So you want to be the athletic director at Pima College? Buckle up, buddy. Sleep is optional.
Here is new PCC athletic director Jim Monaco’s weekend schedule:
Bus with the Aztec football team to the Phoenix airport at 4:45 a.m.
Fly to Salt Lake City.
Eat lunch.
Bus 130 miles to Snow College.
Nap whenever possible.
Coach the Aztecs in a potential WSFL championship game at 7 p.m.
Bus 130 miles back to Salt Lake City.
Have a team dinner at Denny’s at 1 a.m.
Sleep in airport chairs or on the floor.
Fly to Phoenix at 7 a.m.
Bus to Pima College.
Monaco has two games remaining as PCC’s football coach, after which the program he has propelled into the NJCAA Top 20 will be disbanded. Why? It costs too much.
“We do this on a shoestring budget,” Pima College Chancellor Lee Lambert said Monday.
In PCC’s most important game in more than a decade, and maybe ever — “If we win, we are the WSFL champions,” Monaco said — the school had to choose between flying to Snow College and sleeping at the airport, or taking a 12-hour bus ride and bunking in a small-town hotel.
“It’s a huge task,” said Monaco. “It’s also a huge opportunity.”
Jim Monaco spent 25 years of his life as a policeman, in Boston and in Houston and in Tucson. He is, by any measure, a tough guy. His is a voice you don’t forget. If Monaco’s getting in over his head, he’s fooled everybody.
Lambert and PCC’s West Campus president Morgan Phillips believe Monaco is the right man for the job, precisely at a time the school is facing an athletic department crisis unprecedented in its 46-year history.
It is eliminating football. On Monday, Lambert confirmed another sport or two will soon be shuttered.
“It has beaten me up pretty good,” said Monaco.
Yet it is Monaco who has been chosen to fight back, to put a new voice and direction to Pima’s athletic department. His enthusiasm is infectious and even though his background does not suggest he can balance a budget or capably negotiate a practice-facilities deal to benefit PCC’s No. 3 men’s soccer team, he is a notable leader of men.
Monaco replaces Edgar Soto, athletic director for more than a decade, a former Pima College baseball coach and infielder who was on the scene as the Aztecs became a national power in soccer, softball, men’s and women’s basketball and in track and field.
On Monday, Soto candidly said, “I took it about as far as I could; Jim is going to do a better job than I did; he’s going to take it to another level, as a premier athletic director at a premier college.”
Soto suggested that Monaco’s big personality will help PCC’s athletic department tap into new marketing and fundraising territory He is, after all, a salesman as much as a football coach and former teacher and counselor.
Monaco recruited so well the last few seasons — at a school without a regulation-size football field — that his players have gone on to sign with Oregon, Colorado, Utah and Oregon State, among other places. This year’s PCC football roster includes eight players from Hawaii and seven from Georgia.
He has done more with less, 6-1, ranked No. 14 in the NJCAA poll.
That’s what PCC will expect him to do as its athletic director.
The ACCAC, an enterprise of 15 Arizona community colleges, has changed significantly over the years. It used to have 12 football teams. Now it has eight, and after four Maricopa County schools eliminate football after this season, it will have just three football schools.
Pima College has more sports, 18, than any other school in the ACCAC. Rival Cochise College has just five sports. Glendale College and Mesa College have 16. Scottsdale College, 10. Central Arizona, 11.
Prescott’s Yavapai College sponsors only four sports.
Over the next year or two, the Aztecs will need to find a level of participation commensurate with their finances, almost all of which are accrued via student fees.
Soto’s tenure established a productive foundation, creating a higher profile for the Aztecs during a period of consistent success produced by elite-level coaches such as Dave Cosgrove, Brian Peabody, Todd Holthaus, Greg Wenneborg and Armando Quiroz.
Now it’s on a former policeman from Boston to seek even higher ground.
“I couldn’t write a better script,” he said. “I won’t let you down.”
