REBOUND UCONN’S DAVID BENEDICT IS READY TO
Huskies athletic director has faced countless challenges in five years on the job
David Benedict and his family live atop a hill on a steep, winding road carved into the thick woods of South Glastonbury. The 5,500- square- foot house was selected for its expansive rooms and open floor plan, meeting the need to host large catered gatherings. Yet the three- acre lot is far enough off the beaten path for this home to otherwise offer total escape from the ceaseless chaos of his job.
Benedict, UConn athletic director since March of 2016, is seated on a living room couch as flames dance around overlapping logs in the fireplace. With snow covering the back yard and flakes still falling, Benedict, dressed casually in a UConn hoodie, points out the window and wonders what will become of the landscaping projects that are his awayfrom- work passion.
“I planted several hundred bulbs last year,” he says. “It will be interesting to see how they do.”
The parties here have been important. Pre- COVID, particularly on Fridays before a Saturday football game and on chosen nights during the holidays, 125 people often gathered to mingle and eat and drink and allow their professional and personal lives to intertwine.
The guests include UConn donors, UConn coaches, UConn staff members from across the Storrs campus and beyond. Athletic administration is a relationship business, a money business, a camaraderie business, a momentum business. It is a complicated business, for sure. Perhaps more than anything, it is a business about planning and planting and ultimately waiting to find out what becomes of decisions — most of them bold, some of them controversial.
That’s where Benedict, 49, is five years into what became one of the most complicated jobs in college sports. For the first time, through a window no longer clouded by indecision or uncertainty, he can envision the landscape of UConn athletics for years to come.
“I think we’ve at least been able to establish, or re- establish, ourselves on solid ground,” Benedict said. “I don’t have this everyday sense that no one is happy with where we’re at and always looking at what’s around the next corner. I think that’s been put to bed, for the most part. I do feel like what we’ve accomplished is, we’ve created a foundation.”
The future rests on plans Benedict designed and executed with the support of other campus power players. Many decisions of astronomical financial impact, and affecting student- athlete and fan experiences, were made amid tumult and from conference realignment quicksand in 2016- 19 that threatened irreparable damage to the UConn brand.
The foundation Benedict speaks of is last year’s official return to the Big East, a move explored several times before it was finalized in June 2019. It is new facilities, many erected during the pandemic as part of a $ 106.6 million project transforming the southwest corner of campus. It is also cost- cutting and revenue- generating measures established over time and expected to gain traction later, the first steps in an effort to reduce a bloated university subsidy.
UConn’s athletic budget annually exceeds its revenue by $ 40- plus million.
Athletic fundraising, a Benedict strength that was appealing to the university during the hiring process, is way up — from $ 10.4 million donated or pledged in 2018, to $ 14.4 million in 2019, to $ 26.4 million in 2020. And while the department remains mired in a financial struggle that will take years to resolve, facilities keep getting drawn up and built as UConn settles into a Big East life of advanced earning potential.
Benedict’s legacy has yet to be written. All the bulbs that represent the potential for winning and fiscal health, he understands, must bloom. They are starting to.
“I certainly didn’t want to be the one on the watch and responsible for the program when people, historically, would say that period of time was the demise of UConn as we knew it,” Benedict said. “That weighed heavily. … If people said, ‘ Let’s evaluate Benedict since he’s been here,’ well, what are most people going to measure that by? If it’s wins, well, we haven’t been to the NCAA Tournament in men’s basketball since I’ve been here. I mean, that’s insane.”
He smiled a bit. Gallows humor.
“Who would have thought?” Benedict continued. “What candidate that interviewed for this job would have been able to predict that? You’re going to go to UConn, which has one of the best basketball traditions in the past 20 years, and you’re not going to the tournament the next four years. I don’t count the one I walked into.”
A tournament appearance that Benedict has been on board for is about to begin. The Huskies, back in the national conversation in Dan Hurley’s third season, begin Big East Tournament play Thursday at Madison Square Garden in New York. And on Selection Sunday, the Huskies will be announced as part of NCAA Tournament field.
Everything falls apart
The day to mark Benedict’s five- year anniversary at UConn did not exist in 2021. His hiring was announced on Feb. 29, 2016, not long after his interview in an upscale, universityowned house on Scarborough Street in Hartford’s West End used to entertain donors who would become an important part of Benedict’s life.
Benedict, a Tempe, Ariz., native who listens to country music while mowing his lawn to decompress, has spent his life in athletics, the son of a coach and a football player at Southern Utah before becoming a college administrator. He came to UConn from Auburn, where he was the chief operating officer for athletics, and replaced Warde Manuel, now AD at Michigan.
In Benedict’s first few weeks on the job, the men’s basketball team, two years removed from a fourth national title, advanced to the NCAA Tournament’s second round. The women’s team won its fourth national championship in a row. Kevin Ollie was being courted by NBA teams. Football coach Bob Diaco was considered a rising star. UConn had found early life in the American Athletic Conference to be a platform for success it was used to.
Everything fell apart, of course. Rapidly.
“Being responsible for something when you’re not having success, regardless of why, it doesn’t matter,” Benedict said. “I don’t wake up and think, ‘ Why has this happened? It’s not my fault.’ It doesn’t matter. Had we not been successful in getting back to the Big East, it could have very well have turned and maybe … we wouldn’t have been able to get back on [ the right] path. My point is, it wouldn’t have mattered that David Benedict wasn’t here when we went into the American.”
Benedict mentioned his predecessor.
“Warde had a ton of success here, whether it was the Big East or the American,” he said. “They won a bunch of championships. I haven’t won anything. Whether that’s [ viewed as] my responsibility or not doesn’t matter.
I’m the leader of the program right now. So I own that, irrespective of why.”
A detailed list of headspinning developments over Benedict’s tenure could stretch from the front page of the Connecticut Post to the back page of the New Haven Register or cause one to scroll until a laptop overheats.
Quick summary: High profile hires and firings. A move from the AAC to the Big East. Football’s shift to independence and schedules built from scratch. An increasingly unmanageable cost- to- revenue structure. An NCAA investigation into men’s basketball. The elimination of four sports programs. An exhausting legal battle with the state’s ethics commission. A pandemic and its countless complications. All the while, enormous amounts of money moving around.
Diaco was fired in December 2016, seven months after signing a five- year, $ 9.5 million extension. His overall buyout cost the school $ 5.3 million. Ollie signed a $ 17.9 million contract in November 2016 and was fired in March 2018, UConn claiming “just cause” after internal and NCAA investigations. Three years later, the sides continue to haggle over the remaining $ 10 million on Ollie’s contract. Benedict hired Hurley from Rhode Island as basketball coach and brought Randy Edsall back for a second stint as football coach.
“The Diaco contract was on the desk,” Benedict said. “Everyone thought he was the right guy. A contract doesn’t get done like that — although, it wasn’t signed — without university involvement. I [ thought], regardless of how I feel, the university has gone to the point where it has a drafted contract that needs to be signed. I thought it would not have been the right thing to do to say I’m not signing.
“The Kevin one certainly was different. The previous year Kevin had interest from NBA teams, [ UConn] got back to the tournament [ in 2016], they had a great recruiting class coming, they got through the previous probation period [ from the Jim Calhoun era] and the impact. All signs pointed to Kevin being the leader of the program for a long time. There was no reason for me to believe, at the time, that making that kind of commitment was not the right thing.
“Having said both of those things, and hindsight is 20/ 20, if I was to do them over I don’t know that I would have signed either without having spent a full year getting to know people and having a chance to actually observe and evaluate.”
At another place and at another time, these moves alone would likely define one’s success or failure as an athletic director.
In Benedict’s case, they are only the early entries into a broader discussion.
‘ What happened to UConn?’
As Benedict sits behind a laptop in his office at Gampel Pavilion, a cement mixer idles just down the street, ready to apply finishing touches to baseball’s Elliot Ballpark, which connects to soccer’s new Morrone Stadium through the Rizza Performance Center.
Every inch of these buildings and turf fields is remarkable, both aesthetically and practically. They are, to be sure, among Benedict’s crowning achievements, but the world of athletic development spins quickly. There is always another project.
Benedict shares his screen on a large TV and clicks through graphic renderings of a 2,800- seat hockey arena with an estimated price tag of $ 68 million. Pending final approval, a shovel is set to go into the ground this summer. Construction of the building, featuring lots of brick and glass for continuity in style with other new campus athletic facilities, will take roughly 18 months and the goal is for a puck to hit the ice in early 2023.
“Lest you think we were kidding about national championship hockey,” said Dan Toscano, chairman of the UConn Board of Trustees.
Toscano, like some before him and others around him, is a key Benedict ally.
The changing campus
“Having said both of those things, and hindsight is 20/ 20, if I was to do them over I don’t know that I would have signed either without having spent a full year getting to know people and having a chance to actually observe and evaluate.” Benedict speaking about contract extensions for Bob Diaco and Kevin Ollie. “Susan [ Herbst] used to talk about athletics as the front porch of the university. I think it’s way more than that, including, what does the UConn brand represent? Championships. Winners.” UConn Board of Trustees Chairman Dan Toscano