Sitting down with Wren Baker: Learning from mistakes

Certainly, West Virginia University hasn’t been immune from those tribulations, as its long-time men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins was arrested in June on DUI charges. The Hall of Fame coach subsequently was replaced at WVU.

That wasn’t the only major rumbling around the college world, either.

College athletes at Iowa State and Iowa, as well as the head baseball coach at Alabama, were caught up in allegations of sports wagering on events not permitted by the NCAA and/or their state.

Men’s basketball head coaches at two Big 12 schools, Texas and Texas Tech, were dismissed from their jobs for various alleged misdeeds away from game day.

This summer at Northwestern, long-time head football coach Pat Fitzgerald was fired after 17 years for supposedly ignoring hazing issues within his program.

Recently Michigan head football coach Jim Harbaugh was suspended for the final three games of the regular season when a member of his staff was accused of breaking the rules by going on the road to scout a Wolverine opponent, where the goal was to steal the signals for play calls.

As difficult as each of those situations was, including the one at West Virginia, they all presented learning opportunities, explained WVU director of athletics Wren Baker.

“I think it’s important when something happens nationally that at our next meeting we bring it up,” stated the Mountaineers’ first-year A.D. “When I see something, I’ll send it to compliance and say, ‘Hey, at our next meeting, let’s go over this or let’s talk to our coaches about this.’ You would think a lot of those things would fall into common sense, but you can’t make assumptions in this business.

“Generally, we’ll have a meeting at the beginning of the year – coaches, student-athletes, everyone,” he added. “Those discussions will be along the lines of our expectations. What are they for our staff and how they treat student-athletes? What are they for the student-athletes in terms of their behavior? The University has certain policies regarding various things, and if it’s reported, it automatically goes to them. They then start their process, which is a good thing because it should not all be housed over here in athletics.”

The director of athletics tries to stay vigilant and ahead of the game. Not only does he hold informational meetings at the beginning of the year, but he also tries to keep a watchful eye out for any potential problems.

With 18 varsity sports programs and thousands of student-athletes and employees, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of fans, Baker can’t be a one-man compliance office, though. He depends on others to help him head off possible issues.

“I put a lot on the sport-program administrators,” he noted. “We have a lot of sports, and in those we have hundreds of student-athletes and hundreds of employees. I spend a lot of time out of this office trying to raise money and raise excitement and awareness, so I can’t possibly be aware of everything that is going on. That means I count heavily on our sport administrators, because they’re supposed to be in the weeds, often traveling with the team, talking to the coaching staff, talking to the players, and they’re supposed to know the things that are happening.

“Even in the (hazing) incident at Northwestern, I talked to someone and asked him to put together a demonstration that we can provide to our sport administrators. They understand that they have a responsibility in this, too.”

In the end, as painful as a mistake may be, it can also be used as a teaching tool.

“You try to learn from those mistakes as much as you can,” said Baker. “I think for the athletic director, the important thing is to be visible and accessible. To the extent that this job allows — and it doesn’t allow as much as I would like — I like to get out and be seen. If there is some familiarity there, the people will feel empowered to speak to you. What happens a lot of time is you don’t know, and you can’t handle the things you don’t know.”(Editor’s Note – For nearly three decades, the Blue & Gold News has had an opportunity to conduct an extensive, one-on-one interview with West Virginia University’s director of athletics. This year we had a wide-ranging conversation with Wren Baker, who took over as WVU’s A.D. last December. This is the latest installment from that multi-part discussion.)