Mike Bobinski asked questions, listened and took notes. The exercise continued over several weeks, with Georgia Tech’s new athletic director sitting down with every head coach and department head and trying to learn.
“I literally felt bad after a while,” men’s tennis coach Kenny Thorne said. “I was doing all the talking.”
So much so, Thorne said, that during his 1 1/2-hour meeting, he thought to himself, “Shut up, Kenny, you’re going to get yourself fired. Why don’t you find out what he wants?”
Three months after his installation as Tech’s eighth athletic director, Bobinski has reviewed those notes, from about 50 meetings, multiple times. He observed and applied the knowledge gained over nearly 30 years in college athletics administration, and he has begun to restructure the Tech athletic department and infuse it with his personality and style.
Among Bobinski’s objectives are to streamline the functioning of the department, coordinate its marketing efforts and create more cohesion among the department’s 17 varsity teams and its many support departments.
“Mike wants people to be passionate,” associate athletic director Theresa Wenzel said. “He wants people to be excited about being at Georgia Tech and proud of it.”
The changes thus far won’t be readily obvious from the stands of Bobby Dodd Stadium. For instance, he plans to place services for athletes — everything from medical treatment to strength and conditioning to academic support — under the supervision of one staff member, rather than have multiple people managing various elements.
Other internal responsibilities will change hands within the department to reduce inefficiencies, as Bobinski will try to organize the department in a way that he said is “as simple and as least cluttered as I can make it.”
Bobinski said he is not “hung up on structure an awful lot. I’m a whole lot more hung up on performance and efficiency and production than I am on who reports to whom. But you have to have some structure.”
Another priority of Bobinski’s will be to seek donors to endow more of the department’s scholarships. They are expected to take up about 14 percent, or $9.3 million, of the coming year’s $66.9 million budget.
Having that line item removed would be a significant development for a department that has struggled to break even. Due in part to losses incurred at the ACC Championship game and the Sun Bowl and a ticket-revenue shortfall for football and men’s basketball, the department sustained a $1.8 million net loss for the fiscal year ending June 30. Scholarships for the swimming, track and cross country teams are not fully funded.
Like many FBS athletic departments, Tech is holding its breath until the 2014-15 year, when money from TV contracts from the new football playoff will begin to roll in. For the ACC, the ballpark expectation is that it will annually add $3.5 million in revenues per school, and more should come in because of the conference’s grant-of-rights agreement that has effectively bound the league members together. Bobinski, in an athletic association meeting in June, cautioned that growing reliant on external revenue sources will not be acceptable.
However, “from football all the way through the rest of our programs, there are some things that we’re probably going to want to do at a higher level when we have the resources to do so,” Bobinski said.
Tech’s outward face may be changing, too. Where previously, departments such as ticket sales, marketing and media relations have traditionally operated largely independent of each other, Bobinski is encouraging those and other externally focused departments to coordinate efforts.
A goal of Bobinski’s is to build and better communicate the Tech brand, directly and proactively. Coach Paul Johnson’s often amusing Twitter feed and the football team’s Friday rollout of its web-based series “The Process,” which promises to take fans behind the scenes, dovetail into that strategy.
Often described as genuine and accessible, Bobinski appears to have brought new energy to the department in his succession of Dan Radakovich, now the Clemson athletic director. With a series of building projects completed under Radakovich’s watch, Bobinski could put his own imprint on Tech. At the time of his hiring, baseball coach Danny Hall said he was hopeful that Bobinski would return the family atmosphere that former AD Homer Rice fostered during his tenure from 1980-97.
Thorne, the men’s tennis coach, has been left with the distinct impression that Bobinski is determined to help each program, and not merely football and men’s basketball, reach excellence. He has seen it in Bobinski’s willingness to make time to meet with recruits or other visitors Thorne wants to introduce. He saw it, too, in the act of a 90-minute meeting that was short on declarations of expectations and high on listening.
“As a coach, I’ve been here for about 15 years,” said Thorne, a Tech grad who has led a considerable turnaround in his time. “I want to win as bad as anybody, personally, but I want to win for my team, I want to win for the alums at Georgia Tech. And I came out of the meeting, I literally told myself, I want to win for this man.”
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