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Photo courtesy of Newberry Athletics Department/
Brad Edwards is introduced Monday, May 18, 2009, as the new athletics director at Newberry College.
GoGamecocks.com
Morris: Edwards has a full plate at Newberry
Posted on 08.14.09
TEN WEEKS INTO his job as athletics director at Newberry College, Brad Edwards still is trying to catch his breath. Even as he stares across the breakfast table at a Columbia restaurant, Edwards is not relaxed enough to loosen his tie and sit back in the booth.
Too much has happened in what has been a whirlwind introduction to being the man in charge of 500 athletes, 60 employees and about 20 coaches. There was the 23-year-old men’s basketball player who drowned during Edwards’ second week on campus. There was the hiring of a men’s basketball coach, the reviewing and renewing of each coach’s contract, and a budget process that faced a six-week deadline.
“You better understand how to evaluate things all the time,” Edwards says of his new job. “You need to be on the ground running.”
From the time he hung up his No. 27 jersey after nine seasons in the NFL, the former South Carolina standout has eyed an athletics director’s position. For seven years he served as the right-hand man to South Carolina athletics director Mike McGee. There also were a couple of short forays into the business world.
Each time he stepped out of college athletics, Edwards found himself longing to get back in.
“I realized that’s where I had an expertise,” says the 43-year-old Edwards. “I missed being around the sports, around the athletes, around the competition. That’s what you know, what you have skill at.”
From his years with McGee, Edwards says he developed the ability to relate to coaches, and an eye for hiring solid employees. Then he sought the advice of USC athletics director Eric Hyman, who suggested Edwards close his office door and prepare a plan for the department.
Still, all the advice in the world could not prepare Edwards for what he stepped into when he accepted the job on May 18.
More than anything, the new athletics director needed first to address an image problem that has haunted Newberry athletics the past several years. Deserved or not, Newberry was fast becoming known as a bandit school at the Division II level.
Edwards attacked the issue head-on, first with his coaches and then with his athletes. The uneasiness of working with a football coach who was hired three weeks before Edwards was quickly extinguished upon meeting Todd Knight.
“When I said, ‘We’re going to educate young people and we’re going to win with integrity,’” Edwards says, “that’s been the mantra with his team.”
That means no shortcuts, Edwards says. So when the first day of football practice arrived and 30 players had not taken proper care of paperwork or summer-school classwork, those 30 players stood and watched from the sideline — under orders from Edwards, with the full support of Knight.
Not long into the job, Edwards conveyed a similar message to all his athletes.
“Every step you make, every day on campus is a job interview,” he says of athletes. “The walk across campus, the drive to Burger King, the walk to the practice field. Everything is a job interview. That’s my responsibility as an A.D.”
Another responsibility is to put athletes under the tutelage of coaches who serve as role models. That is what Edwards went looking for in a men’s basketball coach, and he believes he found that person in Steve DeMeo, previously an assistant at Providence and Central Florida.
“The good news is you’re at Newberry,” Edwards recalls telling DeMeo when he was hired June 24. “The bad news is you’ve got six weeks to rebuild a basketball program.”
When Andy Carter departed as athletics director to take the same position at Armstrong Atlantic State, he took with him basketball coach Jeremy Luther. Four Newberry players tagged along to the Georgia school.
Additionally, the men’s basketball team lost rising senior Kendrick Johnson in a May 29 drowning accident near Pendleton. In three seasons at Newberry, Johnson blocked a school-record 235 shots to rank second in South Atlantic Conference history.
“That’s something they don’t teach you in A.D. 101,” Edwards says of the athletic department dealing with Johnson’s death. “That kind of put it all in perspective. You realize you’re dealing with real people and real situations, and anything can happen at any time.”
Yet that is what lured Edwards back to college athletics. In the business world, he says, he missed the relationships formed with young athletes, bonds that often are not formed at Division I schools such as USC.
Just a few days into his job at Newberry, Edwards says he realized he had found the right job. That’s when a couple of athletes walked into his office unannounced and plopped themselves onto one of his couches. They were there just to talk.
Listen to Morris Tuesdays from 4-5 p.m. on ESPN Radio 93.1 FM
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