Greg Hansen: Arizona Wildcats' Dave Heeke at critical juncture

Thirteen months ago Tuesday, Dave Heeke took occupation of a windowless compound at McKale Center and began what would become the most toilsome year an Arizona athletic director has ever encountered.

The school’s sports historians might challenge that; they might say that Cedric Dempsey’s first year on the job, 1982-83, was unprecedented in upstream swimming.

Dempsey inherited a Mount Everest of debt, a basketball program that was a 4-24 embarrassment, an NCAA investigation that would forbid Arizona’s football team from playing on TV and in bowl games and the task of incorporating a women’s athletic program into a vulnerable men’s department that was the acknowledged little brother of Arizona State.

Heeke’s first 13 months match that, migraine for migraine.

A week ago, Washington President Ana Mari Cauce announced she planned to give second-year Huskies AD Jennifer Cohen a raise, mostly for successfully negotiating a 10-year, $120 million deal with Adidas.

“When Jen was hired, there were questions about how tested she was; could she do the hard stuff?” Cauce told reporters.

Hard stuff? Compared to what Heeke has encountered at Arizona, Jennifer Cohen is in Margaritaville.

Like most ADs who aren’t at a resource-blessed Ohio State or Alabama, Heeke surely understands there’s no true point at which you catch up, take a breath and believe all is under control. In the Pac-12, the chase of UCLA and Stanford and Oregon is eternal. Once you think you’ve made ground, the landscape shifts.

You’re chasing again, and the chase isn’t always on the scoreboard.

Here’s an example: After evaluating his high command for six months, Heeke created a position and hired Krystal Swindlehurst as senior associate athletics director for human resources, internal operations and strategic planning.

That’s a job that didn’t exist in college athletics since forever. That’s a title that can exhaust or frighten off any potential candidate.

Swindlehurst, who worked for Heeke at Central Michigan, manages all human resources, organizational management and internal administration functions.

After the troubled cases of basketball player Elliott Pitts and assistant track coach Craig Carter created disquieting headlines, why wouldn’t you want someone like Swindlehurst — someone who spent seven years working for the campus police department at CMU — to monitor your day-to-day off-field issues?

It’s a combination of conflict-management and damage control. That office on college campuses might henceforth be as important as that of the football coach.

No longer is an AD’s job performance based on wins, losses and money on the bank, and that’s why Heeke’s first 13 months at Arizona must be looked at through a different lens.

Here’s what I mean: Arizona’s 20-year run as a men’s and women’s swimming powerhouse hit bottom with a resounding splat. Coach Rick DeMont, who inherited a mess, retired a few weeks after Heeke took office. Once Heeke got a chance to fully inspect the swimming program, he was told that it would cost $13.2 million to rebuild the infrastructure at Hillenbrand Aquatic Center.

Who’s got that kind of money for a swimming pool?

Bulldozers arrived at the swimming complex a few weeks ago; what used to be the home of Olympic medalists is now an acre of dirt. But coupled with the acquisition of Heeke’s first coaching hire, Augie Busch, the future of UA swimming is again promising.

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Spending money you don’t have — adding to the athletic department’s debt — is not a noble enterprise, but unless Heeke had eliminated men’s and women’s swimming, it had to be done.

In matters of finance, he has been decisive. In 13 months, he has committed $66 million to bricks and mortar.

On Monday night, softball donors met for dinner at Hillenbrand Stadium and were shown architectural drawings of an $8 million remake of what used to be the NCAA’s leading softball facility. Now it’s merely serviceable. Now, No. 1 Oregon has the Pac-12’s top softball stadium.

Work on Arizona’s softball stadium has been delayed for years; to Heeke’s credit, he didn’t leave it for the next AD.

Spending on credit isn’t anything new at the UA, either. Remember when the sky boxes and loge suites were built at Arizona Stadium in 1989? The final payment will be made in 2019.

You can imagine Arizona’s athletic director of 2050 going over the books and asking, with an incredulous tone, “We’re still paying for that old softball stuff?”

Every AD in the Pac-12 is apt to be saying something like that in 2050.

In 13 months, Heeke also changed the environment of the UA’s compliance department by hiring Brent Blaylock, who was wooed from a similar job at Kansas. Compliance is such an important job in college athletics that Arizona now has five full-time compliance officials.

It’s not sexy — it’s not the all-eyes-focused decision to choose former Texas A&M football coach Kevin Sumlin over Navy coach Ken Niuamtololo — but it’s 2018. Compliance is a huge task at an athletic department with 500 ballplayers.

Good move: Heeke’s intuition from years at CMU and on the staff at Oregon led him to investigate the culture inside Rich Rodriguez’s football program. Those troubling discoveries, combined with substandard recruiting and fan apathy, led to the decision to fire the coach and pay him $6.5 million to leave.

In most years, that would be an athletic director’s biggest and boldest move. But for Heeke, it was one of many big and bold moves.

Not-so-good move: Heeke was less than transparent. He was invisible. He did not answer a single media question about RichRod’s firing.

And over five somber days in March, Heeke was part of a university administrative and legal group that chose to keep Sean Miller as the school’s basketball coach. Good move? The debate continues.

Transparency? None.

You don’t need to be Greg Byrne, outfront and visible, to be an effective AD. But you can’t stand behind the curtain, either.

The heavy lifting for Heeke is far from an end. Can the UA basketball program survive FBI and NCAA investigations without crumbling into years of oblivion? Will the university approve another $50 million or so to remake the west side of Arizona Stadium?

There’s so much more to do and so much more at stake than at any time in UA sports history. Is Heeke the man for the job? He’d better be.