Hamilton begins second year as AD with swirl of activity
“Mike, you’ve got gray hair now,” Beth Hamilton told her husband.
Sure enough, Hamilton’s appearance has changed in the two years since he was promoted to AD, and little wonder given the flurry of activity just this year.
Hamilton fired and hired a basketball coach, took heat for having to borrow money from the university to pay a buyout and dealt with a rash of football player arrests.
“I guess it comes with the territory,” he said about his hair.
Hamilton, who will turn 42 on Aug. 13, replaced retired AD Doug Dickey on July 1, 2003, after beginning his career at Tennessee in 1992 as assistant AD for development.
The most important decision so far in his tenure was hiring Bruce Pearl as the men’s basketball coach after firing Buzz Peterson. Hamilton used a search firm to help identify candidates and make initial contacts, but, unlike previous coach searches at Tennessee, there was no committee.
Hamilton took two weeks in March to find Peterson’s successor.
“That made for an interesting spring. I kind of feel like I lost a month out of my life,” he said during a recent interview with The Associated Press.
No doubt Hamilton will be judged over the next few years on whether Pearl was the right choice to turn around the lagging program. The Vols were 61-59 in the last four years under Peterson and have not been to the NCAA tournament since 2001, Jerry Green’s last season.
Some people were upset about Peterson’s firing, saying he needed more time to succeed.
“I go back to the pledge I made when I took the job. I was always going to put the university ahead of everything else and do what’s in the best interest of the institution,” Hamilton said.
“People can make value judgments about that along the way, but you have to make those decisions based on the best information you have available to you.”
Firing Peterson hurt the athletic department financially because he chose to take his buyout of $1.39 million in a lump sum instead of in payments spread over several years.
The athletic department didn’t have the cash to pay Peterson by the April 1 deadline and borrowed the money from the university’s rainy day fund.
The loan plus interest is due June 2008.
Hamilton has since changed coaches’ contracts to not allow a lump sum buyout.
“Perhaps we could have taken money from our capital funds, endowment funds, but in my mind those things were designated by donors for endowment, for scholarships and for capital projects. I didn’t feel like that was the right thing to do,” he said.
The men’s athletic department’s operating expenses nearly equal its revenue. It had a surplus of only $10,310 for 2004 and projects a net of $21,580 for this year. The department expects to bring in $57.3 million in total revenues in 2006 and spend it all.
A big chunk of the budget is student-athletes’ scholarships. Full scholarships include tuition, fees, housing, meals and books. For 2005, Tennessee paid $3.4 million for men’s scholarships and $2.78 million for women’s. The athletic department is charged for in-state and out-of-state tuition. About 75 percent of male athletes and 90 percent of female athletes are from outside Tennessee.
The athletic department could have saved $2.25 million in total scholarship money last year if all the athletes were from in state, but Hamilton isn’t leaning toward telling coaches to recruit more Tennessee athletes.
“Tennessee has always had a national scale athletic program so I’m very hesitant to do that,” he said.
Hamilton has cut 12 jobs in the athletic department that were mainly related to the selling of souvenirs, a job now outsourced to Dallas-based eSports Partners, and Volunteer Magazine, which no longer publishes.
The legal troubles also piled up this year. Since February 2004, 11 Tennessee players have been arrested or cited for crimes ranging from aggravated assault to underage drinking. Six have remained at the school, while the other five left because they either graduated, transferred or were kicked off the team.
Hamilton has mostly stood back and let coach Phillip Fulmer handle the situation, supporting decisions to dismiss or suspend players.
Everyone seems to have an opinion about everything Hamilton does as evidenced by the hundreds of e-mails he gets a week, even more during football season. Either Hamilton or someone on his staff responds to them. Sometimes he stays up late at home replying to e-mail.
“Because we have such a passionate fan base — that’s a good thing — there are always going to be people who have a different opinion,” he said.
“What I’m trying to build among our fan base is an element of trust that they matter.”
The week after a football loss is just as hard on Hamilton as it is on every Tennessee fan, but they don’t get e-mail from angry people calling for Hamilton to fire Fulmer.
He said the worst was a three-week period in the 2003 season when Tennessee lost back to back to Auburn and Georgia and then had an off week before playing Alabama.
“Have you ever gone around this town on a Monday after a Florida win or a Florida loss and seen the smiles or frowns? It’s amazing the difference,” he said.
“I try to put those things behind me and move on, but that’s my life.”
Mike Hamilton, Tennessee athletic director
NAME: Mike Hamilton
AGE-BIRTH DATE: 41; Aug. 13, 1963 in Brevard, N.C.
EDUCATION: B.S. in accounting, Clemson University, 1985; MBA, Clemson, 1988.
CAREER: NCNB Corp., Tampa, Fla., 1985-86; graduate assistant, Clemson, 1986-88; assistant director of development, Wake Forest University, 1988-92; assistant athletic director of development, University of Tennessee, 1992-96; associate AD of development and marketing, UT, 1996-2002; senior associate AD of development and marketing, UT, 2002-03; UT director of athletics, UT, 2003.
FAMILY: Wife, Elizabeth (Beth) Merrill Hamilton; two children, Madison, 9, and Matthew, 6.
QUOTE: “Have you ever gone around this town on a Monday after a Florida win or a Florida loss and seen the smiles or frowns? It’s amazing the difference.”
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