Barnes Proves Money Isn’T Everything
The statistics which landed Scott Barnes his new job are tagged with dollar and percent signs. So it goes these days when any opening for a college athletic director is filled.
It’s a different language now. Marketing. Development. Resources. Gifting.
The generic old coach’s rehearsal for retirement is pretty much history.
That’s the reality. But the new A.D. at Eastern Washington University wants people to know he can read a box score as well as a balance sheet.
“That’s absolutely the case - budget and funding really drive things,” said Barnes, “but what I’m concerned about is that (college) presidents are losing sight of the value of having people who have strapped it on or laced it up and been in the arena.
“My background in financial services and fund-raising are important. But don’t ever discount the factor of having been out on the playing field. If you haven’t been there and done that, it’s very difficult to understand the needs of student-athletes and coaches.”
The intriguing thing about Scott Barnes is that he’s been here and done it elsewhere.
He played college basketball at Eastern Montana and Fresno State, and pro ball in Germany. He’s done color commentary on radio and TV, invested other people’s money and run a very minor league basketball franchise. He’s hustled donations for athletic departments at San Diego, Pacific, Iowa State and, most recently, as athletic director at Humboldt State.
Now he succeeds Dick Zornes as AD at Eastern, with a three-year contract at $85,000 per.
And he can call it a homecoming.
Barnes was born in Spokane and attended school in Kennewick. His parents, Sherman and Helen, have since moved back here twice and Barnes acknowledged that his two young children, Milanna and Isaac, “wouldn’t mind seeing a little more of grandma and grandpa.”
“In the early 1980s, I’d come home from college in the summer and play pickup ball with John Stockton and the boys,” Barnes recalled.
And anyone who’s been in a pickup game with Stockton can certainly make a legitimate claim to having laced ‘em up and strapped it on.
It’s a concept Barnes will try to perpetuate in a suit-and-tie.
For 15 years, the Eagles have played at the NCAA Division I level, yet only for the last two has it been a true institutional commitment. Eastern has carved out its athletic niche largely because of Zornes’ iron will, but frankly it needs to find a wider audience and deeper pockets.
“I remember the words sewn on our practice shorts when I was a player - `Play hard, play smart,’ ” said Barnes. “Well, what we have to do is play hard and work smart. We need an unprecedented level of activity and not just in the Inland Northwest. We need to turn rocks over wherever we can to find alumni who will listen to our story.”
He’s managed to turn over those very rocks at places that, if not similar to EWU, offered common challenges. At USD, private gift support went up 200 percent under his direction; at Pacific, 33 percent. As associate director for athletic development at Iowa State, he helped the school complete a $23 million fund-raising campaign, largest in the department’s history.
And in the more humble surroundings of Humboldt, he started from scratch - the “last bastion” of Division II non-scholarship athletics finally awarding its first athletic rides this year. But first he had to find the Lumberjacks people to play after the breakup of the old Northern California Athletic Conference.
“About a week after coming on campus, I got a letter from the California Collegiate Athletic Association, to which Humboldt had applied to before I got here,” Barnes recalled. “Basically, what they said was thanks for your application, but we’re not interested in having you.”
Barnes quickly steered the Lumberjacks into the far-flung Pacific West Conference and started cold-calling. Between fund-raising and a student-fee referendum, Humboldt athletics has doubled its operations budget.
In effect, he’s just been through what Eastern was going through 20 years ago - and yet his “comfort level” is in Division I, where Eastern is.
“Obviously, in the past Eastern struggled to define where it belonged,” he said, “and now that they’ve defined it, they have some challenges unique to Big Sky Conference institutions.
“On the positive side, there’s the opportunity to appeal to 30,000 alums and a large metro area. The disadvantage, in some respects, is that you don’t have a captive audience. The challenge is how to move forward so that Spokane more readily embraces what we have to offer. That doesn’t mean you have to draw a line in the sand - that people have to pick Eastern over Washington State or Gonzaga. But you have to appeal to a broader audience.”
He thinks some of the notions of EWU president Stephen M. Jordan - in particular, a long-term plan to develop a more residential campus community - will help.
In settling on Barnes, Jordan’s search committee made a couple of statements, intentionally or otherwise. One, Barnes is a guy who can certainly help a donor find his checkbook. Scott Barnes does development, and he figures to bring a more buttoned-down approach to the job than one name that kept being whispered during the search - former Washington State football coach Jim Walden.
Two, he is essentially the first Eagles A.D. ever to have been hired from outside the department - an indication that somebody feels there’s a big, wide world out there Eastern needs to explore.
Even if the guide is a guy from Spokane.
BARNES PROFILE Age: 38. Hometown: Spokane. Recent employment: Athletic director at Humboldt State (Calif.) since July 1997; associate athletic director, director of athletic development at Iowa State, 1994-97.