General | 6/21/2017 2:37:00 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 third in a five-part series with the head man of the Eagles.

PART 1
PART 2

Q: With your dismissal of Annie Smith as the softball coach, and several resignations for various reasons, you just made your 16th coaching hire in a little less than five years as the AD here. That is a lot of transition. What are you thoughts on that?
TK: I think what you see is an athletic department in transition. We're at a level now where the time demands and the level of expectations across the board are very different. I think the hiring process for coaches is one of the most important duties an athletic director has because you want to have the right person leading your student-athletes and the program. It's not always about wins and losses, although a lot of people think that it is. Sometimes we make a change because the culture of a sport isn't going in the right direction. Sometimes we're making a change because the leader of that sport decides they don't want to do it anymore, or leave to take another job. There are a lot factors that go into coaching changes. I've hired a lot of coaches over the course of my career at several schools, and I feel comfortable in the process that we have in place here. When it comes time to hire a new coach, I involve our senior staff and rely on them to gather information and create candidate pools to help me make the best decision possible. At the end of the day, Georgia Southern is a unique place. It's a place where you have to come to work every day with your lunch pail and you have to work as hard as you can with the resources available to you. As a Group of 5 Athletic Department, you're going to have transition with coaches because if you're hiring the right ones, and they're really successful, they're going to move up. If you have people who come in and they realize it's a little bigger deal than they thought, they're going to move on, too. And it's not only for coaches, it's for staff across the board. As an athletic director at this level, you have to be comfortable with change and you have to have a process in place and a core, so that when change happens, you're recruiting to that core and your beliefs. Those are going to always be the same, but the people will change.

Q: The department posted a 3.01 overall GPA for the second straight year. Is that now the expectation instead of the goal?
TK: When we made the decision to move to the Sun Belt and the FBS for football, we had to get better in a lot of areas and academics was one of them. One of the areas we didn't have the resources was the behind-the-scenes areas like academics, ticketing and training. We have begun over the past two years to really make a commitment to academics, whether it be giving them more space to set up academic units on campus or hiring more personnel to help the be successful. If you take the concept that we just talked about with the coaches, Reggie Simpkins - who heads up our student-athlete services - he's figured out how to be successful with the limited resources that he had. Now, I'm going to give him more resources but the expectations are going to grow. He's proven he can do it with what he had before so now it will only get better. I think that staff has done an incredible job with our student-athletes. When I got here, we averaged about 100-125 tutorial appointments a week and we're now up to almost 700 a week. That staff is engaging our entire department and we're working every day to provide for our student-athletes and I think our student-athletes are beginning to respond.

Q: How much as a athletic director do you worry about APR, in particular with where football is right now?
TK: You worry across all sports now because with the new NCAA distribution of moneys in regards to basketball, part of the criteria is department APR scores. That's an important number in everything we do. The numbers in men's basketball and football are always in the spotlight because of the negativity associated with your program if you drop below the line and are not eligible for postseason. Our football number is close, but we've managed it. Our staff has done a tremendous job of managing that. One of the unique things that I don't think a lot of the public realizes is that while the APR is an academic measurement, many of the components have to do with retention. With the transfer rules we have now and the way the NCAA world allowing student-athletes to come and go as they want, when you lose a kid and he could be eligible, you lose a retention point. Or when you go through coaching transitions like we have, kids naturally leave. They aren't recruited by the new coach, the system changes and the kids leave. One of the challenges we have is that while we have the APR number over here that stresses academics and retention, which are good things that need to be stressed, but these student-athletes are choosing a college a lot of times based on who will be coaching them and the system they'll be running. So when a coach and a system changes, they decide to leave, but that impacts the academic number sitting over here. That's a challenge for us and every school. I commend our football staff who came in and took a tough situation and managed to keep us above the level to where we aren't affected when it comes to postseason eligibility. They have to make some tough decisions some times, pulling kids out of practice when they're not performing up to the level they need to in the classroom. Our kids responded this spring and did a heck of a job in the classroom. 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 4: Wednesday, June 28
Part 5: Wednesday, July 5