ENMU nearing finalists for athletic director position

Eastern New Mexico has received about 50 applications for its upcoming athletic director vacancy, and hopes to get one in place in Jeff Geiser’s final weeks before his July 1 retirement.

Jeff Long, ENMU’s Vice President of Student Affairs, chairs of the athletic director search committee made up of ENMU athletic coaches, faculty, adminstrators and students, along with a Portales citizen.

The committee, Long said, is on the verge of paring the field to five or six finailsts.

“I’m in the process of calling that smaller number and making sure they’re still interested and asking a few questions,” Long said. “Based upon their responses and if they’re interested, the number stays the same or gets smaller. From that group we’ll decide to invite them to the campus and interview them.

“I haven’t contacted all of them, I still need to contact two but at this point it’s to answer their questions.”

The annual salary for the new athletic director will be in the mid-$90,000 range.

“The ideal candidate is someone who has a senior-level athletic administration experience,” Long said. “It could be a former athletic director, a senior associate athletic director or an assistant athletic director. You (should) have knowledge of NCAA issues ... knowledge of compliance, knowledge of recruiting, knowledge of the conference and how it operates like scheduling and how the issues that come up in the conference are dealt with.”

University President Steven Gamble has the final say on the hire. He said he has requirements that are simple, but difficult to pinpoint.

“We’re just looking for the person who is the right fit,” he said. “Someone who is fair-handed, knows when to discipline and when to not discipline. Someone who has a track record of success where he or she has been in the past.”

Long said he will relay to Gamble each candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, and give information in the unlikely scenario the committee had a preferred candidate or any rank of all candidates. While Geiser is not on the committee, Long said he’d be happy to hear anything Geiser knows about the eventual finalists. Geiser has previously indicated he’d be willing to help at any point throughout the process.

“We’d like to bring the candidates to campus before the middle of May so there are faculty and students around to meet them,” Long said. “We’d like to have some overlap with Dr. Geiser, so if we could have someone here by the first week of June so they could have a few weeks to spend with him to learn more about the position before he retires, that’s ideal for us.”

Gamble said if the right candidate couldn’t meet those scheduling requirements, the school would work around the matter.

“We wouldn’t back out of the ideal candidate because of a timing problem but if he or she could overlap with Jeff Geiser that’d be beneficial for everyone,” Gamble said.

Gamble did not expect the college’s NCAA probation to have any impact on the hiring process. The university has three years of probation remaining following self-reported violations of paperwork errors affecting athletes’ eligibilities in every sport.

“The Lone Star Conference is just like any other conference,” Gamble said. “We prefer somebody with experience as an athletic director. The NCAA (violations and punishments are) over. We don’t have anything (beyond probation) so long as we don’t have any other infractions. We don’t have any penalties assessed in terms of loss of scholarships or postseason play.”