Q&A with new Winthrop AD Ken Halpin

Ken Halpin and a longtime friend had a good chuckle when Halpin was named Winthrop’s new athletics director this week.

The two were in the stands in Spokane in March 2007 for Winthrop’s finest sporting moment, when Gregg Marshall’s Eagles knocked off Notre Dame in the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. To get seats close to the court, Halpin and a couple of buddies knew to call the ticket office of the school traveling the furthest to Spokane: Winthrop. They snagged tickets in the Winthrop section and adopted the Eagles as their team for the weekend.

Nine years later, that memory bubbled up from the depths for an ironic resurfacing.

“That’s how I first became acquainted with Winthrop and I’ve always kept tabs on them since,” said Halpin. “When I did see that Tom Hickman had announced his retirement that was something I was absolutely eager to stick my name in the hat for.”

At 34 years old, Halpin is undoubtedly one of the youngest athletics directors in NCAA Division I. He’s already earned a doctorate from Washington State, is married, has two sons and a third kid on the way this fall (what have you been doing with your life?).

Halpin will be formally introduced at Winthrop on Monday, May 23 and begins work July 11. He answered some of the pressing questions on the mind of Eagles athletics supporters while chewing up the road Tuesday evening during a two-hour drive across Washington state.

When you took your first tour of Winthrop were there any things that jumped out to you - good, bad, something you would change, add?

The very first impression I had, coming from the northwest, no matter how much you look at pictures of the (Winthrop) campus online, none of the pictures do justice to what a beautiful campus it is. I think college campuses in general, I don’t know of any I don’t like. But Winthrop’s in particular is just a beautiful campus.

You start on July 11; how long do you think it will take you to get a handle on things and begin to move forward?

The best way I can answer that is that I hope I never feel settled. My thought is I’m gonna begin moving forward the second I park my vehicle in Rock Hill. The minute I get there, even as I’m unpacking my vehicle and moving into wherever my wife and I are gonna live with my family, everything about the experience is feeding what things I want to be working on. I’m lucky to be married to the woman I’m married to because my personal life is very much a part of my work life. It’s all integrated. There’s often times when we’re out having dinner with friends, people that have become life-long friends that we’ll never forget, while they also happen to donate to the athletic department.

I don’t need to be settled to begin gathering input from the community. I think the direction forward starts the second I get there.

How central are marketing and promotion to your plans moving forward?

I try to focus more on the word branding. As an example, you’ll almost always see me with the logo on somewhere. I’ll have a polo or if I’m in a suit and tie, I’ll have a lapel pin. I do that on purpose because whenever I’m speaking about what I’m trying to do on behalf of the institution I always tell people, and I did the same thing at Eastern, ‘everything I’m doing is to advance this right here,’ and I point to the logo. That logo represents so many things - students, past, present and future, experiences, highs and lows - and my job is to utilize what we have to advance the power of this brand, to make it more well known, more positive and exciting, to build pride in this brand with everything we do.

I’m sure Eastern Washington is often overshadowed by Washington, Washington State and Gonzaga; Winthrop is in a similar boat with widely followed, bigger state schools in Clemson and South Carolina...

One hundred percent.

How do you get through to the Rock Hill fan that has no attachment to Winthrop, other than proximity?

You’ve got to know what your differentiating factors are. At Eastern, we’re 15 miles from Gonzaga. In basketball land we’re absolutely under the shadow of Gonzaga and in football land we’re under the shadow of Washington State and a few other schools.

But I guarantee you if you talk to any resident of Rock Hill, no athletic director from Clemson or the athletic director from South Carolina are gonna walk into their office or home for dinner, or if they are it’s gonna be a very small minority. The accessibility that we can offer at Winthrop - the ability to just walk in and knock on the door and be able to meet with our athletic director, our coaching staff, understand the student athletes that we have - that accessibility is something we can do that bigger schools can’t.

No. 2, our price of entry is a fraction of what it takes to make sure you maintain your Clemson tickets or your South Carolina tickets. The cost of entry is so much easier, and then I would say the family atmosphere really resonated with me at Winthrop. The strong family atmosphere, there is a lot to be said about that.

Winthrop has a proud basketball tradition in the last 20 years but attendances haven’t always matched on-court success; how aware of that are you and how much of a priority is boosting attendance at basketball games, just from people (students) at the school?

Boosting attendance is a big deal. During the interview process coaches brought that up. Attendance is such an important factor. Attendance is a symptom of your brand. It’s not necessarily something you drive for directly. If you can build all the pieces around it the right way, then attendance becomes a positive symptom of the success you’re emanating from your department.

Football has been an on-again, off-again thing at Winthrop. What are your thoughts on tackling the issue once and for all, whether a yea or nay?

I talked to (Winthrop President) Dr. (Dan) Mahony and he’s as aware as anybody about the football discussion. There’s obviously a lot of desire for it in South Carolina and that makes perfect sense. He’s been working on some evaluations of what it would be prior to me being there.

Obviously it’s not my decision, it would be a university decision. But there’s two primary factors and any time it’s brought up to me I’ve only heard one, the financial factor, it would be expensive. That’s an obvious one.

The challenging part is the gender equity. If Winthrop were to add football tomorrow they would immediately be at risk for a Title IX lawsuit because they’re not taking the proper steps to provide an equitable experience for both men and women. To add football would mean either adding women’s sports in advance of it, or cutting men’s sports. I can assure you no athletic director in the country, including myself, want to be a part of cutting sports.

I don’t believe at Winthrop that student fees are a financial model worth pursuing. So, those are all the things that play into it. Is it a discussion that I think is intriguing? Yeah. But even if it were to happen at lightspeed you wouldn’t see kickoff for five years. In the meantime, there is an athletic department operating at a high level right now that needs support. That’s gonna be my focus.

You played football and baseball at Willamette University; what positions did you play?

I moved around a lot in baseball. I played centerfield until my senior year when I caught. And in football I was recruited as a strong safety and moved to outside linebacker and inside linebacker.

How old are you? I thought you had to have gray hair to be an AD...

I just shave it off so you can’t see it. I was born in 1981 so this coming September I’ll turn 35.

That’s a pretty quick rise...

I think it is, I’m proud of it.

I asked followers on Twitter if they had any questions they wanted me to ask you; one guy wondered if you were involved with the installation of the red turf at Eastern Washington’s football stadium?

(Laughing) I can talk for hours about it. I was literally hired, like, two months after the inaugural football season on it, so I was not involved in the decision to install the red turf.

There is probably a handful of people in Rock Hill in 2009 that knew what Eastern Washington University was and today they probably know of it exclusively because of the red turf. Love it or hate it, we just care that you have an opinion.

What’s your opinion on schools offering full cost of attendance scholarships?

I’m all for offering student-athletes everything we can to give them a great experience. The trick with that is every school has their own budget to balance. They’ve got facilities to maintain and some schools have great brands, sell a lot of tickets, take a lot of donations and they can supplement that budget. Some schools have to work hard to battle and overcome that.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 1:20 PM with the headline "Q&A with new Winthrop AD Ken Halpin."