When he was athletic director at Eastern Michigan and then Iowa State and Arizona State, climbing steadily up the ladder of college sports, Gene Smith spent about 80 percent of his time raising money.
“Just trying to change a nickel into a dollar every day,” said Smith, who parlayed success at each of those stops into his current role as athletic director at Ohio State University, where he heads the nation’s largest college athletic program.
There, with a $109 million budget that fuels 36 teams — well above the national Division I average of 20 teams — he spends almost none of his time raising money.
“I’m blessed here,” said Smith, who was hired at Ohio State in March 2005, after five years at Arizona State. “Financially, we do very well because of the success of the program and the great tradition. So I spend very little time fundraising. I spend more time as a leader, be it at the institution or in the industry.”
Smith long has been a factor on the national landscape. He has held seats on the most influential NCAA committees and now serves on a 27-member panel that NCAA President Myles Brand established to address low graduation rates in men’s basketball.
WHAT PEOPLE
ARE SAYING:
“His creative and innovative programs in the athletic department demonstrate thoughtful planning, careful preparation, and an understanding of the symbiosis of the athletic and academic programs within the university.”
PHILIP T.K. DANIEL
OSU Athletic Council
On campus, Smith has made the development of the department’s 330 employees a priority. That’s something he wasn’t able to focus on at other programs, such as Arizona State, where he had to trim his staff by 14 one year and find ways to “do more with less.”
At Ohio State he has four administrators and each is responsible for a cluster of sports. He allows each of them to work with coaches, oversee budgets and handle issues as they arise.
“Each of them is almost like an AD for that group of sports,” said Smith, whose teams won 12 Big Ten championships in nine sports in the 2006-07 academic year. “My job is to help develop them, because a couple of them aspire to become athletic directors.
“People tend to support what they build, so you include them in decision-making and help them grow with the program. Everywhere I’ve been, that’s been something I’ve always tried to do and prided myself on. But here I’m able to do it more because of the resources we have.”
Smith said each job has helped him prepare for the next. But perhaps no job set him up better for Ohio State than the first off-field job he took after playing football at Notre Dame and coaching there as an assistant under Dan Devine for four seasons.
Smith said he never aspired to coach and only did so because Devine asked him to. When Devine retired, Smith contemplated pursuing an MBA, but instead took a spot in the training program at IBM. During a two-year stint as a marketing specialist, he gave six or seven seminars a month to dentists, lawyers and others who used IBM computers in their businesses.
“I learned about distribution and the manufacturing industry and the health industry, because that’s who I was selling computers to,” Smith said. “And you develop presentation skills. After that, I felt more comfortable in dealing with people from the business industry than I’d ever felt in my life.”
Entering athletic administration at a time when big-school programs were starting to look more like midsized companies, that business background served Smith well.
“The size of that [Ohio State] program would make it hard for some people, because along with all the support, you’ve got the bills to pay, too,” said Chuck Neinas, a consultant who specializes in coach and athletic director searches. “In a program like that, it’s advantageous to have someone who has a pretty good business mind. I think Gene has that.”
Heads the nation’s largest program, with a $109 million budget, 36 varsity teams and 330 employees.
