General | 6/14/2017 1:48:00 PM

With all of Georgia Southern's sports having completed competition for the 2016-17 academic year, Georgia Southern Director of Athletics Tom Kleinlein took some time to answer questions about the past year and wide array of topics that pertain to the immediate and long-term future of GS athletics. Here is the second in a five-part series with the head man of the Eagles.

PART 1
 

Q: You've had some pretty substantial projects in your time here. What will be next on the facilities horizon?
TK: We're currently finishing up our track project and I think that will be very beneficial to our women's track program. They needed a new track and we improved some locker room facilities out there to enhance everything. We continue to explore the possibility of a new arena. We are in the feasibility stage of that process. We need to look into doing some things out at the softball facility to enhance that program. Softball is a sport that is very strong in the Sun Belt Conference with some really good teams and we need to look at doing some things to enhance that stadium. Overall, if you look at what we've done, we've really upgraded all of our facilities across the board.

Q: In regards to football, are you of the mindset that a 25,000-seat Paulson Stadium is a good size and we just need to fill it up consistently, or do you want to go bigger?
TK: There's an old saying that you "don't build a church just for Easter and Christmas" and I think that's a great analogy here. What you need to do is build a facility that's going to be full each week. I've said a thousand times that if we fill up Paulson Stadium each week with 25,000 fans and there's a demand for more seats, I'll be leading the charge to expand the stadium. That's what we need to do. We need to fill that stadium each week, year-in and year-out, regardless of circumstances. But you don't just build those stadiums for them to be filled up once or twice a year just because we're playing a great opponent. It has to be every time the Eagles take the field. 

Q: You're reaching the end of year five. What are you most proud of and on the flip side, what still needs improvement?
TK: I think the biggest thing for me is the transition and growth of our program is what I'm proud of. We've gone from an FCS school playing in the Southern Conference to being an FBS school playing in the Sun Belt Conference. We've had to transition as an entire athletic department and learn how to run and operate like a successful athletic department. Announcing the transition was the easy part and I told our staff that. The hard part is the actual transition where everyone has to act and think differently. The demands placed on our academic people are different. The demands placed on our fundraising people are different. The same goes for our facilities crew and on and on. We've had to build this department as we are going through the transition. I think as we come to the end of year five, we are at that point. We understand the demands of this level and what's expected to compete at this level. We are starting to function at the level we need to. When you carry that over to the student-athletes, I think they have a better understanding of the academic rigors and it's shown as we've posted back-to-back 3.01 department GPAs. Our coaches are starting to understand that when you play in a conference like the Sun Belt, you are going to travel a little more, but you're going to have more exposure and have more people more aware of your program. In year five, I think we've transitioned well and I think people understand what it takes to be successful at this level. What I'm looking forward to now is five years of getting after it. We've figured out what it is we need to do, now we just need to do it better.

Q: This has been a year of change in terms of the consolidation between GS and Armstrong State. Was it harder than you thought it would be?
TK: The entire consolidation has been hard from a standpoint in terms of some of the difficult conversations we had to have with staff members. And those conversations weren't just with the Armstrong employees, it was with some of ours, too. We were charged with creating a new Georgia Southern University between the two institutions and I think the general thought was that those difficult decisions were only being made on the Armstrong campus and that's not true. The other difficult part was the ripple effect every decision has. If we make three or four decisions within the athletic department, those decisions have an impact on departments that may not have gone through the consolidation yet, so we have to slow down and get those people involved. What I really learned as we went through this process is how integrated athletics is with the rest of campus when you make decisions. When we sit down and make decisions on new admissions policies and new criteria for degrees, all of those changes impact us. The challenge has been to slow down and understand that it's not just that athletics decisions for us. Most people think that once we were done with the athletics part and figured out where we're going to play, who's going to be working for us, we were done. That's not the case. I've got to be a part of every decision that's made on campus because if they decide to change the criteria for a certain major, and we have a large number of student-athletes in that major, it's going to affect us. If we decide to change admissions policies, that's going to impact us. So all of those decisions that are being made affect us, so I'm involved with a lot more than meets the eye.

Q: What can you publicly say about will be done to make the students at the Armstrong Campus feel like the athletics department here is theirs?
TK: We are really trying hard to focus on that. It was recommended and approved at a recent consolidation meeting that we will have transportation available to all Armstrong students for all home football games and for selected other athletic events throughout the year. We're going to take some things down there in the preseason like a football practice to get their student body fired up and behind the team. We're looking forward to trying to integrate their student body as much as we can into our culture. At some point, we may start playing events on their campus, but that's down the road. We have to assess facilities and some other things down their to get the facilities up to the level of the Sun Belt Conference and Division-I athletics, but those are all things we're thinking about.

Part 1
Part 3: Wednesday, June 21
Part 4: Wednesday, June 28
Part 5: Wednesday, July 5