Purdue Today

Building Purdue Intercollegiate Athletics

Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the July/August issue of Purdue Alumnus magazine. The magazine may be viewed at https://www.purduealumni.org/ alumnus/2011_july_aug.

With the bulk of the student body vacated for summer, construction activity is once again teeming across campus. Of particular note on the north end are the finishing touches on the Mackey Arena renovation project, a $99.5 million undertaking that represents the largest facility upgrade in Purdue Intercollegiate Athletics history. For Morgan Burke it's the signature piece in a series of building upgrades designed to help take all Purdue sports to unprecedented levels of achievement.

Now in his 18th year as athletic director, Burke, who says the Board of Trustees put him in charge of making Purdue nationally prominent in athletics, believes teams have become nationally competitive across the board. National prominence, he says, will likely take place on someone else's watch in the coming years.

Burke definitely stepped into a rebuilding program. In work he credits directly to the generosity and increased number of members in the John Purdue Club, he helped put the first pieces into place with additions and renovations of Ross-Ade Stadium, the Boilermaker Aquatic Center, and the Birck Boilermaker Golf Complex. "Those were the obvious projects," he says.

When Martin Jischke arrived as president in 2000 and began to build a legacy of building through "The Campaign for Purdue, " he asked about the long-range plans for Athletics.

"That's when we put together a 25-year master plan," Burke says. "It's been the guiding light through the Dennis J. and Mary Lou Schwartz Tennis Center, the renovations to the Intercollegiate Athletic Facility, the Mollenkopf [Athletic] Center, and more."

Philosophy: Buying into the 25-85 program

Still it's not simply a "build it and blue-chip athletes will come" philosophy. The bar for academic achievement is also set high in Athletics. And so far, so good on the grades. Through 27 straight semesters, the cumulative grade point average of athletes has matched or surpassed that of the general student population.

The dual high standards have been termed the "25/85 Club" by administrators. That lofty goal seeks an average top 25 finish in all sports and a graduation success rate of 85 percent across the board, Burke says.

Sharon Versyp, the women's basketball coach, knows something about the challenges of combining success on the court and in the classroom. Her teams have won two Big Ten Tournament championships and made two NCAA Tournament Elite Eight appearances through five seasons at Purdue. On the school front, her players have earned a grade point average of 3.10 or better for three years running.

"Purdue is such an academic institution, you have to have a great fit," Versyp says. "Young people want to come here and be great students and great athletes. You might not always get the top athlete. It's a tough balance, but we all understand that."

She thinks the Mackey renovation will not only be an obvious boost to men's and women's basketball but also resonate throughout the athletics department. "The new renovation is going to help in so many different ways because it's touching 500 student-athletes," Versyp says. "That's the collaborative way that Morgan has set things up."

Indeed, meetings of head coaches every two weeks have helped make the department a cohesive unit, even when they are spread out over campus. For a tennis coach like Pawel Gajdzik, now completing his second season, those meetings help give a better sense of Purdue traditions and different recruiting strategies.

"Every coach has a vision," Gajdzik says. "My goal is to win a national championship. But we also want to have the best academic team in the department."

With the Provost Award for the team with the most improved grade point average in his rookie year and the most recent President's Cup Award for the team with the collective best grades, men's tennis seems to be a making a mark in its own rebuilding efforts. A recruiting strategy that focuses on Purdue's global reputation is being employed by Gajdzik, his tennis counterpart Laura Glitz on the women's tennis side and golf coach Devon Brouse in particular. Purdue strengths in business, science, and engineering have made it the selection of one of the biggest international student populations in the country. And these coaches are looking for world-class athletes who want a world-class education.

Brouse is one of the few coaches in the country to handle both the men's and women's golf programs. He's also one of the nation's best. When he returned to his alma mater after coaching a top 10 program at the University of North Carolina for 20 years, he knew the Indiana climate was going to be a liability. "The top kids in the United States have opportunities to play at the Sunbelt schools in Florida, Texas, California, and the Carolinas," Brouse says. "If we were going to compete with and beat those teams, we had to maximize our assets. One of them was having a global university."

Brouse has made Purdue golf a global collaboration of its own. With six international athletes from as far away as Belgium, Germany, India, South Africa, Thailand, and Quebec, Brouse's women are taking challenging classes and defeating the Sunbelt schools. The 2010 national champions were led into battle this year by Numa Gulyanamitta, the fourth straight Boilermaker to become the individual Big Ten Tournament champion. Gulyanamitta followed in the victorious footsteps of Maria Hernandez, Maude-Aimee LeBlanc and Laura Gonzalez-Escallon. Hernandez was also an individual NCAA champion in 2009.

Coaching: Coming home and looking beyond

Burke (1973) captained the swimming team when he was at Purdue. Basketball coach Matt Painter (1994) played for Gene Keady and Versyp (1988) earned Academic All-American honors for the Boilermakers. Dan Ross (1981), the men's swimming and diving coach, swam at Purdue. John Klinge (1994), the women's swimming and diving coach, swam for Ross. Wrestling coach Scott Hinkel (1988) was an All-American wrestler here. Doug Schreiber (1986), the baseball coach, was a four-year starter at second base for the Boilermakers. And Brouse (1971) has a Purdue agronomy degree.

Burke insists that the Purdue degree is not a necessity for a head coaching position here -- half of the 14 came from somewhere else -- but a certain campus familiarity and the ability to bleed gold and black have served coaches like Ross rather well.

Ross is tied for the longest-tenured coach (with Minnesota's Dennis Dale) in the Big Ten, having just finished his 26th season at Purdue. Some of his swimmers joke about him going to school with John Purdue, but he takes it all in great stride. He's proud of the deep-running legacies in Purdue swimming. "This is the dream job for us," Ross says. "You have a lot of love for the place and you want to make sure you get the job done for it."

Part of that job, Ross says, includes trying to convince the best swimmers in the Midwest to stay close to home and casting a wider net throughout the nation and world. In 2010, the coaches may have brought in their best freshman class to date. "Last year, we needed some speed," he says, "but you still have to find the guys who fit the bill academically."

One of those speedsters, Eduard Galdeano, is a butterfly swimmer from Spain. But world-class diver David Boudia, a six-time NCAA champion, grew up in Noblesville, Ind. Boudia is leaving the team after his junior year to concentrate on training for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

"He's just an extreme athlete," Burke says of Boudia, the most individually honored athlete in Purdue history. "And that's good for us nationally. You want David to rub elbows with other athletes in Purdue sports."

Kim Maher, the softball coach, is also familiar with Olympic success. She was part of the gold medal-winning softball team at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. A native Californian who was a second assistant at the University of California at Berkeley, Maher came highly recommended from Mike Candrea, the University of Arizona head coach whom Burke describes as the John Wooden of softball.

"Kim knew we had some weather issues," Burke says, "but she believes in academics and they've had a good year on the field."

Schreiber hopes a new baseball field and soccer complex in the works will help ease some of his weather issues. "The stadium will definitely help shine a little spotlight on the program," says Schreiber, who thinks it's not so much the sun and palm trees that draw in the nation's best baseball players in, but the fact that those schools are competing in the College World Series year in and year out. "The good weather allows those schools to build nice stadiums because fans can comfortably watch games in early March," he says. "So they have an advance in building their facilities."

Outside of some connections in places like Texas and New Jersey, Schreiber's recruiting efforts are almost entirely regional, trying to pull players from Indiana and neighboring states. To compensate, he looks for players who are both passionate about the game and the competition. As for returning to his alma mater, Schreiber says he's lucky in that his first head coaching job came at Purdue. He believes that commitment to the University comes through to players and parents in recruiting visits.

Recruiting: Finding perfect Purdue fits

Depending on the sport, Purdue coaches will continue to recruit at regional, national, and international levels to best fit their team needs. Painter has turned his basketball team into a national contender with a core of Indiana players. But recent success and the Mackey makeover might help in his recruiting reach. Danny Hope will still dip into Texas and Florida for football standouts. And Brouse, Gajdzik and Glitz will likely continue spanning the globe for impact athletes.

But it's all a matter of finding the right team chemistry, even in sports that are more focused on the collection of individual results. Gajdzik, who is from Poland, played on a very international team at Baylor University. His first recruiting class, which was ranked in the top 25, included a trio of players from Chile, Hungary and Poland, who joined a nine-man roster that already included players from Hungary, Poland, and South Africa. He says he's happy that the program has signed a couple of Indiana recruits for next season, but thinks diversity can be a key component to success in any organization.

"These days, after students graduate, they're more likely to work for a company that's somewhere else," Gajdzik says. "Our diversity just adds a little flavor to the team and department. Purdue has one of the largest international student populations, so we're representative of the University."

The in-state athletes can benefit from the diverse mix as well. Whether it's an upperclassman advising a freshman on academic matters or an internationally experienced athlete sharing game or match-time advice with a teammate, the learning goes both ways. Golfer Adam Schenk, from Vincennes, Indiana, was named Big Ten Player of the Year in May. He was part of an 11-man team with five international players.

To do more than represent, however, to be actually prominent at national levels of competition, the athletics department often uses budgets to get teams to more hospitable weather. "We have a schedule that we think shortens the winter," Brouse says. "We play all the way up through November in the fall. Then we start back in February with competitions in Florida, Puerto Rico, or Arizona in the early part of the spring."

Burke says the generosity of a donor like Tom Spurgeon, who helped bring the $3 million Spurgeon Golf Training Center into being, also provides an indoor option for the golfers. That kind of December and January practice time can lead to spring success on the courses come tournament time.

And most national championships are a matter of good fortune and peaking at the right time. Burke has witnessed two in his tenure. In addition to women's golf in 2010, he watched the women's basketball NCAA championship run in 1999. What's his proudest moment?

"That's in the eye of the fan," says Burke who didn't plan on being here for more than 10 years. "I'm proud of the academic achievements. But I think the best is yet to come."