By James Crepea
Oregon State has named the advisory committee and the search firm that will administer its process to hire a new athletic director.
Elevate Talent has been retained to administer the search process, and Carla Ho’ā, Oregon State’s vice president for finance and administration and chief financial officer, is chairing the 13-member advisory committee.
Among the committee members are five current OSU coaches including JaMarcus Shephard (football), Justin Joyner (men’s basketball), Scott Rueck (women’s basketball), Mitch Canham (baseball) and Tonya Chaplin (gymnastics). There is also one current athlete, Rebecca Kim of the women’s golf team.
They are joined by faculty athletics representative Colleen Bee; deputy athletic director/CFO and senior woman administrator Jacque Bruns; Nikki Neuburger, chief brand and product officer at lululemon; DeMonty Price, former president and chief operating, service and values officer at Restoration Hardware; Mark Reser, Reser’s Fine Foods CEO; and OSU Foundation president Shawn Scoville.
That group will provide its recommendation to OSU President Dr. Jayathi Murthy, who called the AD position an “iconic position.”
“It represents not only the leadership of athletics, but it’s an outward facing position that in many ways represents OSU,” Murthy said in an interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive on Wednesday. “My sense of the position is that it’s got to be somebody who understands both sides of that role; the overall representation of OSU as a university, but also who is running athletics.”
The new AD will succeed Scott Barnes, who is retiring at the end of August after 10 years at OSU.
The hope is to have the new AD hired “in the next several weeks,” Murthy said, so they are positioned to begin as close to the July 1 launch of the new Pac-12 as possible and certainly in place before the football season.
Murthy said she is looking for a “visionary” and “deeply ethical” leader who understands college athletics as an enterprise and business, its role in the university’s culture and academic mission, as well as the AD’s role as part of her executive leadership team. She also wants the new AD to be a leader in the new Pac-12.
“I want somebody who understands that entire story, first and foremost,” Murthy said. “Beyond that, as we enter the conference they’ve got to be an inspirational leader. They’ve got to be able to get everybody fired up and pointing in the right direction and set the vision.
“I would love for our AD to be a leader in the new conference, to have the stature and the maturity and the gravitas to be heard strongly and to be a leading voice in the new conference.”
Many of those traits suit sitting athletic directors and senior athletics administrators more than private-sector administrators. However, Murthy said she has instructed the search committee to “look very broadly” at candidates from varying backgrounds and that choosing Elevate was “deliberate” because of the firm’s experience in the corporate and business worlds in addition to its work in searches in college athletics. Elevate Talent recently had a hand in hiring Stanford’s athletic director, the Cotton Bowl CEO, and the ACC’s chief revenue officer.
Last week, Shephard said he wants the new AD to have “an extreme understanding of what are the next steps as far as college football is concerned” and “a keen understanding of how we can grow football.”
Whether a candidate has existing connections and relationships to OSU or the state would be valued but is “not determinative,” Murthy said.
The new AD will be hiring a chief operating officer and a chief revenue officer — positions the athletic department has been planning to fill for several months. Barnes and Huron Consulting Group, which he retained this winter to review the athletic department’s operations, are identifying candidates and options for the new AD.
“The new AD will be a part of getting the next layer hired and ultimately it is the new AD’s decision on what to do with the Huron report,” Murthy said. “It may help them, it may not. They may disagree with some of their conclusions. That’s their purview. But we hope it’ll be helpful.”
