experience, including time at KVOA-TV and as a production assistant at Fox Sports.
Then she got a call from the UA: A marketing position had opened up.
Barnes was drawn back to Tucson, which reminded her of Thousand Oaks.
“I have a great appreciation for this place,” she said. “Do I realize the impact this place has on Tucson? Yes, I do. Watching it from afar, living in areas, I learned to really appreciate what UA does for Tucson and what Tucson does for UA.”
After working two years in marketing — and pulling double-duty as Brian Jeffries’ color analyst for Arizona softball games — Barnes switched to fundraising. She worked as associate athletic director for development, eventually ascending to the role of senior associate athletics director for administration and major gifts.
She was promoted to senior associate athletics director and senior woman administrator in 2013, when Kathleen “Rocky” LaRose retired.
“Every step of the way has been the training ground for this,” Barnes said. “Not to use a bad sports analogy, but this is like stepping to the plate, and I can’t have the mentality that I hope I don’t strike out. I have to think I’m getting a hit, that the glass is half-full. I think I’ve developed thicker skin over time, too.”
Candrea calls Barnes “fearless.”
“She’s battle-tested, and when she’s driven and focused on something, nothing is going to get in her way,” he said. “She’s found that balance. It’s doable. It can be done. She’s going to have to learn to be where her feet are, which is a term I use.”
On the job
Right now, Barnes’ feet are climbing the steps inside McKale Center.
She is seeking her pride and joy, even if she’s stopped every few seconds by another adoring fan.
Finally, she makes it to her happy place, right next to husband and former UA golfer Andy Barnes and their kids. It is a Wednesday night, and McKale is popping. Her 3-year-old daughter, Tillie, stands with a pompom, cheering on her favorite team. Blake — he’s 1 — sits next to her, not really sure what’s happening.
“Our Sundays, some people go to the zoo; we’ll go to women’s soccer,” Barnes said. “Tillie loves it — the soccer ball, grass, people running around. We try to make UA part of our life.”
But not her entire life.
She learned that kind of time management long ago.
“I always tell athletes: Your professor doesn’t care that you just played Oregon and Oregon State and got home at 2,” Barnes said.
“You get to practice, and you don’t want the coaching staff to know you were up late writing a paper. I translate that into my balance of motherhood, too. My 3-year-old doesn’t care that I’ve been working all day.”
Barnes says she tries to find harmony, whether it’s “working on a multi-year contract for a head coach or trying to color between the lines with a 3-year-old.”
On Thursday, it was the former.
Barnes led a UA contingent to the Board of Regents meeting, where she successfully presented the case for Miller’s two-year contract extension. She spent the rest of the day wooing boosters in the Phoenix area.
This is what Barnes bargained for when she got the call about Byrne’s defection during Blake’s first birthday party — though, she says, “I didn’t know things were going to change so drastically after that.”
She’d had some warning.
At a UA women’s basketball game the day before the news broke, UA President Ann Weaver Hart asked Barnes if they could talk privately.
Hart said she’d made some phone calls to support staff, coaches and campus contacts and that she was considering Barnes for the role. She asked Barnes: If she were to offer the gig, however temporary, would Barnes accept it?
“Absolutely,” Barnes told her, beaming. “I was just excited for this opportunity.”
“she had a charisma”
Arizona is lucky that it has a Wildcat to turn to in a time of need, when nothing is more important than continuity and unified messaging.
“It’s pretty neat that someone like her has come full-circle,” said James Francis, Arizona’s senior associate athletic director for external operations and Barnes’ long-time coworker and friend. “Boy, I hope it speaks to some student-athletes. They can say, ‘Wow, look what she’s achieved.’”
Barnes echoed that sentiment Wednesday, when she introduced the Arizona football team’s 2017 recruiting class. Who knows, she wondered aloud, what future Arizona administrator lurks in that group?
That’s the coolest part of this story, her dad says.
“Erika’s new favorite story is that Mike Candrea introduced her recently as, ‘One of my former players, and now my boss,’” Richard said.
Ask Candrea, and he’ll say Arizona is in good hands. He isn’t the only former coach to sing her praises.
I called Mr. Walin on Tuesday.
We haven’t spoken in years. Too long. I miss the guy, particularly his excitement over former players.
He hadn’t heard the news.
“Wow!” he yelled. “That’s awesome. Wow. It’s no surprise. Erika was one of our stellar athletes at school, but also one of the great Lancers.
“Great leader, great person on campus. She had great leadership skills even as a freshman. I remember her on varsity, and we had upperclassmen look to her. You could tell from the start. She had a charisma about her that attracted people. Great integrity, and people trusted her.
“You knew that regardless of what she did, that she’d be incredibly successful.”
