Curtain Closes on Hiegert as Bubb Takes Lead Role : Northridge: Longtime athletic director’s differences with administration over money, philosophy led to his downfall.

Bob Hiegert’s office door was closed. The lights were off. His old desk already was bare and the shelves were empty.

Hiegert’s 17-year tenure as the Cal State Northridge athletic director officially came to a close Wednesday when the school announced his resignation after a series of financial and philosophical differences with a senior school administrator.

The move largely was precipitated by the department’s long-running budget woes, according to Ron Kopita, vice president of student affairs. Kopita also said he had concerns about Hiegert’s vision for the fifth-year NCAA Division I program.

The $4,000,000 program had a deficit of $700,000 in 1994-95.

“Just like any other program, it’s important that [athletics] stay within the budget,” Kopita said at a press conference. “I cannot overemphasize that fact. We had differences, and as a result of those differences a decision was made for him to step down.”

As expected, associate athletic director Paul Bubb was named the interim replacement for the 1995-96 school year. Hiegert, 53, was not present during the announcement, which was made 30 feet from his old office.

Hiegert, a tenured associate professor, was reassigned and will teach in the school’s physical education department.

Kopita said he and Hiegert repeatedly bumped heads over budgetary and philosophical issues and said he will seek an athletic director who will lead the school to the “next level.”

“I’m looking for an athletic director with highly honed business skills, who is sophisticated in ways of fund-raising externally, who has highly skilled management and communication skills,” Kopita said.

“These are the kinds of skills that, if you look around the country . . . Division I athletic directors usually have.”

Asked if Hiegert possessed those characteristics, Kopita said: “Draw your own conclusions.”

Kopita said that while the resignation centered on the department’s long-running budget problems, friction between him and Hiegert also played a large role.

“We’re dwelling on the budget, maybe because it makes a good headline, but it’s more than that,” said Kopita, who has been at Northridge for three years. “It’s a relationship that develops. The relationship that I had with Bob was such that it wasn’t working.”

A national search for a permanent replacement will commence in the spring, Kopita said, because no candidate “worth his salt” would leave a school in the middle of the academic year.

Coaches didn’t necessarily agree that Hiegert lacked the vision to make the program nationally prominent in Division I.

“I think Bob did a great job of leading us to this point and could have led us successfully to the next level,” said John Price, the men’s volleyball coach. “On the other hand, sometimes change is good.

“But the problem with change is that it might be better, or it might not.”

Most of the coaches didn’t realize the differences between Hiegert and Kopita were so pronounced.

“I knew that Bob and Ron butted heads a lot over the last three years, but I didn’t realize they had this kind of history,” Price said.

“Just because you know they’re bumping heads doesn’t mean you know how hard they’re bumping.”

Bubb outlined several short-term goals, including the upgrading of substandard facilities and improvement of fund-raising efforts. Securing membership in the Big Sky Conference--whose administrators are scheduled to make an on-campus visit to Northridge next month--is the most-pressing item on the agenda.

Bubb next month will submit a plan to Kopita calling for the overhaul of the department’s business affairs wing, which is responsible for overseeing budgetary matters.

Bubb, 38, came to Northridge in 1990 after serving in various administrative capacities at Drake and Southern Illinois.

His installation as a Division I athletic director was almost a battlefield promotion.

“I hoped it would come about at some point in time,” he said. “But the way that this transpired sure isn’t the way I’d have envisioned it.”

Contributing: Mike Hiserman.