When considering Homer Rice's legacy at Georgia Tech, there's a little something for everyone, for both the hardened pragmatist and dreamy idealist. Because Rice, who died Monday at the age of 97, so naturally worked both sides of that street.
He was part program-builder, arriving at Tech in 1980 and sparking a sporting renaissance on The Flats during his 17 years as athletic director. Where before him there was a football team that teetered on irrelevance and signs of dry rot throughout the athletic department, there followed one of the golden periods of Tech athletics. Highlighting Rice's reign was a football national championship, a men's basketball Final Four appearance both in 1990 and six different programs enjoying at least some time atop the national rankings.
And part person-builder, who dared step beyond the often cynical, win-today realm of college athletics and advocate for a player's long-term well-being beyond the field. His "Total Person" program, which stressed life skills, career planning and self-improvement, was the model for a similar course later launched by the NCAA.
Make no mistake, Rice served the bottom line of winning. "When he took that job in '80, Georgia Tech was probably as low as it has ever been and will never be again, whether it was facilities or funding," said Bernadette McGlade, one of Rice's initial hires at Tech as its women's basketball coach, now the commissioner of the Atlantic 10 Conference. "He literally reinvented and rebuilt an entire academic institution's athletic program."
As Rice put it succinctly in early 2023: "We were able to put some money together and some wins together and one by one, we moved it forward and gained a lot of success."
But he also reached deeper into the athlete, past the fast-twitch fiber to the mind and spirit, to where the ever-fading ideal of college athletics lives.
"His most important legacy is in the education and self-esteem the student-athletes earned by going through his program," said Bill Curry, the football coach hired just before Rice's arrival who spent the 1980-86 seasons there before leaving for Alabama. "If you took the Total Person program it affected everything else in your life and made a difference in your life. I think that's Homer's gift."
Read the full story by Steve Hummer on ajc.com
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