Marshall University Athletics
MCGILL: Hamrick hits 10-year milestone as Herd AD
7/20/2019 11:38:00 AM | Football, General, Men's Basketball, Big Green Scholarship Foundation, Word on the Herd, Ticketing & Promotions
By Chuck McGill
HerdZone.com
HUNTINGTON, W.Va. – Happy Anniversary, Mike Hamrick.
On this date 10 years ago – 10! – the former Marshall football player became current Marshall Director of Athletics. A column headline in the Herald-Dispatch read: "Easy to see Marshall made the right choice." Now, Hamrick's stay at his alma mater has reached double digits in years. That means the Clendenin native is the second-longest serving AD in school history behind Cam Henderson, who served parts of 14 years starting in 1935.
That's a long time ago in a very different collegiate athletics landscape. A very different world, actually. Gas and bread cost around 10 cents and the popular board game Monopoly debuted in '35, long before Hamrick fell in love with Marshall as a student-athlete and started a lifelong journey as an athletic administrator. That path, which included stops at Kansas, Illinois State, Arkansas-Little Rock, East Carolina and UNLV, always seemed destined to bring Hamrick home.
When he was approached by a search firm in 2009 about the vacancy in Huntington, his mind immediately drifted back to his years as a student-athlete with the Herd.
"I wanted to provide our student-athletes with what we didn't have when I was a student-athlete," Hamrick said. "There wasn't an academic center. There wasn't a soccer field. There wasn't a baseball stadium."
Hamrick said the training facility he used was about the size of his current office inside the Shewey Building. Tens of millions of dollars and a decade later, and the facility upgrades are obvious. The Chris Cline Athletic Complex looms large to the east of Joan C. Edwards Stadium, and features an indoor football field and track, sports medicine center, academic center and Hall of Fame. The Hoops Family Field at Veterans Memorial Soccer Complex is just down the street on 5th Avenue, and the state-of-the-art baseball stadium is scheduled to open in between the indoor and soccer stadium in 2021. A new hanging videoboard was installed in the Henderson Center before the start of last season, and additional, significant facility upgrades are on the way.
There have been athletic-specific accomplishments, like the football program being the winningest Conference USA program of the last six seasons and the holder of the nation's longest bowl winning streak, which is now at seven. The men's basketball program ended a 31-year NCAA tournament drought, and then advanced in the Big Dance for the first time in school history. This past year, football, men's basketball, women's basketball and softball all won postseason games after conference title games or conference tournaments, one of only three schools to accomplish that.
"The potential has always been here," Hamrick said, "and I received outstanding support from Dr. Steve Kopp and now Dr. Jerry Gilbert. We have a passionate fan base. Our student-athletes excel in athletics and in the classroom. Our coaches and staff deserve a ton of credit.
"This isn't about what I've done; this is about what we have all accomplished together. But this job, the allure, was coming back to the place where it all started and seeing if you could make a difference."
Hamrick reminisced this week about what troubled him when he took the MU job in 2009. He grew up idolizing Marshall athletes as an in-state kid about an hour away from Huntington, but he struggled with the reality that there was no place to truly honor the all-time greats. Eventually, the Chad Pennington Hall of Fame became a dream come true.
Hamrick recalled a story about seeing track athletes running on the concourse level of the Henderson Center. He stopped to chat with them and they told him that they had no place to practice indoors. And, of course, Hamrick has long been motivated to build a baseball stadium. Legendary Jack Cook was his favorite professor in school, and he had friends on the baseball team. He heard their gripes decades ago about the lack of a home field, and he made the baseball stadium a bucket list item when he took the job.
"It hasn't happened as quick as I wanted it to," Hamrick said, "but it's happening."
The bucket list has been important to Hamrick. The facilities, obviously, were at the top of the list because of how they'd enhance the student-athlete experience, aid in recruiting and generally be the rising tide that lifts all of the department's boats. Football scheduling, too, was high on Hamrick's list, and one can never understate how important it was to him to add schools like Notre Dame and the service academies – Navy and Army – to future schedules.
Ten years later, Hamrick is still busy crossing items off that bucket list. There are plenty more items on that to-do list.
"The key is we are not finished," Hamrick said. "We're not finished yet."
Chuck McGill is the Assistant Athletic Director for Fan/Donor Engagement and Communications at Marshall University and a seven-time winner of the National Sports Media Association West Virginia Sportswriter of the Year award. In addition to HerdZone.com's Word on the Herd, McGill is the editor of Thundering Herd Illustrated, Marshall's official athletics publication. Follow him on Twitter (@chuckmcgill) and Instagram (wordontheherd).
