“Tom Frericks was a legend,” Kissell says. “You are always advised not to follow a legend. I drive down Frericks Way and walk into Frericks Center and am greeted by this huge picture of Tom Frericks. He deservedly has such a presence here.”

Ted Kissell knew that when he turned on the light in his new office for the first time that the job wasn’t going to be easy. The University of Dayton has only had six Athletic Directors in its history. Harry Baujan was the Athletic Director for 42 years, but no one put the University of Dayton on the map like Tom Frericks during his 28 years. Without Frericks, there would be no University of Dayton Arena. There would not be the 63 NCAA games that have been played on the Arena floor. There would not be the 26 games that UD has played in the NCAA. Putting it very simply, without the vision of Tom Frericks, the University of Dayton basketball program and the rest of the athletic department might be worrying how to compete against Wittenberg and Otterbein instead of Temple and Cincinnati.

Little did Kissell know when he took over just what was ahead of him.

“I didn’t come in with a plan. I didn’t know enough,” he admits. “I had watched someone else take a program to a higher level and I was part of that team. Candidly, I accepted the position without knowing nearly enough about the situation at Dayton. I was not prepared for what I found. Our funding was essentially Division III.”

He continues, “Right away I got a clue about the state of our sports programs. Our softball coach had resigned following a 7-32 season. The administrator in charge recommended that I hire her assistant. That was a reality check about how we viewed our total sports program”

At first, the task facing Kissell appeared to be too great. Three months on the job, he needed to take a personal leave and the whispers started. Was he in over his head? Couldn’t he take the pressure? Ted found himself in a very difficult position, away from extended family and friends and it took its toll.

“I began at UD August 1, 1992,” Kissell says. “Within three months, I was out of commission for three months with a clinical depression. Had no prior history or any problems since. It was an extremely difficult circumstance for my family being in new surroundings with no friends or established support system. Brother Ray (Fitz S. M., U.D. President) never stopped believing in me. He had previous experience with someone suffering from clinical depression and knew that the condition had a beginning and an end. The fortunate thing about clinical depression is that the imbalance in brain chemistry can be corrected through medication. However, I believe that the support of Bro. Ray, the loving care of my wife Deanna, and God’s grace had as much or more to do with my recovery.”

When he returned, Kissell hit the ground running. He had big shoes to fill, but an even bigger job to accomplish. Only two years away from its last NCAA appearance, the basketball program was about to fall on very hard times. The Midwestern Collegiate Conference had done everything that could ever do for Dayton and was not going to be the vehicle to the national spotlight. It was time to make a change.

“The initial vision of the Great Midwest was big time basketball, big time tradition, big time arenas, big time support, and strong conference,” he says. “The mix changes but everyone hit a certain threshold on those requirements.”

What Kissell didn’t realize was that the spring of basketball talent had run dry. The one athletic program that had seen real success over an extended period of time would only win 10 games over the next two seasons. The one thing that made us attractive to the new league was about to abandon him. Kissell explains.

“I came into a very different context in the sense that the basketball program was about to bottom out. When Frericks was here he needed to come up with a better building. For me it was to get us into a premier athletics conference. To be in such a conference you need to have an authentic broad-based athletics program. That was irrelevant in Frericks’ day. The goal stays the same. For the University of Dayton to be successful, the men’s basketball program must be nationally prominent because everything flows from that. What you must do to achieve that changes. What Mr. Frericks needed to do was very different from what I needed to do, but the goals were the same. It used to be that you could put all of your resources into the men’s basketball team and the rest of the programs were scholarship free.”

For a brief period of time it looked like the move to the Great Midwest would serve the University in the long run. Despite the woes that faced the basketball program, just being part of the GMW should bring in better athletes and get the program back on top. However, behind closed doors, the rest of the league was looking at the entire program and wondering if they really needed Dayton. The basketball program was down and the rest of the programs were barely above Division III levels. Things were changing within college basketball and we were being left behind.

“I think what really hurt the program aside from the losing that occurred during the O’Brien years was the fact that at the same time that the industry was undergoing cataclysmic change, Dayton found itself in a protracted leadership transition. The timing of those things could not have been worse. Mr. Frericks’ illness and failing health was occurring at the same time that the industry was turning topsy-turvy. That put us well behind the curve. The programs were under-resourced. The business model was no longer valid. Mr. Frericks had a great business model. It was to keep the prices at the Arena low — very low — and treat the customers great. That business model served us well as long as we didn’t need to support other sports programs. When Title IX hit, the NCAA rules changed on how many scholarships you had to provide and they literally changed the rules on how you had to support sports programs, and how many you had, and who you had to play. Now your baseball team had to play 90% of its games against other Division I schools. You could no longer run it like a Division III program. Now you would have to go down to play the University of Cincinnati and potentially be embarrassed. As a result, the business model in place no longer made sense in that environment. Conference affiliation now became critical.”

Just as conference affiliation was becoming the overriding factor in the potential success of the basketball program, UD was told that they were no longer welcome in the newly transformed GMW, now called Conference-USA. Not only were we reeling from a nose-diving basketball program, we were now adrift in a turbulent ocean with no life preserver.

Kissell relates, “In retrospect, it can be said that moving to the GMW was strategically unsound. But the important thing is that we were willing to move in that direction. We were fortunate. People do not know the politics that went into the decision to have Dayton leave the GMW. We were not a very appealing program at that time and it wasn’t just basketball. What I felt was important at the time was, what were we trying to accomplish? Were we going to back down or try to get the program to compete at the highest level possible? The men’s basketball program — and I’m not trying to slight any other program, we are talking about our economic engine from a business prospective — are we going to allow it to fail or return to a national stage? Dayton still wants to be a player. Do we want to return to national prominence or do we want to remain where we are? It was an institutional commitment to return to a top level.”

Things could not have been worse for Oliver Purnell and the basketball program. Not only was the team in a downward spiral, we were now without a conference.

“It was really tough on Oliver. His first recruiting class was made up of Coby Turner and Josh Postorino. We weren’t even in a league. Coby was coming to his camps for years and Josh wasn’t on anybody’s Top-100 list. So the challenge was two fold: to rebuild a basketball program and to build an authentic broad-based athletic program.”

Like it or not, Kissell now knew what had to be done and the urgency to make it happen. Through some help from our friends at Xavier and some hard work by the Administration, there was some light at the end of the tunnel. Affiliation with the Atlantic-10 had been assured and the program was no long without a home. Yet, UD was not in a position of comfort and it was time for change.

“We needed to move part-time coaches to full-time coaches and to create more opportunities for support of the program,” Kissell says. “In discussion was a seating program and aggressive fundraising for the Donoher Center. When I arrived here, the program was very similar to the Arizona program when I got there. It was a very operationally oriented program, very internally focused. The external capacity needed to be developed.”

The way the Athletic Department did its job was going to change. We were lucky that we fell where we did. In the overall scheme of things, the A-10 is probably a much better fit for UD than the GMW was. But the way that things were constantly evolving during that period of time, Kissell wanted to be much better prepared if this type of potential disaster ever happened again.

“My focus has been to get us to where people would come to us and want us in their conference. When the Great Midwest was dissolved they looked at us and said, ‘We are forming a new league and we don’t need Dayton.’ I told our staff that our challenge is if that ever happens again, the people sitting around the table will make the statement, ‘We must have Dayton.’ We are still not there.”

It is easy to look at the men’s basketball program and get a good feel where they fall in the national pecking order. It is not so easy when looking at the other programs because many are on the rise. In 1992, it was very easy to see where the programs were because it had never been a matter of concern. They were in the only place that they could have been and that was at the lowest levels within the conference. Realizing that conference affiliation was not just based upon how well the basketball team did, the Athletic Department went to work to create a plan that could upgrade virtually all of the supported sports.

Everyone was involved and facilities tended to be very high on most lists.

Says Kissell, “One of the nice things about facilities is that they are a one-time financial hit, something that does not hit your budget every year. It has a big impact on how students, athletes, coaches, and recruits feel about us. We talk a lot of where we are and where we would like to be. We try to be brutally honest. We look at how we are viewed in the marketplace. One of your challenges is how to break through the mental model that is set up in kids’ heads concerning what is ‘Big Time.’ They grow up watching Michigan and North Carolina and Duke on TV week after week and that is what they consider ‘Big Time.’ You have to change the recruits’ and their parents’ thinking in that you can have the best of both worlds, a good education in a family oriented caring atmosphere and still have big time basketball. It was from conversations like that that the idea of the Donoher Center came about. You have to do something dramatic to get that point across. When a recruit or parent walks in, you want them to think, ‘Whew, this is big time.'”

Ted Kissell has a job that is almost as open to second-guessing as any coach. He has to be the final decision maker when it comes to dropping or upgrading programs. He is the man that must make all of the final hiring and firing decisions within the department. He is the man that must tell the loyal fans that it is now going to cost them considerably more to watch their favorite team because of a new seating plan. He may not have had a plan when he walked through those doors the first day, but it didn’t take him long to begin the process and get us headed in the right direction.

Part III wraps up this series on Sunday.