Blue White Illustrated

known. Lately, things have been going well on both fronts. In NCAA data re- leased last fall, Penn State achieved a Graduation Success Rate of 89 percent, second-best in the Big Ten behind Northwestern and the second-highest rate in school history. Meanwhile, PSU was ranked second behind perennial champion Stanford in the most recent Directors' Cup standings. The ground- work for those accomplishments was, of course, laid prior to Barbour's arrival, but she's eager to build on it. "I believe we're going to be the best athletic pro- gram in the country by anybody's stan- dards," she said, "by any metric." Barbour recently took the time to speak with Blue White Illustrated about her introduction to Penn State and where the athletic department is headed under her leadership. You took the job nearly a year ago, but what did you #nd upon #rst com- ing to Penn State? You know, I found what I've always heard about and been told about, which is this incredible university with a fan base and an alumni base that are incred- ibly connected to this university – through good times and in challenging times. I think that passion is 99 9 ⁄10 per- cent of the time our greatest strength. There are certainly times when we with- in ourselves maybe disagree on a means to an end, and that passion becomes ex- plosive. So I found that. I found an athletic department that, through the circumstances of the San- dusky scandal and some of both the real and practical implications of that, and some from a PR standpoint, probably found itself in circumstances that they never had before. You've got the $60 million fine, you've got whatever the amount it adds up to be that we had to forgo in bowl revenues from the confer- ence. So probably for the first time in its history, really, Penn State athletics finds itself seriously financially chal- lenged, and not too long after they've added two programs – two really re- source-intensive programs in the two ice hockeys – so we find ourselves probably not being able to do "business as usual" from a Penn State perspec- tive. And I find that I call that "oppor- tunity." I think that there are so many oppor- tunities here, but it's also challenging. Because again, Penn State – and this truly is a strength – has a set of values and a set of ways of looking at things, and we need to be careful that whatever these new things are that we do, that they are consistent with what I'm start- ing to call "Penn State standards." So that's the challenge that we have. I think the opportunity is, Penn State has been able to be so good for so long operating in a certain way that actually we do have a lot of opportunities that we previously haven't had or that we haven't taken ad- vantage of, and I think there's great op- portunity there. How quickly were you able to evalu- ate and prioritize what you needed to do? There's been a reorganization of Intercollegiate Athletics. Did you see that as the starting point? Absolutely. The number one priority was in our human resources: Who do we have? What were their talents? You know, we're nothing without our peo- ple, and we've got really good people, really talented people, and most impor- tant, really passionate people, but the priority was the people. Who do we have? What are their talents? And what's my assessment of what gaps those leave us? I think certainly my very quick as- sessment was that we didn't have enough high-level really experienced leadership. So we made one executive hire in Phil Esten as COO fairly quickly. And then we took a step back and said, "OK, now let's take a little more time and really figure out what it is we really need." Which led to the senior associ- ate for the administration position opening, which we recently filled with Lynn Holleran. Then we announced the reorganization; identification of the senior associate AD for administration was part of our work on the reorgani- zation. So that was the overarching reorgani- zation, putting people into divisions, if you will, or units. And now there's a lot of work going on in those units of re:n- ing, because we need people at every level of the organization to participate in how we're going to do this. Once the people part was under way, we turned to two tools that are now kind of under way, neither of them in a really signi:cant or meaningful way yet, but we're about to turn that up. The :rst is the strategic plan, which had been started maybe a year ago. So we're going to take that initial work and continue to go through it with a strategic plan. Obviously, a piece of that plan is the facilities master plan. I don't think anybody denies there's a lot of work to be done there. There's obviously been great work that's been done there. You look at Pegula [Ice Arena] and obviously that's a tremendous facility. We have a relatively new shared facility in baseball that's outstanding. We could go through all of them, but we've got needs. We've got some kind of need, whether it's upgrade vs. new building vs. more space, more indoor :eld space. We've got to be really smart about that. I think the one thing I prob- ably would note that I do have some concern about – and it probably was done for very good reasons, but times are di;erent now for us – is that [the university] built facilities that are very decentralized, that are one-sport. A fa- cility for this sport, a facility for that sport. It's not the best use at this time of our land, although we probably have more land here than at any place I've been, and our capital resources. So, how do we build a facility that meets three needs rather than just one need? That's what the facilities master plan is going to help us do. We're not go- ing to do projects as one-o;s. We're go- ing to put them together and look at what they are and how we're going to accomplish them, perhaps taking ad- vantage of synergies as a perk.

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