New AD aims to elevate Chargers to Division I

we’re a much different school than we were 15 years ago,” Kaplan said Thursday morning. “That’s why I think we’re ready to at least be exploring great ambitions in our athletic programs.”

He’s entrusted former University of Kansas athletic director Sheahon Zenger to help lead that mission. Zenger was introduced as the school’s new AD Thursday at a news conference inside Charger Gymnasium.

“This is an ambition,” Kaplan said. “Sheahon and I are both very ambitious people.”

That mentality is what has driven Kaplan to explore leaving the relative anonymity of Division II, as risky as that may be on the surface. There are obvious challenges involved, and Kaplan has already consulted with administrators who have made similar leaps at other schools to weigh the potential costs — both literally and figuratively.

Since 2008, UNH has resided in the Northeast10 Conference. The school currently competes in 17 sports.

“It’s clearly, just by nature, at least a fourtofiveyear process,” Kaplan explained. “In terms of the fundraising and in terms of identifying and being accepted into a conference, it could be beyond that. It

could be five years, it could be six, it could be seven.

“It’s certainly not something that we want to extend indefinitely. It’s something that we’re going to pursue with great rigor.”

In order to pull off such a move, Kaplan knows the school will need to boost fundraising, upgrade its facilities, raise salaries and increase the number of scholarships it offers, among many other things. He didn’t throw out a figure of what that move would cost, but he knows it’d be steep. With that in mind, Kaplan hired someone he thinks is a “naturalborn fundraiser.”

Zenger, 53, has an extensive background in bigtime college athletics, including a sevenyear stint as Kansas AD. He was fired in May 2018, as school chancellor Douglas Girod said in a letter to school staff that “progress in key areas has

been elusive.” The most obvious stain on his resume during that time: a 1062 record in football.

Last year, he served as an adviser to the AD at TCU.

“The way we’ve done everything in the time I’ve been here is we’ve set the goals, and they’ve been pretty ambitious,” Kaplan said. “We’ve obtained a sense of what it’s going to cost, and then not worried about the costs but about making sure we were good enough at what we were doing to support each of those goals.

“I’m confident that we have the donor base that will help us realize these ambitions. Whether it’s in Division II or Division I, it’s to be a stronger, much more prominent athletic program. I think we certainly have a track record of setting high goals and meeting them.”

Like Kaplan, Zenger — who was hired from a pool of over 50 applicants — is excited about the possibil

ities facing UNH. He’s talked about the intrigue of being at “a place that’s growing, not at a place that’s downsizing” and how he’s eager to acclimate himself with the community. He spent one of his first days on the job helping Kaplan teach a class in honors literature.

“You start with a 90day plan that I keep in my briefcase at all times,” Zenger said Wednesday. “That has to do with becoming acquainted across campus and with the donor base and the stakeholders and so on and so forth — the community. That’s when you do a lot of qualitative research. You don’t come in with any strategic plan ahead of time, that’d be unfair to the institution, to the people who are here.

“You have to be a qualitative researcher if you’re going to implement what’s best for the university and the department.”