UCONN’S DAVID BENEDICT IS READY TO REBOUND
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 away-from-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
skyline would hardly suggest that UConn is in such a tenuous financial place. Think what you will of athletic spending and to what degree it is responsible. Every time the athletic budget is discussed, there is a skeptical member of the faculty senate in Toscano’s ear reminding him that certain academic pursuits on campus include a scratch-and-claw approach to securing resources.
That is not of Benedict’s concern, though. He is paid handsomely, about $550,000 a year, to be ambitious in the athletic arena alone, and he has the support of the Board and the university hierarchy. He had it under previous president Susan Herbst, who hired him, and he has it under current president Thomas Katsouleas.
“The importance of the athletics brand to the university, academically, I don’t think people fully appreciate how important that is,” said Toscano, of Darien, a 1987 UConn graduate and managing director of global leveraged finance at Morgan Stanley. “Susan 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.
“It’s hard to explain to people something you can’t quantify, that were it not for what athletic programs have delivered in terms of branding we wouldn’t be attracting the students and the faculty and the money that we do. In 2013, my fear was, we were going to lose all that we built up.”
When the old Big East broke up, UConn found a landing spot in the AAC, a conference of scattered members. It was not a long-term fit.
“How we woke up and found ourselves in the hole we were in, you couldn’t have predicted the damage,” Toscano said. “We basically evacuated our fan base and all the things we cared about. The rivalries and expectations had been built up over time and then all of the sudden they’re gone and we’re scrambling. It’s taken us six years to figure out what to do about it. There’s really nobody else going through what we went through. … There are so many schools that used to be great and they never get talked about anymore. I don’t want to be one of those places.”
Benedict said, “We wound up in a conference that didn’t resonate with our fan base, our alums, the state and for that matter, prospective recruits. The combination of that, and the situation we went through in men’s basketball, with that brand deteriorating in rapid fashion — those two things weren’t just an irritation. Those were things that could cripple the [athletic] program, change it forever. You’re at a place where the brand is forever impacted. You feel it in the lack of crowds coming to games. No one really talks about you anymore, nationally. Or if they are, it’s, ‘Hey, what happened to UConn? Can they ever return? I’m not sure you could pinpoint an athletic program that was more impacted, in a negative way, by conference realignment than UConn.”
That has been addressed. Still, the move to the Big East, worked toward without consulting or notifying Randy Edsall until the 11th hour, created the need to essentially reinvent the football program as an independent.
The program has effectively lost a large portion of the state. Diaco’s final year was a disaster on the field and in public relations and the Huskies are 6-30 since Edsall returned. Announced attendance dropped to an average of 18,216 in 2019. Actual attendance was much lower.
There is a segment of fan and academic communities, especially in the wake of UConn making moves to re-establish itself as a basketball school, who support dropping football instead of trying to repair it.
Benedict and Toscano are not among them. They value the sport as a major part of the program’s past and future identity, hoping the fan base will embrace scheduling that will bring Power Five opponents and old rivals to East Hartford.
“People have that visual [of a near-empty stadium] and think you’re just flushing money into football and [ask], ‘Why are you in football?’ ” Toscano said. “I think the [independent] setup is funky, but it works. We can be successful. I think people will come be part of that experience.”
The team opted out of the 2020 season, amid coronavirus safety concerns and the crumbling of a schedule as most opponents went to a conferenceonly format during the pandemic.
Benedict recently extended Edsall’s contract, previously set to expire in December, through 2023. When that was announced, Benedict said, “Randy is a program builder. He’s done it before and he’s doing it again. When we made this hire and made the change, we knew it was going to require patience. Now it comes down to performance. And Randy certainly understands that.”
Fixing the budget gap
While part of Benedict’s job is to guide the athletic department in its recovery from those dark AAC years and the financial fallout, another is to prepare it to thrive on a new platform. That means spending and building even while belttightening.
That means fundraising. That means parties at the house. That means cultivating relationships with alums like Doug Elliot, whose name is on the baseball facility, and Tony Rizza, who donated $8 million and has his name on the performance center.
“That’s where he is particularly resourceful,” Herbst said of Benedict’s fundraising. “Cost savings have been tremendous. I know the deficit continues to grow, but I hope that doesn’t hide how many savings he has eked out of that program without hurting the student experiences in any significant way. That’s one of the biggest things we talked about in his interview. There are no big items you can actually cut. It’s a series of smaller things, and you hope they add up. We’ve got some parts of the deficit that can be whittled down. Others are the result of structural matters that are very hard to change. That said, we’ve just got to keep hacking away at them until we can get this thing in proper shape.”
Revenue from the old Big East dried up a few years ago. The AAC exit fee was $17 million. The Big East entry fee was $3.5 million. The athletic department operated at a $43.5 million budget deficit in 2020. The subsidy closes that gap.
With a mandate to reduce that subsidy by 25 percent or about $10 million a year by 2023, UConn announced in June the elimination of four sports — women’s rowing, men’s tennis, men’s cross country, and men’s swimming and diving. In scholarship costs, coaching salaries and operating expenses, the moves could save the department $2 million a year.
Another $5 million will be shed by a reduction in the scholarship rates the university charges the athletic department. Until recently, each out-of-state student-athlete represented the charge of a full out-ofstate tuition cost. Toscano said the athletic department will save $5 million a year in a new structure of lower rates, long pushed for by Benedict.
“The cost to UConn is zero,” Toscano said. “It’s just how you transfer money. It’s just an allocation from one department to another. We fixed it. One by one, we knock these things off, and it gets better.”
Of the financial problems tied to the athletic department in general, Toscano said, “It’s overstated and it drives me crazy. We have corrected some of it.”
UConn saw a rise in ticket sales upon joining the Big East and season ticket packages are now tied to a donation, a structure used by many Division I institutions, but empty arenas during seasons of the pandemic have only delayed progress. Eventually, UConn will earn NCAA “units” paid out annually to every Big East member for the conference’s postseason success. A contract is in place for CBS Sports Network to televise football games, bringing the university roughly $2 million over four years. Women’s basketball maintains its contractual relationship with SNY, which would have been eliminated as a member of the AAC.
There are three areas of the athletic budget. In recent years, scholarships have cost roughly $20 million a year (it will shrink to $15 million), salaries about $30 million and operations $30 million. Benedict, who took a 15 percent paycut for 2020, has kept payroll essentially flat, with just a 1 percent increase since 2016 even with inflation and mandated raises. The operating budget has decreased under Benedict by 20 percent, from $30.4 million in 2016 to $24.2 million in 2020.
Future at UConn?
Benedict is strolling campus, through football’s Shenkman Training Center and into Rizza, past Elliot and Morrone and other new amenities along Jim Calhoun Way. He sounds as if he’s nearing completion of coursework toward degrees in civil engineering and architecture, the way he’s describing planning and construction.
These discussions, so specific, speak more to a general feeling of accomplishment, even joy. He crossed the Husky logo beyond second base at Elliot Ballpark, and when he could walk no farther he leaned up against the outfield field wall.
This has been his life. He was in his mid-20’s and working at Arizona
State when he met Lisa Zeis, a two-time national champion gymnast who had returned to campus for induction into the Sun Devil Sports Hall of Fame. Benedict, “a low-level grunt,” in the ASU athletic department was helping set up for the upcoming ceremony on the football field.
That night, Zeis’ former coach pointed her out to Benedict at a gymnastics meet and Benedict — out of character, he says — sought Lisa out in in the midst of a group of former gymnasts on hand.
“Just started chatting her up,” he remembers.
They were married in 1999 after two years together.
Benedict has worked at Arizona State, Long Beach State, Virginia Commonwealth, Minnesota, Auburn … and now UConn. When the latest move was made, a promise was made to the couples’ twin sons that the family would not move again until, at least, they were out of high school.
Jake and Sam will graduate in June. Benedict turns 50 in December. He has drawn interest from Power Five programs. Search firms will continue to call this Southwest guy running a Northeast program.
“My goal with leaders is to get several good years where they give their everything to the university, and hope our place fits their longer term goals,” Herbst said. “I just want them to stay enough years to make big change. Dave has, without question, done that.”
Benedict is on the couch, looking through the living room, through the dining room, into the kitchen. He loves to cook, one of his few hobbies. He makes his own salsa, and many Mexican dishes based on chicken breasts he shreds after letting them sit in the slow cooker for seven or eight hours.
The Benedicts have lived in Glastonbury for a longer period than they’ve lived anywhere else since leaving Arizona 15 years ago. The weather is turning. Benedict will soon be out in the backyard, on his tractor, Sam Hunt in his earphones, the family’s two Portuguese Water Dogs romping around the yard.
“Look, we’ve gone through a lot in the last five years,” Benedict said. “This year has been COVID, the previous year was something else, and the previous year was something else. [My life is] the job, or my kids. [Lisa and I] both enjoy watching the kids do their thing, and we know that’s coming to an end. We’re going to be emptynesters. I made a commitment both to my kids and this university that I wasn’t going anywhere. … UConn made a commitment to give me an opportunity. It was very important for me to come here and do the job that I was asked to do.”
Where will Benedict be when all the bulbs he has planted, and will plant, actually bloom?
“I’d be very happy [at UConn long-term] as long as, philosophically, athletics remains a very important part of the fabric of our institution,” Benedict said. “I’m not sure everyone would agree with everything the institution does relative to its investment and support of athletics. We’re certainly trying to do what we can to reduce the need and level of support required. … I think we’ve accomplished a lot, not necessarily the level of success I would have liked to in certain sports. But between the conference piece and a lot of facility improvements, I think we’re really well positioned.”