Carroll Resigns to Take Job at UCI : College sports: Cal State Fullerton athletic director leaves behind budget crisis.

Ed Carroll, the smiling, tight-lipped Cal State Fullerton athletic director who said he wanted to accentuate the positive but instead was forced to spend his tenure slashing budgets and threatening to drop sports, is resigning to take a job at rival UC Irvine.

Carroll, 40, told his staff Thursday that he is leaving. He will be named assistant athletic director for finance at Irvine, filling a position that has been vacant since before Tom Ford was named athletic director last May. Carroll would not comment Thursday, but said he will give his reasons for resigning at a news conference in Irvine today.

“He just said it was time for new leadership,” said Dick Wolfe, the Fullerton men’s gymnastics coach. “He said he was leaving now because he didn’t want to be a lame-duck AD, and so they could get someone in to move things forward right away.”

An interim athletic director is expected to be named with the consultation of school president Milton A. Gordon, who released a statement thanking Carroll for his service.

A former Fullerton wrestler, Carroll had been athletic director since 1985, and once said it was the job he wanted for the rest of his life.

His departure comes after a series of budget crises, the latest nearly resulting in the discontinuation of the school’s Division I-A football program. As he resigns, the department is embarking on a two-year, $2.3-million fund-raising campaign that, if successful, will help save the football program, which appeared so close to being discontinued last month that Coach Gene Murphy had told recruits to consider going elsewhere.

It was the athletic administration, headed by Carroll, that made the original recommendation three weeks ago to drop football because of state budget cuts. That recommendation was sent to the athletics’ council, which passed it on to Gordon. Gordon decided to keep football, but not before serious damage, caused by apparent miscommunication between Gordon, Carroll and Murphy, was inflicted on the program.

“I think he’s like a man with 18-million pounds of weight off his shoulders today,” Murphy said of Carroll on Thursday.

Fullerton coaches and officials said Carroll was under no pressure to leave. He will take a salary cut, believed to be less than $10,000, by changing jobs. Carroll’s salary at Fullerton was recently increased to $72,000. His salary at Irvine will fall in the “mid-range” of the position’s scale of $45,700 to $68,600, Irvine’s Ford said.

Even though the football program fiasco seemed a likely catalyst for the resignation, Ford said he and Carroll had been discussing the job for “more than a month,” including a session as they sat side-by-side in Irvine’s Bren Center last month while Irvine defeated Fullerton in men’s basketball.

Murphy, who spoke to Carroll on Thursday, thought the football situation was probably part of the decision.

“I think it was heavy on his mind,” Murphy said. “He’d gone through a lot. I think that was part of it, part of the whole.”

Bill Puzo, a professor of geography, a member of the academic senate and a former member of the academic council, agreed.

“My sense is that there was an unfortunate coincidence of the budget problems and the football crisis, corresponding to an opportunity Ed couldn’t pass up,” Puzo said. Although Carroll will be remembered most as the athletic director who headed the department during a period when Fullerton dropped numerous sports programs and trimmed others to subsistence levels because of budget problems, he also made several key coaching hires.

He hired Larry Cochell as baseball coach in 1987 after Augie Garrido, who guided the Titans to two national titles, left to become coach at Illinois. Cochell guided the Titans to the College World Series twice in three years before leaving to become coach at Oklahoma after last season. Carroll responded by rehiring Garrido.

Carroll hired women’s basketball coach Maryalyce Jeremiah from Indiana in 1985. Jeremiah’s team recently was ranked in the top 25. He also hired men’s basketball coach John Sneed, responding to a public groundswell after Sneed guided the team to a 16-13 record as interim coach after George McQuarn’s resignation in 1988.

Carroll also presided over the department at the time of the long-awaited groundbreaking for the Titan Sports Complex, which had been in the planning stages for more than a decade.

Still, Carroll’s lasting image will be associated with the annual ritual of budget cuts.

The school dropped water polo, men’s and women’s golf, and men’s tennis during Carroll’s tenure, although it added men’s track.

Last spring, the fencing and men’s gymnastics teams were on the verge of being eliminated until Carroll switched two 1990 home football games, against Fresno State and San Jose State, to away games, bringing the school an extra $90,000 revenue.

Several Titan programs, such as wrestling, soccer and men’s gymnastics, have been cut to the bare minimum, forcing coaches to raise a large percentage of their budgets to remain competitive each year.

Men’s gymnastics and wrestling, for example, received $5,000 in athletic department support this year--not even enough for one full scholarship--and Wolfe, who has worked under 12 athletic directors and interim ADs in 23 years at Fullerton, had his salary slashed in half.

“My 12th AD just killed me,” said Wolfe, whose teams won national championships in 1971, ’72 and ’74. “He killed my sport. I’m not optimistic that someone is going to come here and turn my career around.”

Carroll’s budget decisions often cost him popularity among the coaches, and the recent football situation was seen as a telling crisis by some.

“Ed has lost support from most directions,” said a school source, who asked not to be identified. “He knows that and so do a lot of other people. The handwriting has been on the wall for quite some time.”

The source emphasized that Carroll was not forced to resign, but the situation likely contributed to Carroll’s decision.

Although speculation within the athletic department about Carroll’s replacement centered on several people with ties to the school, it seems unlikely that Gordon, in his first year at Fullerton, would turn to a former employee.

One possible exception would be Ralph Barkey, who was director of the Titan Athletic Foundation in 1978 and ‘79, and is now athletic director at Sonoma State, where Gordon was vice president for academic affairs before coming to Fullerton.

Barkey said he had not been contacted by Gordon, but would “probably be interested.”