By Kevin Clerici and Arlie Rahn
Arizona Daily Wildcat
December 2, 1997

Livengood Lets Loose

Charles C. Labenz Arizona Daily Wildcat UofA athletic director Jim Livengood recently spoke with the Arizona Daily Wildcat about the University of Arizona Athletic Department and its future.

The past 12 months have put the national spotlight on the University of Arizona athletic program. For nearly three years, 52-year-old Jim Livengood has headed up the department. Livengood sat down with the Arizona Daily Wildcat Nov. 19 to talk about the past, present and future of the department, from championships to Nike.

Q: What accomplishment are you proudest of when you look back over the last couple of years?

JL: The fact that we've grown as a department and we've continued to be broad based and not about one or 2 programs. All 18 of our programs are good and keep improving. We've also made significant improvements in terms of academics. We're not where we want to be, but we're better. I'm proud of that.

Q: Is the corporate partnership that the athletic department has set up (like Cellular One and pending Nike deals) a decision you made, or really a necessity?

JL: It's a necessity. If we're going to have 18 programs and try and make them as good as we can and give them good coaches, it's obviously going to cost money. Ten years ago, 12-15 percent of the athletic budget came from the state. Now, we're only at about five percent and it's getting smaller. The corporate partners program is a big part of that reduction. There was a big story about the Cellular One logo on the floor in McKale. It was tastefully done. It's not at all obtrusive. We knew that when fans look at that floor, the first thing they want to see is that cactus logo, and that hasn't changed. But what that deal allowed us to do was to get a new floor at the end of the year, something that we desperately needed. Our desire is not to be a Grand Prix racetrack and have our athletic venues be that way. But at the same time, we only have X amount of sources of revenue. The university has many more important things to do with its money than give it to us and we know that. So the money that we are going to get has to be done privately some way.

Q: With the issue of Title IX, what are your plans to deal with that and the other gender issues? (Title IX, the gender equity clause in federal law)

JL: We do a gender equity report every year where we look at every aspect of gender equity as it relates to our program. We've really improved our number of women athletes, but we're not where we want to be. But the greatest fear is when you get to a point and say 'We've done everything we possibly can so we don't need to do anymore,' and that's when you become very average as a program. I really believe that our female student-athletes feel they are being treated exactly the same way as the men.

Q: What is going to happen in terms of female scholarships and participation?

JL: We have 10 programs for women and eight for men. In about four years, we're going to add another women's sport. On the men's side we are not taking anything away. We are trying to take a close look and make sure we are operating efficiently. Our football team has around 105, 110 scholarships where we used to have 150.

Q: With regard to that, do you ever have a problem with certain teams, like basketball and football, that make a lot of revenue and then say that football needs a new office, but yet you use the money to help out the women's softball team or some other team. Does that create a conflict?

JL: It's not a conflict, but some criticism comes from that because some people think I spend way too much time thinking about other programs. I can understand where they come from. I got in this business because I want to help all programs. We've never done anything that's been detrimental to football in terms of revenue. Our football budget will compete with any football budget. Our facilities budget, when finished, will compete with any facilities budget. At the same time, we don't let the teams that make the money, keep the money. If that were the case then cross country, track and field, tennis, and golf, and those kind of programs wouldn't be able to support themselves. We only have two programs that fall in that category that would be able to support their own program, men's basketball and football. As much as we get in volleyball and women's basketball, they're not going to be able to do it, so that's the natural kind of thing, in terms of what people will be critical of me and say, "Let's not put the money in the women's program, let's just build a dynasty or power in football." At this point in time, it's not about money in football. It's about better recruiting, which we are doing. Next year is going to be a great year for us, I just know it is. We need to get out and sell Wildcat football.

Q: Should athletes be paid?

JL: I'm very strongly against athletes being paid. I'm very strongly in favor of student-athletes having access to other types of aid. Paying student-athletes gets us very close to sort of a minor league situation, which is distasteful. If it were a perfect world, I would like to see us go athletically to a more need-based aid. Student-athletes then would receive a scholarship solely on athletic ability, but instead on both ability and need. We have student athletes right now that are perceived as being rich because they are on full scholarships, but they don't have enough money to buy a hamburger or go to a show. All of the money they receive goes home because of really tough economic situations.

Q: What's the status of the Nike deal?

JL: It's still in the process and will probably take another two months before the deal is finalized.

Q: What's your response to the people who say the department should boycott Nike because of its perceived labor activities overseas?

JL: If I didn't in my own mind think that Nike was doing its very best effort to get better with regard to their activities, I wouldn't do it just for the money. But I've been assured by Phil Knight that they are trying to do the right thing, and that they are going to get better. If it was a company that was saying, 'Hey, we're not going to worry about somebody else. We're worried about making money. Do you want to go with us or not?', it would be a different situation. If we go too much in a radical direction in the other way, you get to a point where you couldn't sit in these chairs or even wear Levi's. Nike has done a good deal of work in making sure that we are comfortable with them as a company and they are doing a lot of things that are making the quality of lives of our student-athletes better.

Q: What's your feeling on the direction of the football team?

JL: One of the things is that I want to tell everybody the same thing. I'm concerned about attendance. Attendance is money but it's important to secure other programs. The other thing I'm concerned about is the message we send out. We're 5-5 right now, I'd love it if we were 6-4 or 7-3 but we're not. But we played pretty well the last couple of games and we've done some great things with a very limited team because of injuries and those kinds of things. The message that I don't want to send out to anybody, including our students, our alums, or anyone across the country is that all the University of Arizona cares about is winning. That's a poor, poor message. Is winning important? You bet it is. That's why we play, that's why we have scoreboards, but there are other kinds of values as well. There's academic values in terms of what's happening to our graduation rate. Our graduation rate of our football team has skyrocketed. We have a young football team. We got a lot of talent in our freshman and sophomore classes. I think that's really important as we go forward. The future of Arizona Wildcat football, I think, is dynamite. This is will be our first year to recruit to through the offices. We didn't have any of this last year. We didn't have the offices. The offices are more than just a symbolic place where coaches sit. To recruits coming in, what those offices say is one thing, "Boy, this place is committed to football. Football is really important here," as opposed to last year, when we walked them down the hall to about five or six different locations. Homer (Smith, offensive coordinator) and several of other the coaches couldn't even stand up in their own office. There was no lobby and the trophies were mostly in boxes. So if somebody goes there then goes to, let's say, Nebraska, that's what we have to compete against or against UCLA, USC, or Washington. That's why we did that fast. It would have an impact and that's why we have all the models sitting down in the football offices now. This is going to come and its going to come very soon. Football is important to us. I'll meet with every football player recruit, but I'll be very candid with them. Football is not the most important thing we do. Everyone of our 18 programs is important. But, football is also important for what it does for our school and for our other programs.

Q: What's brought on all the building expansion (weight room, football offices)?

JL: When I came in around Feb. 1994, we addressed the needs that our program had and set up a program for the next 10-15 years. We've been talking about the weight room for a year and a half, so it's been a long process and we hope to get it going next summer. One good thing about the weight room project is that is going to be funded by private money. None of it will come from the university. It can't be.

We have an annual review every year and go over the needs of our programs. We then look at a wish list with the head coach. And most of the things on that wish list we try and do. We've chopped off a ton of things on those lists over the last four years and it's been in every program. There wasn't a single program we didn't address. We're upgrading the scoreboard in tennis, a soccer field, softball concession stands and restrooms are going in as we speak. We've put in a new track. It wasn't like we've put all of our money in one sport.

Q: When is The McKale Center extension going to open?

JL: With any luck, our target is for next summer. We'll probably looking at an 18-month window. That might be a bit long. 12 months on the short side, 18 on the long side. It could go rather fast. So much of it is the digging because the weight department is underground.

Q: I saw you last week at the cross country meet. How often do you get a chance to check out stuff like that?

JL: I try to see when at all possible. I saw a little bit of swimming last weekend. I try to see every one of our teams compete as much as I can at home. I don't go on the road with men's basketball because if I do that then I'll miss our women's team here at home. I saw women's basketball last Sunday here. I don't watch many practices because if I watch football practice then that means I should be watching softball and swimming and other practices. The perception of our student athletes is very fragile considering that watching one thing may say, 'Well, I know what he really likes." I see as many home events as I possibly can, and that's a lot. The spring time is brutal. We had a stretch last spring of two months where we had 76 home events.

Q: How crazy has it been for you personally since the national title? How much has that affected you?

JL: So many people want to talk to you and want you speak to groups. A bigger part of my job all the time is fundraising, trying to raise money to make sure we make the budget and balance. The Board of Regents says we're not going to be in the red. June is a really edgy month. The speaking engagements are incredible with regard to talking about the trophy and talking about the team and those kinds of things. It's changed the way I go out. Lute's room and my room were back to back in Indianapolis and that night after the game celebrating with each other we both realized that our lives will be different from that point on- in a very good way, too. The only hard way is sometimes telling people that we can't autograph any more balls right now. Not from the standpoint that we never can, but we don't want the players to get to the point where they say, "Hey, I don't ever want to see another basketball." It got really crazy there for a couple months, at one point it got to where stacks and stacks of stuff from different people were being dropped off and they would say, "I need to have this signed by next Tuesday. I know it won't be a problem." But it became a problem.

Q: Looking back, have there been any decisions that you might take back or things that you might have done differently?

JL: Hiring a baseball coach was very controversial to a lot of people and I want to be careful of that because I think Jerry (Stitt) is a very good coach and we were a lot better in baseball last year. We're going to be really good this year. There will always be people who will say, 'How could you do that?' and '(Former coach) Rich Alday was a Tucson native,' but I never look back. There probably have been a lot of decisions that maybe I would make differently now if I had all the information, but I wouldn't change them because at the time, that's the information that I had and that's how I felt. Once you go down that road of trying to allow yourself to say, 'I wouldn't have done that,' in this business, you'll just drive yourself nuts. There will be 50 decisions a day and we have 153 people on this staff, so you just get as much information as you can, make the decision and move on.

Q: I am a regular student and I didn't win the basketball ticket lottery. Is there any hope that there may be more tickets or that maybe the seats will be closer to the floor?

JL: There's a lot of hope. Two things will happen with that. One is that we are trying to get more tickets. There are going to be tickets available for every game on a first come-first serve basis as well. The interesting thing is that tickets are not really gobbled up as fast as you might think. The other thing is that we need to get students closer to the court. However, we've got to be very careful because with the people who have been in those seats for a long time, it creates a lose-lose situation. Somebody's going to be mad, so we have to be very careful how we deal with that. We've probably added 40 or 50 student tickets and we've also, in little pockets, started to move students down closer to the floor. Every time we lose some seats now we are trying to move students closer. Eventually we'll get there. It's just hard to do wholesale because people in Tucson who have those kind of seats almost feel like it's a birthright and they're really serious about it.

Q: Has there ever been any talk about maybe expanding McKale Center so you could get more people into the games and maybe lure some other special events?

JL: The first year I was here we did an expansion study and the costs were so prohibitive that I think it would have been unbelievably unpopular on campus. To extend that kind of money with all of the other university needs, it would have been viewed as, 'If people are willing to give that kind of money, why wouldn't they give it to the science department or the college of education or those type of things.' It's very political.

Q: How often do you get a chance to talk to regular students?

JL: The only time I get a chance is walking across campus and then I get a pretty good chance to stop and talk. Our son is a junior here and our daughter is in her first year of law school so I get to talk to a lot of their friends. I taught for 13 years before being an athletic director and there are still a lot of days that I really miss teaching. I don't like to be perceived as somebody who is only concerned about athletics. Often the perception is, 'Those people at McKale, they don't care about us. All they care about is rolling those cash registers. They don't care about the students.' If you guys aren't students here, I'm not here. We need to remember everyday that if there are no students here, we're not here either so we need to focus a little bit more on the concerns of the students.

Jim Livengood

University of Arizona Athletic Director:

Born: March 28, 1945 in Quincy, Wash.

Family: Livengood has a wife, Linda, and two children, Michelle and Jeremy, who currently attends the UA.

College: Attended Washington State, Everett (Wash.) Community College and Brigham Young University. He earned a bachelor's degree in physical education from BYU in 1968.

Athletics: Honorable mention all-state basketball player, Quincy High School.

Career Highlights: Assistant football and track coach, Moses Lake (Wash.) High School, 1968-69.

Head football and basketball coach, Oroville (Wash.) High School, 1969-72.

Athletic director, head football and basketball coach and counselor, Ephrata (Wash.) High School, 1972-80.

Held various assistant director positions in the Washington State University athletic department, 1980-85

Athletic Director, Southern Illinois University, 1985-87

Athletic Director, Washington State University, 1987-94

Athletic Director, University of Arizona, Jan., 1994-present. Livengood this year became president of the NCAA Division I-A Athletic Directors' Association.