Bass reflects on 43-year career, time at UNCW
A final Q&A with the UNCW athletic director before his retirement
Jimmy Bass has had this day to look forward to for nine months now, but don’t think for a second he’s going to coast through his final week as UNCW’s Director of Athletics.
“I'm not quitting,” he said, laughing. “I told 'em 5 o'clock on the 31st, I'm out the door … but I'm gonna work till the final hour when that clock strikes five.”
That’s when he’ll flip the switch on a 43-year career in college athletics that included stops at Davidson, East Carolina, Mississippi State, Pittsburgh and N.C. State before landing in Wilmington for good in Oct. 2010.
He’ll leave the program much better than when he found it, taking over during a period of turmoil that had seen three ADs depart over a six-year period while the department’s finances and academic performance dipped.
Over his 12-year run, Bass helped the department double its budget, going from $8.5 million to nearly $17 million while the Seahawks excelled competitively, too, winning 32 CAA championships. Academics have never been better.
We spoke with Bass to reflect on his career in college sports, his accomplishments at UNCW, and what he’ll do with all of his free time.
Presented in Q&A format, Bass’ answers are only edited for length and clarity.
SHP: What were the factors that you considered when looking at the UNCW job back in 2010, and ultimately, led to you deciding to take it?
JB: One, I have been in and around the CAA for so long, and I knew UNCW was a charter member of the CAA. I know the success and tradition through the years in many sports — not just men's basketball — but certainly baseball, the soccer programs, golf and tennis has been really strong.
That's one of the things that attracted me to that because I thought the CAA was a good fit then for UNCW because of the commitment to the student-athletes, because of the commitment to academic progress and certainly the commitment to making sure kids get degrees, so that was very important to me.
I kind of grew up around Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach and coming there in the summertime and having been there back in, I guess in '86 to '89 with Coach (Bill) Brooks. I knew a lot about the program, so it was very much a homecoming and something that my family and we just absolutely committed and dedicated ourselves to making UNCW athletics better.
SHP: When you started considering the pros and cons of the job, what did you see in the athletic department as an area that you could improve?
JB: Well, I'll start at the other end.
First of all, we are leaving the program in much, much better condition financially, competitively, academically, working with the community than what we founded in November of 2010.
But we had some challenges right away. Financially, when we got here, the budget was approximately $8.5 million, as we're walking out the door the budget now is almost $17 million, and so there's been slow progress with that. Not nearly enough progress if we want to stay competitive in the future… but I think financially we wanted to, once I got to know, we eased into the thing initially in '10 and '11 and got to know the staff, got to know who our coaches were, listened.
One of the first things I did was I met individually with each of our head coaches to find out where they were and what their needs were and what their goals and ambitions were. Here's a story: Matt Clark, who was the men's golf coach then, the first time I met him he was in Duke Hospital.
And after we changed pleasantries … the first thing he said is, ‘Don't give all the money away before I get back there.’ That's one of the things I do remember about getting here in the initial, first 60 days or so was visiting with Matt and his family up at Duke Hospital.
And he obviously he recovered and did a wonderful job. I think again, and then learning after we knew who the coaches were and what their needs were, we started working on that immediately.
Then it was a matter of getting to know and understand the admissions process at UNCW, the financial aid process at UNCW, the facilities process at UNCW, student affairs, getting to know them because that group is so very, very important to the student athlete experience at UNCW so that they get a well-rounded education.
It was a matter for the first 60-90 days of very much listening and trying to understand what the current culture was at UNCW, and then obviously making sure everybody, all the other entities on campus knew that the student athletes were my priority moving forward.
SHP: What did you come to find out about the culture that you had there at that time, and what you wanted it to become?
JB: Well, I think one, UNCW has a really unique culture in that we all are pulling for each other. We can't do what we need to do in athletics without the support, business affairs without support of student affairs, without support of facilities and operations on campus, even campus police, we all know each other. We all pull for each other and we all depend on one another. And one of the things that I've seen evolve over the years is our student athletes like each other. Our basketball players will go out and watch tennis compete in the springtime, the baseball team comes to the volleyball games in the fall. Our student athletes like each other.
They support each other. We've got a great undergraduate community, and the kids see each other in class, in the dining halls .... I think the culture is that it's very much, we all were pulling for each other. We all wanted, we needed each other to be successful. And we didn't always see eye to eye about things, but we always had a knack, going into the room, closing the door. And when we opened the door back up, we came out shaking hands and in agreement. We usually didn't get everything we wanted but there was major compromise as we continued to grow our programs. And as we grew the program over those 12 years, 12 1/2 years, with five different chancellors.
SHP: What has the challenge been like as you've had five different chancellors? How has that played into the growth?
JB: Those of us at the senior level at the university work at the pleasure of the chancellor. The AD always has a contract but you’ve gotta listen… once you get to know them through the interview process and hear them and what their goals are for the university, you gotta make it fit. And again, in the early days, again, I've mentioned 60-90 days, how important that is.
First impressions are lasting impressions, and if you go in to a new chancellor and let 'em know that our absolute priority is the health and wellbeing of our student athletes, it's easy to get them going.
We've had to wrestle for resources through different administrations but that's just part of it — you gotta learn to survive and adapt. It’s been easier to generate resources under some administrations, and it's been much more challenging under other administrations, but you suck it up and you try to do what's best and combine what the university's commitment is to the program, then with generating private resources through the Seahawk Club and certainly through marketing and those type things.
Then, all along the way you're also working with the conference office on what's good for 10, 12, 13, 14 schools as that has evolved over the years. And so, as I said before, you don't always get everything you want, so you gotta make it work and try to keep on pushing forward.
SHP: As you sit here 12 years later and you look back at where you were, what are some of the things that you're most proud of from that run?
JB: Well, for the last six years, I guess six or seven years, we have to check, we have to do an annually athletics report to general administration … and they go over everything. They go over the admissions practices, the financial aid practices, what courses student athletes are taking, what majors student athletes are declaring, certainly their progress. And for 12 years, we have never had a single exception to the admissions process at UNCW.
Our head coaches have bought into identifying and recruiting and signing kids that are serious about coming to school here. They're serious about going to class, they're serious about getting a meaningful degree, and that's something I'm really proud of. We've been able to adhere and maintain UNCW standards and again, of course when you do that, you're attracting kids that are motivated and want to get a degree and they know how important that degree will be to them 10, 20 years from now. So I think that, and again, that whole academic progress situation is certainly the most important thing that we can focus on. The NCAA Public Recognition Awards for grade point averages, for APRs, and we were in a dark hole when I first got here, when we suffered and had to serve the APR penalty when the APRs first came out.
That might have been one of the more miserable years that I've ever had professionally, having to work with that with the men's basketball program — but our basketball players stayed focused. We kept one of the very, very best basketball players UNCW ever had, Keith Rendleman, he stayed on the roster and stayed here and stayed loyal to the university.
The ups so far outpaced the downs, but we've had to work through them. And obviously we've had hurricanes, we've had pandemics and we've always stayed; we've always worked.
I can tell you when a lot of people were staying home during the pandemic, our staff was here working, serving our student athletes and that's the good thing.
Financially we've grown, competitively we've grown, I guess we've now in those 12 1/2 years, we've hammered out 32 CAA championships, which I'm very proud of, and all that credit goes to our head coaches, the staffs, and certainly our student athletes who toil and work so hard every day. They get up, they go to class, they do their strength conditioning and they try to get better, and they're here for four or five years and hopefully they stay healthy.
We've done a really good job all the way across academically. I mentioned it, giving back to the community and then competitively, and again, I think we've grown the Seahawk Club. We've gone, it was just a few short years ago, the Seahawk Club was contributing $500,000 a year to a $2.7, 2.8 million scholarship bill.
Now, this year, the scholarship bill's $3 million, and the Seahawk Club for the past 2 years has contributed $1 million to that. The most important thing our fundraising group can do right now is continue to generate and add scholarship resources.
When I mentioned that, if they're giving $1 million, we are taking and pushing $2 million from our athletic budget to finish paying for that scholarship bill every year, and you can imagine — I think the kids in the Seahawk Club have done a wonderful job. The board has done a wonderful job and they've grown so much over the past four years with total dollars contributed to scholarships, with members they set a record last year for total members almost 2,700 — but what I was saying is, if one day, whenever the Seahawk Club is paying the entire $3 million scholarship bill, that's $2 million that the athletic department have that would solve a lot of ills that we have right now financially, the $2 million would make some problems go away — I can tell you that.
SHP: The Seahawk Club is doing a great job. They’re certainly on an upward trajectory.
JB: Absolutely, and that's going to continue to grow. It's gotta continue to grow.
We do have facility needs and we've been working on that for a long, long time. We've got lots of plans, lots of architectural drawings, lots of master plans, and certainly facilities sits right up there, very high at the priority list, but I'm gonna tell you the lifeblood of this athletics program is scholarships.
If we don't continue, if we're not able to continue to attract the very best and most committed student athletes to come to UNCW, we can't be successful. Can't be successful academically, we can't be successful competitively, and we can't be successful making Wilmington a better community.
SHP: So, I've seen your grandsons around quite a bit. What has that part of it been like, being able to have them at games and watching your teams win championships?
JB: Well, that all started with our son Corey — he said it's been a great journey as Seahawks and Bulldogs and Pirates, and Wolfpack and Panthers.
It started with him and he's actually grown up around a lot of student-athletes, he's grown up in and around locker rooms, he's grown up in and around a lot of big brothers and big sisters. I think that's what's been really good for Preston and Easton, our two grandsons, to be able to see what... They're seven and five now, they see what it's like, and what they've got to look forward to down the road — it's been a wonderful thing. Every institution where we've been, there's been a high priority on family, and we embrace that right now.
We love to see our department has grown with a lot of children. We have lots of nieces and nephews on our staff right now, and we encourage all of our folks to bring your kids, have them around. Every time something's going on, and I hear a little voice and laughter outside my office, I always come out and find out who's there with their kids. Family's very important, and I hope it'll continue to be very important to the department.
And it's been a blessing to be able to have our son grow up around it and certainly our two grandsons. It's fun — everybody asks what I'm doing; I've got baseball practice tomorrow. I'm an assistant coach for 4 and 5-year-old baseball team, my tee-ball team. So, we're gonna stay focused and continue to compete and continue to try to develop young people.
SHP: What do you want to do over these final weeks? What’s the focus for you?
JB: I think we're working on trying to finalize the budget for next year. Mark Wagner's working really hard with the folks on campus to try to project what that's going to be, and having to deal with inflation, that's a major challenge for us right now. We have several hires. We've got a strength coach that we're trying to hire, and some things that are normally from a personnel standpoint, we're trying to get those things moving, but that'll overlap into when (Michael) Oblinger gets here.
One that relates very specifically to basketball, we're trying to hire a new strength coach for men's basketball. And then obviously working with everybody on, Coach Siddle, we think that he has earned an extension and some more pay and so we're working on that, trying to reward him, trying to reward his assistant coaches.
And obviously, Oblinger's going have to figure out what he wants to do with the women's basketball situation moving forward, too.
SHP: As you get to the end of this run, you've been in college athletics for so long. Has it always been changing at this speed, or is it kind of in the past 10 years or so, really hit a rapid overdrive of just the landscape completely shifting every couple of years?
JB: I think that's a great way to describe it in 100 words or less. I think it's starting to change in the past decade at a breakneck speed. And this is for me, all along for 40, whatever it's been, 43 years, for me, it's been a transformational business.
We take kids, we bring them in, we bring them on campus, we educate them, we let 'em learn how to get along with people, we develop them physically so that they can compete at the highest level of the NCAA. We let them make decisions, we let them make mistakes. We let them grow as human beings, and hopefully at the end of four or five or six years, they leave here and they're ready to... They've got a degree, they're ready to be productive citizens and move forward.
That's the transformational part of the athletics for me, but what has happened, it's turned into a transactional business. It's not so much now developing, focuses on developing young people. It's more, ‘What can I get? What are you gonna give me? How much can I earn when I get here?’
And then with the transfer portal, we're teaching kids first at the sign of adversity, ‘I'm out the door — I don't like a professor, I don't like my assistant coach, I don't like my strength coach, I don't like the dorm, I'm leaving.’ And that's not the way life works. I'm sorry. It's really, really not.
So, I think that for me, it's gone from a transformational business to a transactional business, and there're going to be tremendous challenges moving forward at a mid-major level.
Adjusting to that now, at president's meeting two weeks ago down in Charleston, I spoke up. There was a long discussion about NIL, how the CAA is going to work toward that and try to meet that, the transfer portal.
I told folks the bright side is that, I think there's going to be as much unrest above us at the Power Five leagues. I think kids are going to go, they think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, and they're going to find out they're not playing as much as they wanted to, and maybe they're not getting as much money as they want to from the NIL, and they're going to come back.
I think the mid-majors that are prepared and have their own NIL programs and continue to keep student-athletes at the forefront, and we will. I think UNCW will always be a part of that educational model. I think there's going be a lot of kids coming back from that higher level because they want to play and they want to compete, and I think the mid-majors that are prepared and ready are gonna benefit from that.
SHP: So, as you're sitting on the beach a few years from now looking back, what are those memories that are going be the most special to you?
JB: Working with student-athletes and watching them grow — student-athletes and their parents. There's so many stories of watching kids, a women's soccer player that suffered a knee injury and came back from a lot of rehabilitation. Came back and played and then suffered another knee injury to her other knee toward the end of her fifth year here, and never once complained. She's a great kid.
You see kids like that, that are warriors. They do the very best in the classroom; they obviously do the very best on the fields. Basketball players, it's great to see them move on and it's wonderful to see our baseball players, not just the ones that are still able to pursue their dreams in professional baseball, but it's fun to see those players come back at reunions and all of a sudden, they have spouses, they have children. It's really cool to see the little ones running around.
I think the best is yet to come for UNCW. I think Chancellor (Aswani) Volety is going to be terrific for athletics.
One of the things that we've been fortunate during my tenure here is we've always had a board of trustees that was interested in athletics, and they were committed to athletics. They were committed to competing at the highest level, so I know that will continue — the trustees, the chancellor. I think Chancellor Volety is going to make sure that athletics has access to resources, financial resources; he and I have had long discussions about that. Even during the expansion process over the last two years when we were having CAA meetings, the chancellors and presidents (talked) every day, ‘You've got to make a financial commitment to your athletic program.’
Chancellor Volety is going to bring something that will be good for athletics. He's going to help find resources, he's going to help identify in terms of major-gift prospects over to athletics to ask for some transformational gifts that'll help improve facilities.
I'm thrilled to death, again, with the leadership at the top of the university, with the trustees, the chancellor, and then the cabinet. The other senior officials, they very much are committed to this athletic department, and I can't wait to see it grow as there are new financial resources turned over to athletics.
SHP: What’s the plan from here? What are you most excited to do in life after college athletics?
JB: You know what? It's obviously family. We've settled in. Our son works in NASCAR, and we've got two grandsons and they live in Huntersville near Lake Norman, north of Charlotte, and we will move to the west side of Lake Norman. We've bought a home on the golf course at Verdict Ridge and so we'll move in there.
I've had a conversation with the golf professional here. They're hosting the many, many tournaments here this summer — the youth tournaments — they're actually hosting the North Carolina Women's Amateur here, and I told 'em I wanna work. I've got experience in that from serving on the men's Division One Golf committee. That's something that's very, very important to me. So we're gonna stay busy with that. I mentioned working with coach-pitch and tee-ball team, so we're gonna do that. We've identified a church that we wanna be active in.
And the next phase for Sarah and me are, it's wide open and there's so much to do here in the Charlotte area. So we're excited about it, and we're gonna be wise about it. Obviously, we'll take some time to decompress a little bit, 43 years has been a long time.
But now, it's a good time — now's a good and fair time. As I mentioned, the athletic program is in so much better shape than it was 12 1/2 years ago, and I'm looking forward to them to continue to grow and get better.
SHP: Anywhere in particular, any trip that you've been looking forward to but couldn't make happen because of college athletics?
JB: No, not yet. That's the one good thing about college athletics. We've been fortunately blessed to be able to travel and go to Final Fours, go to bowl games, go to National Championship contests.
Most importantly too, I talk about family, but the friendships that you make in college athletics, we have 'em at every stop. One of our really dear friends is Rick Barnes, the basketball coach, University of Tennessee. Rick and I started together when I was an intern at Davidson. He was a volunteer coach at Davidson back in 1980. And so, we've been able to maintain these friendships and to watch him and people like Rick Barnes and people who have had major, major influences on the direction of college athletics as they've move forward.
This is a wonderful industry. Wilmington has been a wonderful home for us. And we certainly, Sarah and I, and our family wish nothing but the best and continued success and progress for the Seahawks.
Well written , Jimmy! Congrats on your retirement. I have a strong feeling you will be missed in the Athletic community. Enjoy your time with our grandkids- and family! Best of luck!! Bob and Nancy.