SUU AD talks about TV deals, favorite moments, keeping football coach Warren

Ryan Miller | The Spectrum

Southern Utah University athletic director Debbie Corum knows there are built-in limitations for her department.

In her quest to gain greater exposure for the programs, she looked into getting a television deal and discovered something: There is a lack of local options — and it's unlikely Salt Lake stations are going to carry SUU games anytime soon.

“Who would we get?” Corum said. “Really, if you have any ideas, please tell me.”

Finding ways to get the program on the state radar is one of Corum’s goals. She believes it's low profile is part of the reason the Thunderbird football team, which is coming off a Big Sky championship-winning season, has yet to appear on any preseason Top 25 lists. SUU has often been forgotten; she’s hoping to change that.

Here is the second part of The Spectrum’s sit-down interview with the SUU athletic director.

PART ONE: Corum talks about goals, Eccles Performance Center, state funding

What was the best moment of your first year as AD?

This is going to not sound genuine, but it is. Watching one of our football players walk across the stage and get his diploma, I started bursting into tears. I didn’t think he was going to do it, I didn’t think he was going to make it. He had every reason not to do it, all the odds were against him and when he walked across that stage, it was one of my proudest moments because I knew our staff had helped him accomplish that. That was very special.

If you were to ask me the top three, watching Demario (Warren) lift that trophy up was pretty special. Watching our men’s basketball team gut it out and get the win in the quarterfinals, that was special. Watching Mike Tate qualify for the NCAA finals, that was special. But watching that one young man walk across the stage was one that really got me.

How important was it to sign coach Warren to his new five-year extension?

Huge. Huge. Huge. I feel very strongly that one of my most important jobs is to make sure we have the right coaches. And once we have the right coaches, we do what we can to keep them here.

When you look at the programs that are really successful, it doesn’t matter what the sport is, one of the No. 1 things is there has been stability in the coaching staff. Being able to hear coach Warren say that he wanted to stay here for another five years was music to my ears. It was one of the best things I could have heard. It says a lot about this community because we all know that he could have gone a lot of places. He loves this community, he loves this institution, he wants to stay here, he’s happy here and being able to keep him here and keep that consistency was very important. And second, to that, we didn’t lose any of our assistant coaches.

MORE: Wives share how two SUU coaches balance fatherhood and sports

I did my research to see where he fit in with the other Top 10 FCS schools, since we did so well, and where he fit in with the Big Sky. I have a plan that I want to make sure that we don’t take advantage of him because he wants to stay here, that we continue to pay him in a comparable way for what his accomplishments are.

Is there a model school that you look to and feel you can realistically get to its level?

I want everyone to be us. I guess I haven’t really looked that much. I take bits and pieces from my experience. There are things about Stanford that I have brought in. There are things about LSU that I’ve brought in. There are things about UConn that I have brought in. Things from the SEC that I saw schools do, that I have brought in. I think what I’m trying to do is model best practices in different areas. Academically, who is doing the best there? Nutritionally, what’s going on at the University of Alabama is phenomenal, we want to try and do the best there. We are just taking bits and pieces.

Nutrition is something we have added in the past year. We don’t have seven nutritionists, like Alabama, but we can have one nutritionist and really do a great job of getting information out to student-athletes. When you go to this restaurant these are things we suggest you eat — in town and on our away trips. One of the other things we are doing is every team that travels, they have a box of nutritional snacks. We have nutritionists, we have volunteers from our nutrition schools that fill those boxes up. That’s something that we are doing at our level that is making a difference that we copied from Alabama and University of Utah.

Is your department experimenting with anything?

With our new sports performance facility, we are looking at some equipment that we think will really help us quickly recover from injuries that people might copy one day.

What is happening with the old weight room in the Harris Building?

We are looking at moving my staff, our administrative staff, over there and doing open offices. And moving the football staff to our current offices. We have to go as soon as we can. We want to get it done before football starts.

I have been committed since Day 1 to get the football staff out of their offices. We are being creative and we are going to do it.

What does success look like for you, specifically in basketball and football?

In football the world, success to me every year we are in the hunt for a conference championship. That we are in the playoff every year. That is success to me.

With men’s basketball, I’d love to be in the top quarter of the league and to feel like every year we have a shot to win the tournament. To me, if we feel that we are a team that has the opportunity, then we should be happy.

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