In pivotal moment for Winthrop athletics, new AD Chuck Rey has some ideas
How do we differentiate ourselves?
Chuck Rey isn’t the first Winthrop official to ponder this question. He’s also not asking this question for the first time. But it has a new urgency to him now.
Rey, who since December had been serving as Winthrop’s interim AD and volleyball coach, was named Winthrop’s athletic director two weeks ago. In taking the helm, the Chicago native and decorated coach stepped down as the program’s volleyball coach and stepped into a role that hasn’t been filled permanently since Ken Halpin left in July 2021.
It’s a role that is tasked with addressing questions with department-wide, university-wide and Division I college sports-wide implications during a particularly pivotal time. And among those questions: How do we differentiate ourselves?
“I tell you what’s interesting about this conference, and what’s interesting about Winthrop and where we need to go, is that at one time, Winthrop was one of four or maybe five Division I universities in the state of South Carolina,” Rey told The Herald in an interview last month. “We’re now one of 13.”
He continued: “The challenge we run into at Winthrop is, ‘How do we differentiate ourselves? … How are we and how can we be different from Furman? College of Charleston? Charleston Southern? Clemson? Carolina? USC Upstate?”
Rey has some ideas, and they involve using resources close to home.
Investing in new sports
There is no denying it, Rey said: Winthrop needs to “understand and recognize” that “we are a basketball school.”
Winthrop’s recent success in men’s basketball has been well-documented. The program has earned 12 NCAA tournament berths since 1999 and earned national recognition and Cinderella labels along the way. (The team was one win short of its third Big South tournament championship in as many years in March.)
But supporting basketball requires a rising tide that, in turn, can lift all boats.
Rey, 48, said that adding more athletes into Winthrop’s athletics programs could help rebuild Winthrop’s athletic department. Adding more student athletes, for instance, can allow the staff to add an academic adviser, or a strength coach, or an athletic trainer. And that’s critical: The Herald previously reported that the pandemic thinned out a lot of Winthrop’s administrative roles in athletics — at one point, approximately 30% of “high achievers” had left “high-achieving vacancies,” to borrow words from Halpin.
So how can Winthrop add more athletes? The Rock Hill university doesn’t have to look far, Rey said.
Winthrop can continue to invest in esports. In some instances, Winthrop can use and expand on some resources already at its disposal. That includes esports — a sport whose professional world championships compel a comparable amount of viewers to the Super Bowl. Two years ago, Winthrop won the national championship in League of Legends.
What does “investment” in esports mean? Rey cited the model of one of the best esports programs in the country. Maryville University’s esports program divides its players into a varsity team — fit with college scholarship opportunity and similar NCAA athlete benefits — and a community club team. The club team at Maryville, Rey estimated, boasts approximately 2,000 members.
Building a successful club team, Rey said, can be a way to build the athletics program — in turn protecting “traditional sports” — and it can also be a way to bring uniqueness to Winthrop and attract students.
The same theory applies to building a disc golf club team. Winthrop is home to a beautiful disc golf course. The U.S. Disc Golf Championship, the premiere event in a growing sport, is hosted there. Innova, one of the largest disc golf companies in the country, was founded in Rock Hill. How come Winthrop doesn’t use its nearby resources and turn having a club team at the sport’s epicenter into a selling point? What if that club team eventually turns into an NCAA-sanctioned team?
Same goes for corn hole. The American Corn Hole League headquarters are based in York County. And cycling. The BMX World Championships are being hosted in Rock Hill in 2024. Belmont-Abbey, a like-sized university to Winthrop, has a cycling team with dozens of athletes on it. Yet Winthrop doesn’t have one.
These are all ways Rey thinks he can immediately impact Winthrop.
“How can we continue to marry ourselves to the city of Rock Hill,” Rey said, “who is thriving in amateur athletics and athletics overall?”
‘How do we bring the old and the new back?’
There are a lot of moving parts early in Rey’s tenure — and a lot of those parts are subject to the whims of a rapidly changing college sports ecosystem.
Conferences are realigning. One-time transfers are shifting scholarship reservoirs every year. Name, image and likeness is now a service Division I athletic departments need to be well-versed in. The Transformation Committee, a group of high-ranking college leaders charged with modernizing the NCAA (who will be visiting Winthrop officials in January), could change Division I inter-league parity forever — it might let individual conferences determine whether they’ll eliminate scholarship caps, or abolish the cap on number of coaches per team, or expand direct payments from schools to athletes and more.
Rey is also inheriting the stresses of a normal AD at Winthrop — filling coaching vacancies and sustaining a healthy work culture and monitoring budgets.
Per the school’s 2021 NCAA financial summary report, which was obtained by The Herald via FOIA request, Winthrop athletics reported just over $11 million in total operating revenues and $10.9 million in total operating expenses. It’s worth noting that the reported revenue includes $5.4 million in student fees and $2.9 million in direct institutional support, and it comes a year after Winthrop cut both of its decorated tennis programs.
Rey said bridging the gap between “the old and the new” will also be a central goal of his tenure as AD. He’s on his second stint at Winthrop — first as an assistant volleyball coach between 2009-13 and second as a head coach in 2018 and now as AD — and he plans on staying in the area awhile to see his plans through. (He and his wife, Lori, have 6-year-old twins, Siena and Tripp, and the parents want the kids to finish school here.)
“I’ve been here long enough where I know enough people here who can help guide us in ways that are meaningful for the university, for the alumni, and can bring together the Winthrop family that we are,” he said. “How do we bring the old and the new back? How do we continue to make this the family that we know that it is? I’m not saying it wasn’t there the past few years. But I think we can make it better. And that’s what we’re excited about.”
This story was originally published July 10, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
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