I think I'm with you now as well. Myself and several baseball alumni offered thoughts on new baseball hire...crickets. Add the home football disaster and Albin.

+1 I believe that you've got it figured out.

Julie is a quality AD and person. In the 2 months before the opener she had a head coach retire, SID retire, the entire video staff retire, and the asstant AD for facitlities go on paternity leave. This from the smallest staff in the MAC, and as much as we want to laugh at the OVC, our support staff is smaller than most of them. Going into that first game, the department looked nothing like what it did in June. Not to mention, most of campus was still in remote until July.

As for concessions, you are dealing with an independant contractor that HDL hires on the lowest bid, and that Athletics has no control over. Lost in all this the head of concessions contract resigned in the spring too, and a new person was doing their first game was well. The stadium was built in 1929 and is outdated, oldest in the MAC, and totally under equiped, mainly due to infrastructure, narrow concourses, etc. The new person has no clue and has never worked an event like this before, and of course staffing issues.

In short, Julie has a clue to what she is doing. She has demonstrated that with the contract on late notice for a football coach, but less than two full years into the university beauracy there are things still out of her control.

Pile on the hate, I am used to it. But Julie does hear the complaints and she is working on them! She is the most quaified AD in many years!!!

No doubt she is facing many issues at the school and she’s not responsible for all the problems easily seen. One proof of the pudding will be to follow her hires and see how they do. Ultimately, she will get the credit if they are successful and the blame if they are not. She’s hired a lot of coaches lately, let’s see how they do.

These are the facts.

BTC - I appreciate the positivity and optimism. I also think Tim Albin is a great person and I personally really like him. However, objectively speaking, his head coaching tenure has been a dumpster fire thus far. I hope that changes.

I don't know Julie and have never interacted with her even casually.I will blame that on the pandemic, or my status. I'm a former employee, season taken holder and small donor. She may be a great person. I just don't know her. However, objectively speaking, she has been at the university for two years and her tenure has not been great from my view. Most importantly I don't see the presence in taking accountability for any it. Also, the people you mentioned other than Frank who "retired" are not really a retirement age, I am almost certain. That means they left including some who just quit without another job. Why would someone do that.. the environment they're working in is not great.

Is that Julie's fault? Directly maybe not but functionally it is. The buck has to stop with her even if the pandemic has brought forward a tougher world that makes her job MUCH harder. We have the smallest staff in the MAC - fundraising can help support us better. Everyone has had problems with game day operations... if ours is tied to the lowest bid contract, own it and work to get better. She was no where to be found at least as I am aware. I loved the accountability I saw from Northern Illinois on Twitter. Not here.

Again BTC, I appreciate and respect the optimism. I hope you are right and she resurrects the department. It is important to note that it is crashing in flames under her watch. Functionally that is on her. I hope we turn it around.

For the record folks, I am not attacking anyone personally. I don't wish hard times on anyone. I love this University. 90% of my friends and professional network are because of OHIO. I simply want the best for our Alma Mater and the future.

If there were job opportunities available (that fit my background), I would move my Family to Athens tomorrow and go at it with passion. Sadly, there are no such opportunities.

I believe an OHIO Alum would approach any job with passion and excitement. Jeff Boals is a recent example.

Athens isn't for everyone.

I'll tell you straight up why I left (and you're very much so correct, I'd say a couple were maybe 30/31 and the rest of us sub 30... There's also more people than us that've left, they just weren't as visible.

The primary reason is that my wife got into vet school. I gave an almost 6 month notice that I'd be leaving haha.

I was the primary person for almost any and everything that hit social video wise, practice photos when we were trying to get the SAs more things to post, plus the single camera streams. Working a lot of weeks nearing 70-80 hours, not having a day off for weeks, and just not feeling like I fit in there were a lot of reasons. For a lot of people, COVID shut down was awesome because the workload significantly decreased... For me, the workload significantly increased and home became my office and I couldn't separate the two.

Now I'm at a job that tries to be a bit more mindful of a work life balance (we are short staffed at the moment, so I'm cool with working a little extra to help out). I have my weekends back a lot of times, so I get to actually be a sports fan and rant on here with you guys. A lot of times I have my nights back even! One of the things that really stunk was getting in at 6 AM to do stuff with football workouts and then not getting out until 10:30-11:00 PM if not later because there was a volleyball game. So for the almost 4 years I was there I couldn't make plans to do anything after work even. The work environment at my new place is awesome. For the most part it's like a bunch of friends hanging out vs the isolation I felt there. A nearly $20,000 pay bump at the new place didn't hurt my feelings either haha.

Overworked would easily be solved by realizing how small you are and that you'll never compete with say an OSU. The common thing I heard was how all the sports need to be treated equal, and we need to make things on par with larger schools... Well both of those things are great when you're at a big school and can have one person focus on one sport, not one person focusing on 16. As far as salary you'd honestly be surprised how criminally low it is in sports in general. The $36k I was at (I would've be at $34k something but DeWine made that pay cutoff if you were going to have someone salaried so I got a little bump) is actually pretty level with other places in sports. Similar job that I had at K-State was $32-34k I believe... I interviewed at TAMU before Ohio. I kid you not, to be in charge of ALL of their video boards, participate in content creation, and manage students was $28k. On top of all of that, I wasn't a drinker. At 28 years old, Court Street has no value to me. You take away the one reason everyone LOVES Athens, and Athens isn't that great of a place to live. I didn't have enough money/the time to go out and eat at all of the restaurants and the Walmart is the shining thing to do in town (coming from a small town in Arkansas where Walmart is the only thing to do, the only difference is our local places there were chains here), so if I wanted to do anything I'd have had to driven to Cbus and it revolves back around to I didn't have money or time to do anything in Cbus haha. Most of the staff at Ohio falls in one of two camps. Camp one is they're using this as a stepping stone to go somewhere else or they're testing the waters to see if this is really what they want to do, and camp two is they've got kids here, they're married to someone who works in the area, etc and they just don't want to move.

A fun research project is to look around at people's salaries. When you factor out coaching staffs (and I wouldn't do that fully as a while back FH was trying to hire an Asst Coach at $12 an hour) and senior admin, a lot of us low on the totem pole folk made right around the same amount. Some people got the same amount and got to work 8-5 though which sucked for those of us that had to GRIND lol.

EX-Cat, I feel your pain. Sadly, what many do not realize is the work that does go on just to produce what we actually have, and that OUr staff is the smallest (by far) in the MAC.