Georgia Tech President Dr. Bud Peterson offered these thoughts on Todd Stansbury, who was introduced as the new athletic director on Thursday.
Stansbury's experience also includes stops at Houston, East Tennessee State, Oregon State, Central Florida and then again at Oregon State, where he has spent the past 1 1/2 years as athletic director.
Q: What’s job No. 1? What’s the first tangible thing fans will be able to see from his efforts?
A: Clearly, the first thing he’s going to have to do is re-acclimate himself with Georgia Tech and the situation. But I think both he and I would like to see his initial focus on strengthening, renewing and expanding the fan base.
It’s not clear when he’s going to get here, the late part of November, first part of December, but it’s going to be a great time to re-energize the fan base. He knows Georgia Tech. He knows how to do that. He’s done it before. We’re excited about that.
Q: When you say fanbase, does that include donors or are you referring more to grass-roots efforts?
A: It’s not just donors. I don’t want him to go out and just raise money. We’ve got to re-energize the fanbase, try to fill the stadium, sell season tickets. Basketball season is coming up. That’ll be the first thing he needs to focus on after he gets his feet on the ground and gets to know the personnel.
Q: Considering the facilities race – and a lot has been made of the facilities – what are your expectation for you main sports, football and men’s basketball, what do you think they can accomplish?
A: Do you mean in terms of facilities or in terms of performance?
Q: In terms of how performance is affected by recruiting which is affected by facilities and the race in the ACC?
A: We want to be the top of the ACC. We’ve been there in football. We can get back there in basketball. That’s certainly our plan and our goal.
We have done a lot with facilities. I’ve read a lot of what has been written about facilities. Since I’ve been here we’ve done a basketball stadium, softball stadium, the indoor football practice facility, we’ve redone the tennis facility, the golf facility, re-did the locker room in baseball and re-tiled the swimming pool.
We’ve done a lot. We can always do more. Todd gave a great answer, “you have to know who you are and what you are.”
Q: Did y’all know each other before this, perhaps from different athletic committees?
A: We had actually met at a reunion to honor Phil Adler. As he mentioned, he took seven classes from Phil Adler, which is a little unusual. That was 5-6 years ago.
Q: No communication since then until this?
A: He’s been on the radar. He’s an alum.
Q: Did his name circulate the last time (the a.d. job came open)?
A: It popped up, but he hadn’t been at Central Florida very long. He wasn’t are Oregon State for very long, but we are glad he is here.
Q: How will the buyout with Oregon State be handled?
A: We haven’t got all of that figure out. We are almost there. It’s a little premature to talk about.
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