AN INTERVIEW WITH BOB HIEGERT : ‘It Was Time to Make a Change’

Officially, the search has begun.

One week after Tom Keele, football coach at Cal State Northridge for the past seven years, was notified that he was not being recommended for reappointment to his post, administration officials can formally begin the process of finding a successor .

Bob Hiegert, 43, now in his eighth year as CSUN athletic director, will lead the search. Hiegert’s association with the school goes back its second year of existence, 1959, when he became a shortstop on the first Valley State College baseball team. Hiegert took over as coach of the team at age 23 and held the position for 18 years. He resigned in 1984 to become a full-time athletic director.

This week, he discussed the direction of the CSUN athletic program with Times staff writer Steve Springer.

Question: There were claims from some that Keele’s problems extended beyond the field into administrative matters. Is there any truth to that?

Answer: First of all, at a state institution like ours, the immediate reasons and the actual reasons for a non-reappointment really are more of a confidential thing.

But, it was my determination, and I believe the department’s recommendation, that all things being considered, the program was not progressing as quickly as they would liked to have seen.

And, certainly, if you break each of the responsibilities down, the head coach is ultimately responsible for the actions of everyone, whether it be the players, whether it be the assistant coaches or all the people associated with it.

You can take all sorts of little things and run with them if you like, but the main thing in a year-to-year appointment in an athletic situation is that the won-lost record is probably as important as anything.

I really didn’t think we did as well this year as I thought we should have, based on returning players, the competition we played against and that kind of thing. And not seeing enough progress in the seven-year period, we figured it was time to make a change. That is the basis of our recommendation.

The thing that made this decision very, very difficult--and I don’t think this is any secret to anyone--is that Tom Keele is a very fine individual. He’s a good friend of a lot of people here. I think he’s as respected a faculty member as we have in the department as far as getting along with people.

Those things make this decision probably a little more difficult to swallow for a lot of folks down here, although the job he was brought in to do, he wasn’t doing as well as we thought it should be done.

Q: What about the argument made by some that this was an unfair time to fire him since the scholarship money for the football program is going up? Critics of your decision maintain that Keele should have been given at least one season with the additional money to see what he could produce.

A: I think you can take every coach here and if you sat them down and said, ‘Is your situation good or could it be better?’ they are all going to tell you it could be a lot better.

Pete Cassidy last year within our conference won the basketball title, went on to postseason play in the NCAA championships, although he gave the least amount of financial aid of anyone in our conference.

So, money is a factor, but it’s not the determining thing. I don’t think the dollars and cents is as big a deal as some people are making of it. It’s been ever-present here ever since we’ve been playing football. They’ve had continual money problems all the way through.

Dollars and cents in this area is not as big as it would be if you were stuck at a Boise State or a North Dakota State where you have got to draw people into that area. There’s enough people in this area where that shouldn’t be a factor.

We’re tickled to death about the increase across the board for the program on the (student) fee increase. But it’s not enough money to make tremendous impacts, even if we put all the additional increases into one program.

It’s going to mean a difference to the men’s program of about a $90,000 increase over last year. But if we put all that $90,000 into the football program in addition to what they are getting now, we’d still be near the bottom in terms of scholarship allocations. And we’ve got 10 other sports to be worried about also.

Q: Did you go into this season feeling this was a make-or-break year for Keele?

A: That’s a loaded question.

The best way to answer you is, I approach every coach with that feeling. They are all year-to-year appointees. I have to base my evaluation at the end of the season on what I think they have done that year and combine it with what has gone on in the past or what I think is going to happen in the future.

In his case, I was concerned after last season, for sure. (CSUN finished 2-8, but was credited with a 3-7 record when San Francisco State was forced to forfeit its game with the Matadors because of an ineligible player). Nobody likes to watch somebody go through that. We hoped everything would get straightened out. But it didn’t.

Q: There were charges by some close to the team that the players lacked character, lacked desire. Did you sense that?

A: As a person who watched a lot of games and has coached, I didn’t get any sense the players quit.

A lot of that blame, if there is blame on that, goes more toward the players than it does toward the coach.

I thought, from a physical standpoint, we hit as hard as anyone we saw all year.

I don’t know what goes on in a kid’s mind, but the kids I saw and the reactions after ballgames were the normal kinds of things. Kids do not like to lose. And these kids looked like they did not want to lose.

Q: Tailback Mike Kane criticized the attitude on the team bus after losses, saying too many of his teammates seemed to be having a good time. Did you see any of that?

A: I wasn’t on the bus. If it bothered Mike that somebody was doing something, as team captain, maybe he should have been doing a little bit more to tell people to be quiet instead of blaming somebody else. But, he may have his own set of problems on that.

Some people just looking from the outside might blame the coach for that, but the players themselves have got to say something. If this is an acceptable thing for only 10 or 15 guys and the other 50 disagree with it, then I’d say, why aren’t the other 50 standing up and doing something about it, instead of waiting for the coach to do that?

It’s as much the kids’ team as it is the coach’s team.

Q: What are you looking for in your new football coach?

A: We’re looking for someone who can come in and handle effectively a Division II football program. What that means is someone who can work within our structure, which includes the combined department of physical education and athletics. And there will be, maybe, some teaching responsibilities as well.

Q: Any restrictions or preferences on who you’d hire? Would you consider a high school or junior college coach? Would you favor a Division I coach?

A: There is a lot to be said for familiarity with the level of competition you’re going to be working against. A professional coach coming into a college situation has a whole different set of priorities to understand and figure out very quickly.

And the reverse would be true. A high school coach, having not ever worked in a college situation, would find a whole different set of priorities to establish and learn very quickly.

We will not rule either of those two out. We will have the job description couched in the sense that things will be preferred rather than demanded or required.

I think we are going to favor someone who has had college experience. We prefer to have that experience. We certainly prefer to have someone who is used to either a head coaching responsibility or major responsibilities within a Division I program. You might have an offensive coordinator or a defensive coordinator, somebody that has had five or six people on his staff that he has had to work with, and is used to dealing with young men 18 to 22, 23 years old.

Q: There seems to be a lot of sentiment on the team for the current offensive coordinator, Rich Lopez. Will he be given a shot at the head job?

A: Yes, we have asked him to apply. The feeling at the university, I think, right now is that we do have the time to conduct a nationwide search. Since we do, we would like to find out what is available outside. If Rich applies and his application process is reviewed and stacked up with other candidates and he’s on par or better than them, I think he’d be, right now, an excellent choice for head coach. But he has to go through the process and we want to be able to find out who is available across the rest of the country.

The problem that most people aren’t aware of is that, as a public institution, we’re different than a Notre Dame, for instance, or a Loyola or a Pepperdine. When they replace somebody, you often see the coach has been fired or not reappointed on a Friday and there is someone hired on a Monday or a Tuesday. We have to go through the affirmative-action processes, we have to advertise nationally and it takes us a minimum of a month to conduct a search.

But we have had the non-reappointment (of Keele) done early enough where we’ve got the time to get someone on board here before the spring semester starts.

And we’ve been allowed to maintain the two full-time assistants. Lopez will be on board starting Jan. 1 and going through the following Jan. 1. The players that are here will feel they are being a little better represented with a new coach because he (Lopez) knows their background.

(Defensive coordinator) Mark Banker will be hired through June. We’ve encouraged him to apply for the assistant coaching job. The head coach may want to hire him when that time comes around.

They are both quality people and I think they are going to keep things pretty well tied together until we get the new coach named.

Q: Gerry Faust, who was ousted from his job as head football coach at Notre Dame, was reportedly suggested as a candidate for the Northridge job by one administration official. No one took that proposal seriously. Is this a good time to take a look at Matador football and perhaps aim toward building it to the level where a Gerry Faust might seriously consider coming here?

A: I don’t know the origin of Faust’s recommendation. I have no idea who started that.

Our concern in anything that we offer here is that we do it for a potential conference championship or we shouldn’t do it at all.

What I’m saying is, we are not trying to make each sport a national contender, a national champion, because there’s many more factors involved other than the financial and the coaching that you have. But we’d like to give each sport the opportunity to say they have got a fair shot to compete equitably against the rest of the people that you are competing against within the conference structure.

I think the three sports that have probably not had as good an opportunity to be successful as other sports would be both basketball programs, men’s and women’s, and football.

Once we get those three sports to the level of the other sports, then I think it’s time to make a serious decision on a directional change.

If we continue to be successful across the board, and there seems to be more community support and interest around the campus, I think the school has as good a chance as anyone to compete on a Division I level. We’ve got the community, we’ve got the size and we’ve been able to keep and attract qualified people to run the program.

I think, in a couple of years, we’ll make the move to a higher classification if we can get a tremendous amount of support. And that support has got to be basically financial.

Q: What must happen to generate that support?

A: Public awareness of what we are doing. We said for years that we were the best-kept secret in the San Fernando Valley. Whatever we did, whoever we beat, however many times we beat them, we were much better known outside the San Fernando Valley than we were right here. The basic reason for that is we just were not getting enough coverage of what we were doing. We’ve got quality programs thought of very highly across the nation, but not too many people knew about it in the L. A.-based area.

With the daily coverage by The Times, feature stories, I think there is a lot more interest in the school, more awareness of what we are doing and when we are doing it.

I think as people find that out, they will want to see us play somebody other than a smaller school. They’ll want to see us hook up with a Cal State Long Beach, a Fresno State or a Fullerton in basketball or football.

The university also has to recognize the fact that they are going to get basically out of the athletic program what they put into it.

This school is still only 26 years young. When you look in terms of sister institutions we are competing against, we are one of the younger state institutions. Cal State Long Beach has 20 years on us, Fresno State has got 30, 40 years on us. We are just about where those schools were in the early 50s and early 60s.

We’ve got a chance to emerge and do a good job or we’ve got a chance to make a lot of mistakes like some of them did.