Oral history interview with Nelson Bobb, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Nelson Bobb
INTERVIEWER: Ann Phillips
DATE: April 25, 1990
[Begin Side A]
AP: [unclear]—Carolina?
NB: Well, I came to the university in September of 1983, and I’m fortunate enough to be the
first full-time director of intercollegiate athletics at UNCG [The University of North
Carolina at Greensboro]. I came to the university with a background primarily as a
football coach, teacher, athletics administrator at Cornell University. I had been there for
ten years. Prior to that I had taught three years of high school and coached during those
years in high school in Ohio at two separate situations, and I had received both my
undergraduate degree and my master’s degree from Kent State University in Ohio.
So I brought, really, all of that knowledge and experience to this position as full-time
athletic director at UNCG. Probably the experiences that have helped me the most
along the way were those involved with being an assistant football coach in an
intercollegiate athletics program at Cornell University. In a ten-year period of time, I
worked with three different head coaches. As I was leaving to come to Greensboro, they
were yet adding a fourth head football coach. I also worked under three different athletic
directors, and so I was quite aware of the turmoil that can exist within an intercollegiate
athletics program and the conflicts that can exist within the university structure, period.
The attraction for Greensboro was very simple—the campus is committed to
excellence. I came singularly because I was extremely impressed with Chancellor
[William] Moran and his vision for this university. I asked him a simple question, and
that was: Did he intend to have the same dedicated excellence to athletics that he did to
the rest of the university. And the answer to that was: Yes. And so I saw it as a golden
opportunity for me to really expand my career.
The other attraction for Greensboro was the city itself. It’s a lovely city. I had
seen it on television through the GGO [Greater Greensboro Open golf tournament] and
through the different basketball events that have taken place at the Greensboro Coliseum.
And so the city was an extremely positive attraction for us. I like the near distance to both
the ocean and the mountains. I think that’s a rarity. I like the climate, and I was really
captured just, literally, by the city and its greenness.
I will tell you that the third attraction for us is that my in-laws had moved from
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Charlotte, North Carolina, now some fifteen years ago—that
we would come down and visit in the springtime, leaving Ithaca and the tundra of the
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North and the gray snow and the gray clouds to come down and see the dogwoods in
bloom and the azaleas out. And I just felt that it was a better climate.
The fourth, really, was tied in with the fact that my in-laws live in Charlotte. We
lost a son to cancer in 1981, and because we had been at Cornell for such a period of
time, we knew that it was eventual that we would be leaving there. And so we had our
son buried at a country church that my in-laws attend. And so the attraction to being near
family, or at least some of the family, was very positive.
But frankly, the major attraction was the university itself, the commitment to
excellence, the quality of the enrollment, the quality of the faculty. And I was
persuaded—and seven years later will tell you that I feel much better today than I even
did then—I was persuaded that this campus wanted to expand in terms of the outreach
that it had in the state of North Carolina.
As we all know, historically it had the best and brightest when it was the
Woman’s College [of the University of North Carolina]. The transition from the
Woman’s College to a coeducational institution, I think, was painful for this university.
My history background would tell me that we are still going through some of those
painful transitions. However, change, positively or negatively, is painful, and I think in
this instance while there are some pains, I think the gains are going to be extremely
positive. And I think they’re going to be very permanent for us.
I think that we’re working at an institution that is dedicated to the future, looking
beyond the nineties and into the year 2000, that it’s—the student enrollment is excited
now at a time when it’s neat to see them excited. Of course, the movement to Division I
athletics and our direct involvement with that is very positive, both for me personally but
I also think for the greater university. And when I say that, I think the greater university
in terms of the entire UNC System.
UNCG is a bright star in the system, and, unfortunately what we hadn’t been
doing is we hadn’t been telling everybody that we were a bright star. We rested on our
laurels, and that dated back a little bit to the past experience of being a women’s college
and you knew that you were naturally going to attract the very best and the brightest. You
can’t afford to do that in the days or marketing, in the days of promotion. You must tell
your story.
McDonald’s advertises every single day. Why? Well, because they need to
continue to tell their story. They need to have people continue to come. Now we’re not
McDonald’s. We have a higher product that they have. But we need to explain to people
the quality of the experience at UNCG and athletics is only a real small part of that. It’s
only a microcosm of the greater university.
So it’s extremely positive. It’s why I came. Seven year later, it’s why I’m
dedicated and loyal to this institution. Probably if you cut me open, I’d bleed little
Spartans, little blue and gold Spartans. [laughs] I think of it in that way. I’m impressed
when I get out and about and have the opportunity to talk with prospective student
athletes, prospective students and past alums. I think that there is a freshness now that’s
abounding for the university, and we’re very positive about it.
AP: The—I know Woman’s College did have fine physical education. A friend of mine
finished her master’s here in phys ed [physical education]. She’d done undergraduate
work in religious studies at Duke [University]—really a powerhouse of a combination.
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She went on to be an outstanding teacher in the state. I’m thinking of her background, but
thinking that women’s athletics was always taught here?
NB: Yes. There’s a rich history and heritage of women’s athletics. You really need to only go
back to about the year ’54-’55, and you’ll find us winning a national championship in
women’s golf. We were probably, to women’s athletics, what possibly a UCLA would
have been to men’s basketball during their run in the time of John Wooten as coach.
We had some of the very best and brightest women student athletes—women
students, but women student athletes on this campus. Donna Horton White, Dot
Germaine, Carol Mann were examples within the sport of golf, and they went on to make
names, major names—and especially Carol Mann—in the world of professional golf.
And that was at a time when we weren’t talking ERA [Equal Rights Amendment]. We
really weren’t talking equity of sports. UNCG, albeit the Woman’s College at that time,
was making a very strong statement, a commitment to, a dedicated commitment to body
and mind, and it paid off. We have only expanded that experience. That’s the way I see it.
AP: Yeah. You’ve built on that. I mean, it was there, the history was there.
NB: We’ve built on it. We’ve built on it and today, still, one of the strengths of this
intercollegiate athletic program is the women’s success in the various sports. And now
having added women’s soccer, within two years we’re nationally accepted, and we have
the ability to recruit within the entire United States and indeed, outside the United States.
People will look at us and say, “This is a quality place to continue my soccer experience.”
We are bringing back women’s golf, and that’s real exciting. And again, because
the state of North Carolina doesn’t really have a high school golf program, we are finding
some of the student athletes as far away as Minnesota and Seattle; Washington; and
Dallas, Texas; and New Jersey. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to spread the
good word of UNCG to all those places.
AP: That is an exciting thing to think about.
[recording paused]
AP: You said you came here because it was strong, because there were a lot of attractions
coming here. And what were the programs when you came here, and how have things
changed in six or seven years?
NB: Oh gosh, we’ve changed so dramatically from ’83 to now. Let me begin. [laughs] We—
when I came here we had seven and a half full-time positions. The half was a person that
was a partial position with us and a partial position within the School of Health, Physical
Education, Recreation and Dance. We now have twenty-two full-time members, coaches,
administrators, support individuals. We employ somewhere between another ten to
twelve part-time or graduate/assistant-type individuals.
So we have greatly grown. And the most difficult challenge in some respects has
been to keep a family approach to what we’re doing with respect to a closeness that we
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really had when there were only seven of us. And we’ve managed to do that because
we’ve surrounded ourselves with very good people. And out of the seven and a half full-time
positions, actually now I have been responsible for hiring all of our individuals
except five, which is pleasing to me, and I hope pleasing to the university. I think it’s
been pleasing to the university. So our personnel has changed dramatically.
Our sports have changed. When we came here in ’83 there was men’s and
women’s basketball, men’s and women’s tennis, women’s volleyball and softball, men’s
soccer and golf. We had eight sports. We had four coaches. Each coach coached two
sports.
In February of 1987, the trustees of the university made a major decision to move
the athletics program from the Division III non-scholarship level through Division II and
to Division I by 1991. In the history of the NCAA [National Collegiate Athletic
Association], as it reorganized itself since 1972, no institution has ever tackled that
challenge.
Why? For us, some obvious things that we’ve already mentioned. We were, and
have been, a bright star in this system, but we were the only non-scholarship program in
the system. And we were losing some of the very best and brightest students because they
were looking for social experiences that our campus could not provide them, one of
which, and a major one, was the intercollegiate athletics program at a scholarship level.
Now, because of that move, we changed from an eight-sport program to a twelve-sport
program. We added women’s soccer. We are bringing back women’s golf. In the
year ’90-’91, we will have added men’s baseball and cross-country, and we will be a
twelve-sport program. And I will tell you that the future probably lends itself to being
somewhere around fourteen to sixteen sports, conceivably adding women’s cross-country,
possibly wrestling or lacrosse in the program.
And if we ever build a natatorium, we would then have the opportunity—and it
would have to be 50 meters—we’d then have the opportunity to bring back men’s and
women’s swimming, which was also a very fine program here. So the changes have been
personnel, they have been sports-oriented and they have been my direction of the
program from the non-scholarship Division III to the Division I scholarship program.
Along that same line, the facilities have changed dramatically. This campus is
flexing its muscles and particularly this western side of the campus has undergone—
undertaken rather, major changes. The building that we’re sitting in, the School of
Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance is housed here, intercollegiate athletics
is housed here, campus recreation uses the courts, uses the area, uses the weight room and
the swimming pool. This is a marvelous facility.
In the future, in the near future, we’ll be building a student recreational facility
which doesn’t have anything to do directly with intercollegiate athletics, but it does have
to do directly with the image of the institution and that social atmosphere that the student
population is looking for and demands and needs. We are going to be building a state-of-the-
art soccer stadium that will allow us to play nighttime soccer. I think that will be the
event on Saturday nights in Greensboro in the future.
We obviously add to that stadium a quality men’s and women’s soccer program
that, as we have already mentioned, is extremely well known. The future also holds
eventually building a center tennis court facility over off of [sic] Spring Garden [Street].
And somewhere on the campus, once we have acquired the land that is inside the
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boundaries of Oakland, Aycock, Walker—excuse me, Market and Tate Streets,
somewhere we’ll locate a baseball facility.
Those things will keep the student population here. They will give them things to
do, places to go, outside of opportunities that already exist on the campus, on the
weekends. And that’s something that is very, very positive.
AP: That sounds good. So a tremendous amount of growth in facilities. It is a beautiful
building, it’s a beautiful place, a lot to keep in line.
NB: Well, the most important statement is that it’s demonstrating to the population of
Greensboro, the Triad, and indeed the entire state, that the university wishes to again
achieve the level of recognition that it had when it was the Woman’s College and that in
fact, some of the very best and brightest do continue to come here.
The intriguing thing about that is they’re not only coming from the state of North
Carolina, they are coming from all over the United States. Indeed, if you just take a look
at our athletics teams, you’ll see individuals from as far away Washington and New
Hampshire, Florida, Texas, California, Arizona. That’s a way of putting ourselves out on
the map.
I think quality begets quality. So you bring in a quality student or a quality student
athlete, and they go back and they tell their hometown of the positive experience that they
have. We are not [the University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, we are not NC State
[University]. We don’t pretend to be. We don’t care to be. We are one of the three
flagship schools, as those two are, and frankly, we have some qualities that they never
will have. They never will have. The quaintness of this campus they never will have
again, because they are so much bigger.
And they—as far as I’m concerned, the quality of the faculty here is very rich and
gives and affords the student a closer one-on-one relationship than they would have at
institutions that are much larger in size and scope. So I think that it’s an appropriate time
to be involved, because it’s such an exciting time.
Twenty-five years from now we’re going to look back, and we’re going to have
said, “Well, it wasn’t as painful as we thought it was when we were going through it.”
Most of us probably won’t be around, certainly physically, on the campus. Hopefully all
of us will be around still for a while. But I think that we will be able to look back on it
and say that, while it was painful and while there were some difficulties in getting there,
look where we are.
And I think that we’re very much an institution headed in a positive way to the
future. I think the student population tells you that when you look at who is attending our
intercollegiate events. They’re the freshman and the sophomore, and they’re very excited
and they have come here with new visions. They are pioneers, if you will, striking new
frontiers here on this campus. And that’s a quality that’s very intriguing about UNCG,
that there still are frontiers here to be able to be captured.
Athletics is one of those, but it’s only one part of it. I think that the faculty
continues to generate itself in a positive way. The students continue to come in in a
positive way. Enrollment seems to be up. The applications for admissions seem to be up.
And the quality of the students who are applying seems to be up. So the mission of the
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university, and indeed, in some small way, our mission of intercollegiate athletics, is just
very solid.
And now it’s time for us to go forth and continue to tell our story. As the
centennial looms for us, it’s going to be a marvelous opportunity to brag, and I think that
we need to do that. Not in a chest-puffing, pompous way, but just telling our story,
because our story is very positive. It’s a very good story. It’s dedicated to the
advancement of the state of North Carolina through a multitude of opportunities, from
any one of the professional schools to the college and to the dedication of liberal arts.
For us, that transcends to quality student athletes, people who come to get an
education first. And luckily for us along the way, they also have the same kind of
dedication to their sport that they have in the classroom. They are some of the best and
brightest. We will graduate a young man this year who is an outstanding tennis player,
who has been an academic all-America, who is a Phi Beta Kappa key winner, marvelous
individual.
Those are the kinds of leaders that we’re turning out. That’s going to reap us the
benefits twenty-five years from now, very much. So we can’t even begin to comprehend
how much that will affect us in twenty-five years.
AP: That is a great challenge and a great record. It’s just very good, not only for the students
but for faculty, for the whole university and for the state influence. It seems that we can
do things in athletics that we cannot do in the classroom. We can do—an athletic program
allows us to do things that we can’t do anywhere else in the university. Don’t you think?
NB: Yeah. An athletics program is in many ways the most visible element of a university. I’m
not telling you that that’s right, I’m just telling that that’s probably true. And as a result
of that, a lot of times it’s the negative side of the image of the university, too. From our
standpoint, it happens to be the positive side and it is our intention to keep it there.
But athletics is a way that the institution is in the newspaper at least every day,
albeit the fact that it might be in the sports section, nonetheless, athletics is in the paper—
I mean, the university is in the paper every day via athletics. When you win a national
championship in something, in any sports—in our instance, we’ve demonstrated a
prowess in soccer, men’s soccer—that touches every other university across the United
States. Therefore, it touches the populations that are tied into that university.
We just had a team come back from Penn[sylvania] State [University]; they
played in a softball tournament. The headlines in the newspaper, not in the university
newspaper but in the newspaper at State College [Pennsylvania], said “Penn State Wins
over UNCG in Close Game.” Well, UNCG became a name at State College. I don’t know
that they’d ever heard about us before, and that in one small way is a way that we
deposited our name in a very positive fashion in another portion of the Untied States.
Now when I say Penn State, people think about it. If you say Ohio State [University],
somebody thinks about it.
AP: It’s well known.
NB: Why do they think about it? Well, do they—do you look at Professor So-and-So, X, Y,
and Z? Sadly, no. The academicians do, but the typical student population doesn’t. What
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the typical student population sees is television exposure, radio exposure, newspaper
exposure, So-and-So won a national championship. Who were the teams that are in the
Final Four in basketball? Who are the teams that are in the Final Four for the women’s
basketball? Who’s winning a soccer championship? Who’s winning a decathlon event in
track?
All of those things are a way that an image of your university is portrayed. In my
tenure at Cornell, we had some exceptional professors, Nobel Prize winners, but the
people in California were very excited when we beat Harvard [University] because they
would now have bragging rights over all the people that they knew that graduated from
Harvard, and more importantly, that was in the newspaper out there, and here was
Cornell had beaten Harvard.
Well, in our own way, we’ve had some of those kinds of victories, And again, the
future will be very bright with that because the competition that we will play at Division I
will allow us and afford us the opportunity to compete in an athletic venue with those
institutions that we marry up philosophically and academically with, and in some
instances, historically with. Women’s College of Virginia was James Madison
[University] now. Women’s College of the state of Florida was Florida State [University]
now.
Those are institutions that we have or will play, and that now moving into the
Division I arena gives us so many positive experiences with the ability to play the Dukes
and the Chapel Hills, and the States, and the Wake Forests [University], the Old
Dominions [University], the Virginia [Polytechnic] Techs [State University], and we do
play them. And lo and behold, we’re starting to beat them. And that’s a good statement.
It’s a good statement.
AP: But it seems as even as you’re outlining maybe the possibility for winning and for tough
competition, that you also—I feel that you have a clear idea of what you want in your
personal vision, but the vision for the university—that that’s strong, that’s stable, that’s
here and that it’s okay to compete, but that, you know, we don’t have to take it overboard
at the expense of academics.
NB: No. If we’re not dedicated, if we’re not dedicated here at UNCG to the student side of the
ledger, the student side of the formula “student athlete,” then we need to shut down the
athletics program. Now I don’t think you need to do that because there are enough good
people in athletics programs who do believe in the quality experience for the student and
that the fact that they are an athlete—they are athletes—will brighten their horizons. But
it isn’t the reason why they’re here.
So you surround yourself with those kinds of people, and UNCG is committed to
that. That goes back to my very basic statement about the dedication to excellence. That’s
all you really need to understand.
And if you go out and you talk with any chancellor or president at a university
and you can say to her or to him, “Are you dedicated to excellence?” “Yes.” “Do you
have that commitment to athletics?” Well, what are you asking? Well, I’m just asking the
same question. Does it mean that everything that exists on the campus is the best, the
brightest? And the answer to that is no. But the dedication, the philosophy takes you
towards that level, it takes you towards being the best. You don’t always have to be
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number one to be successful. And unfortunately in our society a lot of people don’t agree
with that. If you’re not number one—
AP: Then you don’t count.
NB: Then you don’t count. But if that was true, then there’s only one school in the 64
basketball tournament, the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament, that ends up
playing the last game as a winner because all the rest of them have to lose along the way
to get there. But one game certainly doesn’t make, nor does one season. What we’re
talking about is the overall quality of the experience. That’s what we’re talking about.
AP: In the game of life as well as the game.
NB: Yeah. Well, yeah, if you really want to get broadly philosophical about it, it’s the game of
life. That’s exactly right. You come here, you are here to be a student. You are admitted
to the university to be a student. You are admitted to the university the same way other
students are admitted to this university. That’s as it should be.
But along the way, what you want to do is you want to be involved in
intercollegiate athletics or you want to be involved in the show choir, which is an
exceptional display of talent for this university, not much different than our student
athletics. [They] don’t get the same kind of accolades on the broad plain that the student
athlete gets, but nonetheless extremely talented and in their own way they do receive
accolades.
AP: Yeah, they are dedicated.
NB: And they are dedicated.
AP: Well, you’ve outlined, well, your coming here and personal philosophies, professional
philosophies. Other closing comments on personal visions, other visions, other hopes,
dreams, maybe pitfalls for you or for this school or for this program, other ideas?
NB: Personally, I don’t think I have anything more to add from a philosophical standpoint
about Nelson Bobb. Hopefully, the legacy that I will be able to leave when it comes time
for me to move on is that he was extremely dedicated to the greater university, he
understood the values of the university and he worked very hard to maintain those values
in intercollegiate athletics and in his everyday life for the good for the university.
I envision UNCG fifty, twenty-five to fifty years from now, as one of the gems. I
think we are now, I just don’t think that many people understand it. We’re kind of in the
diamond mine still being picked away at, and—but I certainly believe that we will
continue to be able to attract the best and the brightest. The schools on campus have
demonstrated in resounding fashion their ability to attract very bright individuals.
I think we have added to that in athletics because we have been able to attract
individuals that would not have come here had we not been able to offer an athletics
experience, either as a player or as a spectator. So I think the future is extremely bright. I
see no reason why it won’t be bright.
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I think that we need to continue to understand that change is painful because it
forces us to think beyond maybe the boundaries or parameters that we’ve defined for
ourselves and think broader than that, that the answers aren’t always directly in front of
us, that we have to seek other knowledge. But that’s what an institution is all about.
That’s what a university is all about.
And so I see UNCG moving boldly into the future, making its strike at other
institutions of a similar fashion, finding its niche with those universities, calling those
sister institutions and being very proud of that association and being very proud of itself.
And I’m fortunate that I’m able to have witnessed and be a part of the experience of the
change of UNCG. It’s been most delightful and very rewarding.
It’s just a golden time to be involved with a university, and by that—we’re not
talking buildings, we’re talking people—to be involved with a university that feels good
about itself and that is willing to be venturesome, willing to be a little bit of a pioneer,
and in some respects a big pioneer.
AP: Yeah, and risk taking.
NB: And risk taking. It’s good to be involved with that, rather than being involved with an
institution—which, quite frankly, my last experience led me to believe that it was—was
just sitting back on its laurels and saying, After all, this is who we are and you need to
understand that that’s who we are. That’s being a little nearsighted, so I—with all due
respect. But UNCG is not that.
AP: Take us or leave us.
NB: UNCG is very viable. It’s got a very vital heartbeat for not only the Piedmont, the Triad
area, but for the state of North Carolina. And we have a lot to be proud about. And yet,
let’s don’t brag about it. Let’s just keep on being good. And I—that’s what I see for us
and I am, I’m extremely proud that I’ve had the opportunity to be in some small way a
part of the growth of the university. And the challenge for us is to keep it at that level and
to continue to build on that and not be complacent.
AP: I like, I like what you’re saying. I’ve enjoyed this very much.
NB: Oh, I have too.
AP: Thanks so much.
[End of Interview]