Woelk: Buffs A.D. George Reflects On First 1,000 Days
June 07, 2016 | General, Neill Woelk
BOULDER — There were days when time seemed to fly — and days when it seemed to crawl at a snail's pace. Days when the Champions Center appeared to grow before your eyes — and days when delays seemed to maddeningly halt progress in its tracks.
But now, with his first 1,000 days in the books (he passed that milestone in May), Colorado Athletic Director Rick George can look back and see progress that many thought impossible when he took the reins of the CU Athletic Department in August 2013: a world-class facility in place, fundraising at a record level and performance on the field and in the classroom improving at a steady rate.
It didn't come easily.
When George assumed control in 2013, he took over a department that had myriad financial troubles and a fractured fan base. When talking with CU officials about the possibility of taking the job, it didn't take him long to reach an assessment.
“In my opinion, it was a part of the university that was underperforming, particularly when compared to the standards of years past,” George said. “When we came in we had a budget that was in significant deficit. We felt like we were behind significantly in our facilities and we felt like it was an underperforming asset we thought we could grow and turn into the jewel that it is.
“We knew we needed to chart a plan for the future.”
George began charting that course immediately. He took one look at the facilities in place, studied current plans for expansion — plans that had been on hold for years — and in barely 30 days, revamped and reworked those plans into blueprints for a world-class facility. At the same time, he began formulating a comprehensive strategic plan that not only addressed the department's most pressing issues, but set an ambitious trajectory for success that included aspirational but attainable goals. He established new fundraising goals and strategies, and made sure he had the people in place to execute those strategies.
Then he took action.
By December of 2013, he had the CU Board of Regents' approval for the new facility. In February 2014, he presented the department's first-ever three-year strategic plan to the regents, one that included a three-pronged mission: provide a world-class student-athlete experience, significantly improve the department's financial condition, and raise the level of competitive excellence throughout the department. In May 2014, CU broke ground on the new facility and by August 2015, it was ready for the football team to move in.
The reaction has been a long list of rave reviews from every corner of the sports world. The CU Champions Center sports a full-field indoor practice facility, spacious locker rooms and a weight room second to none; as well as the CU Sports Medicine and Performance Center, a facility that is drawing worldwide attention. The construction of the facility, in turn, allowed CU to remodel the Dal Ward Center and add locker space for Olympic sports, retool the existing weight room and add thousands of square feet for academic support.
Now, 1,000 days after he started, CU's athletic department has entered a stage that few envisioned: a world-class, state-of-the-art facility in place, a budget that will be balanced for the second year in a row, and steadily improving success on the field and in the classroom for the Buffs' student-athletes.
“I certainly had high expectations about Rick's ability to turn the athletic department around, given his success with the PGA and the Texas Rangers, but his accomplishments in the last three years exceeded my expectations by tenfold,” said CU Chancellor Phil DiStefano, the man who hired George. “He has raised more private funding in three years than what was raised in the previous 10 years. The Champions Center facility is definitely one of the top five new facilities in the country, and our student athletes are seeing success on the field and court as well as the classroom. Besides these tangible accomplishments, Rick has instituted a culture of integrity and entrepreneurship into the department that has also paid huge dividends.
“Personally, I am looking forward to the next 1,000 days to watch Rick George take athletics to the next level.”
George isn't someone who spends much time looking in the rearview mirror. His eye is always on the future, always studying where the Buffs must go next. But recently, he did take time to reflect on what his first 1,000 days produced — and what he's expecting from the next 1,000.
Q: When you arrived in Boulder, what did you consider your first order of business?
A: There were a multitude of things that we had to do. We had to look at our culture in the athletics department and determine exactly what our priorities were. When you work anywhere and you don't know where you're going, it's really difficult to get there.
We also had to repair some relationships. We had a really fractured Buff Nation that we needed to fix. There were numerous things that I felt were necessary, but the priority was to develop a strategic plan. Once we got everybody turning in the same direction, once we understood where we wanted to go and how we were going to get there, we got more people on board.
Our culture was a major part of that. I think 1,000 days later we've addressed some of our issues. We'll balance our budget for the second year in a row and we'll have a small surplus again. That was a priority. We needed to show our alumni base, our campus, our supporters who have invested money, that we're going to be thoughtful about how we spend our resources. I think we've done that.
Q: What has the strategic plan helped accomplish?
A: We know what our priorities are, we know what our vision is, we know what our mission is. We've balanced our budget. We have our expenses under control, but we still need to do a much better job of generating revenue. While we've done a great job of fundraising for our facility, we still have our annual fund that we need to grow; we have our endowments that we need to grow; and we have to get football putting 10,000 more people in the stadium every game. There's a lot of work to be done.
But in 1,000 days we built an incredible facility — that was a priority. When you go back to our core values and look at Respect, Accountability, Passion, Integrity and Dedication — RAPID — we felt like we needed to do that quickly. We did. We built a gem that's going to be transformational for this university and this department for the next 25 to 30 years. We knew we needed to do it right and I think we did. It's doing all the the things we hoped it would do.
And, I think we've generated some pride from our alumni and our former athletes in what we're doing. Our coaches have done a great job in embracing our “compete for and win championships” vision. We've won national championships and individual championships. We're competing at a pretty high level.
Q: What are some of the priorities now that still need to be addressed?
A: Our facilities. There's still a lot of work to do. We need to fix the Flatirons Club (in Folsom Field), we need to fix the west side of the stadium, we need rails in the stadium and in the Coors Events Center, and we need a new speaker system in Folsom. All those things require money and patience, and a lot of people don't have patience. They want a lot of those things done now. But now that we have our books under control, we're able to be maybe more thoughtful about addressing some of those things.
Q: About a month after you started here, Boulder was hit by a 1,000-year flood. How did that impact your planning?
A: That was certainly something I hadn't planned for. I was still living in married student housing. I was actually one of the people that was evacuated. I had to sleep in my office, and that gave me another perspective on our facilities. I saw the Dal Ward Center — which was our newest building, built in 1991 — wasn't holding up. We had water coming through multiple areas of our facility and I saw the way our facilities team had been creative in diverting water to prevent even more damage. We had water coming through our computer center.
I remember the following Tuesday I went to the Board of Regents and said, “This isn't a want, this is a need.” That may have been the only positive thing that came out of the flood. It really opened my eyes and maybe others' eyes on the need for facilities.
Q: What were other effects of the flood?
A: It was very difficult canceling a football game. Less than two months on the job and you have to make a decision of that magnitude, when you have a Fresno State team sitting on the tarmac ready to fly here and you're telling them to hold because you're trying to make a decision that makes sense. A lot of people didn't know me then and were probably were questioning that decision because the football team had just won a couple of games (Colorado State and Central Arkansas) and were on a pretty good high. To have to cancel that game was difficult, to say the least. I also knew the repercussions if we didn't get another game. It was very difficult, but we finally got Charleston Southern.
It's something that you obviously never see coming, but we had great leadership from our chancellor. He came over and we met with the team and Mike (MacIntyre) and told them we weren't going to play. They were disappointed, but they also rallied and the next day we took the food that we would have had for the game and we fed all the married housing and international students. Our student athletes really showed their commitment to the community.
It was definitely a challenge but everyone here responded in a great way.
Q: You mentioned that the Dal Ward Center was more than 20 years old when you arrived. CU had held plans for a new facility for more than a decade, but had never been able to take action on those plans. What made you decide to begin the project so quickly?
A: In everything you do, you take risk — and at some point, you have to have confidence in people to make a decision they think is best. My second day on the job I looked at the plan that they were talking about. I went to Chancellor DiStefano and said it wouldn't work, at least from my perspective. I told him we needed 30 days to really evaluate what we needed and what we wanted. We talked to multiple people — academics, Mark Wetmore, the football coaches, everyone.
The result is what you see today. This building isn't really my vision. It was listening to multiple constituents. Having the academic center under the club level (as originally planned) logistically didn't make sense. That's not a slap at any other design; it's just that for me, it didn't make sense.
We kept hearing that you can't put a full practice field up on Franklin Field — well, we have extra room. We actually put up a full indoor facility and still have room for a grass field out there.
We did it through collaboration and we did it through support from the chancellor and the president and our design review board. We had to look at the flood plains and get reports from the EPA. That was something people said we could never do, and we did it.
Then (track and cross country coach) Mark Wetmore said, 'Why aren't you building a 300-meter track around the indoor field?' I said, 'Well, why not?' So we did, and we're going to find that the track is one of the very best in the country.
You can't focus on one thing and say you can't do something because of something else. We went all-in at the start and said, 'What do we have to do?' The acronym for our core values is a sense of urgency. There were a lot of things we needed to fix in a short period of time, but we had a good team in place and we had good coaches in place.
Was it a risk? Of course, but again — until you put together a plan, and you know where you're going and you know how you're going to get there, it's very difficult to operate.
Q: The Champions Center is no doubt the jewel of the facilities upgrade. But what else came about because of that decision?
A: We've got locker rooms now for all of our Olympic sports teams that worked out in Dal Ward for 25 years and didn't have a locker. To me, that was the biggest thing.
We didn't build this just for football. We built it for all of our student athletes and teams. It wasn't something that we thought about from the very beginning, but as we studied the magnitude of what our needs were, we did that. Now we have a great weight room in Dal Ward, 12,000 more square feet of academic space, and we're doing 110 individual tutor sessions a day that we were never able to do because of space.
All these things combined allow us to do the things we said we're going to do. We're creating a world-class experience for all of our student-athletes. We added $1 million to our nutrition budget; we have more space in academics; and we're doing full cost of attendance, which is another $700,000 or $800,000 to our budget.
Q: What is the next step in the process?
A: This fall, we'll be going into the third year of our strategic plan. Once we get our fourth-quarter numbers, we'll start looking at our next three-year portion, which will begin in 2017.
We'll start looking at whether our priorities have changed. Has the landscape changed? That's important — where's the NCAA going? Where are costs going to change? What other costs are we going to incur? What are priorities going to be? Do we add a sport?
We'll look at all those things and formulate the next stage of our plan.
Does our vision change? Probably not. Does our mission change? Probably not — but some components of that may. We'll evaluate that and institute a new strategic plan that will begin July 1 of 2017, and we'll work on that this fall.
Q: When you first announced your intention of building the Champions Center, there were no doubt people who weren't convinced it could be done. What specific obstacles did you have to overcome?
A: An important point I think people forget is that to build this kind of facility, when you haven't had your most visible sport successful, it's hard to do. It's been a lot of one-on-one meetings for two-plus years and getting people to buy into the vision and direction that we want to go.
Yes, this is a risk. It's a risk for our regents, it was a risk for our chancellor, it was a risk for me — because what if we didn't get there? We still have money to raise. We haven't paid all of our bond payments off, which will take 10 or 15 years. But we've put ourselves in pretty good position to do that.
But one thing I do know is the only way to get better is to get out of your comfort zone — and that requires risk. I tell our staff all the time, for us to get better we have to push each other and get ourselves out of our comfort zones. Building this thing got us out of our comfort zone. We had to work. We had to sell a vision.
A lot of people didn't think this could ever happen. But for us, it all goes back to when we were developing our strategic plan, we wanted all of our objectives to be aspirational but attainable. This was a pretty aspirational thing to do, especially in light of the fact that we had a fractured support group and we hadn't had success in football.
Yes, it was risky. It still is. We have a lot of work to do moving forward. But you have to take risks if you are going to succeed and go places — and I think we're going places. No doubt, we have to get football on the right track. We have to bring back the history and tradition that we're used to. But men's basketball is really doing well and I think our best days are still ahead of us. Overall, I really like what our coaches are doing. But we have to keep getting better.
Q: Looking back, what would you change in your first 1,000 days?
A: I don't look back too much. You want to learn from mistakes and failures, but you don't dwell on them. We're not even close to perfect, I promise you that. But I don't have anything that I really regret.
I've learned a lot from this process. Maybe we could have slowed down a little bit and done it a little differently, because a design-build means costs can grow and sometimes it's harder to control costs. Yes, we exceeded our budget, which puts a little more pressure on us to have to go out and fundraise.
But in that same vein, we weren't going to have another chance at this. If we didn't do it right, if we didn't build the rooftop terrace, if we didn't build the 300-meter track, if we didn't do this or that — I'd be sitting here telling you we made a lot of mistakes.
That indoor track is going to be beneficial. The rooftop might have been something that wasn't originally contemplated, but it was smart to do that. A lot of people are going to have great experiences with wedding and meetings and different things up there — it's going to be a great revenue producer for us.
Overall, I think we have a pretty solid plan in place. We're following our plan and I don't think there are things I regret and would take back. Our staff is experienced and we're moving in the direction I'd hoped we would.
Now we have to figure out where we're going in the future.
Q: What would Rick George's evaluation of Rick George say?
A: I don't know that I would give myself a grade — but what I would say is that I have given it all that I have. The effort has been there, the enthusiasm, the work ethic. I don't know what kind of grade you would put on that, but I don't have any regrets on where we are today. The only thing you can ask of somebody is to give everything they have. If they're doing that, I can live with that.
Contact: Neill.Woelk@Colorado.edu