Rutgers AD Pat Hobbs "had a pretty productive first year" on the job, as "not even the most diehard Scarlet Knights fan could've foreseen Rutgers generating the kinds of positive headlines as a result of Hobbs' Year 1 efforts," according to Keith Sargeant of the Newark STAR-LEDGER. Hobbs last week sat with Sargeant for a Q&A to "reflect on his first year in charge of the Rutgers athletics department, discussing his top accomplishments, his biggest challenges." Below are excerpts from the Q&A, some of which have been edited for brevity:
Q: What are you proudest of?
Hobbs: The excitement that people have around Rutgers Athletics, and I mean that across the constituencies. We have a long way to go but to have pretty much every constituency excited about Rutgers Athletics is pretty good, and it's a long way from where we were a year ago.
Q: Just last week you spent time talking with fraternities and sororities about the Athletics Creed, you traveled to Chicago to support your men's team at DePaul, you then went to Washington DC for your women's soccer team's NCAA game. And I'm assuming there was a fundraising meeting or two along the way. What was that week like?
Hobbs: There's no normal week. The hours are very, very long. You want to get to as many contests as you can. ... It's part of the excitement of the job, is you can be in Chicago one night with your basketball team, go out and watch your soccer team in DC, get back and have an important dinner with members of the Board on Friday night. Back for wrestling and football on Saturday and I spent a lot of that time in the lots visiting with people and everything else, and then Sunday we had Niagara and it just continues. So (Thanksgiving was) the first day off in a long time.
Q: What have been the biggest challenges you've faced?
Hobbs: It's about not having enough time to engage everybody that I'd like to engage. ... You have to be as efficient with your time as you can while doing all the different roles you have an as Athletic Director. There's so much to do, and there's an urgency to it, but there's just not enough time in the day to accomplish everything you want to get done on a daily basis.
Q: How's the strategic planning process going?
Hobbs: We already have begun collecting some benchmarking data. ... What is the best thinking out there in terms of where college sports are going, where we view attendance going, what do millennials want in terms of game-day experience -- all of that information we're working on collecting now and if it takes 6 months or 9 months from the time we start working in earnest (Newark STAR-LEDGER, 11/26).
