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Post by Jazzfan on Jul 30, 2009 17:37:10 GMT -5
Wright State Eliminates Hall of Famer Matt LiddyBy Tom Archdeacon Thursday, July 30, 2009 LiddyWright State associate athletics director Matt Liddy — the longest tenured person in the department, the most decorated coach in WSU history and a member of the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame — has lost his job at the school. A surprise victim of the massive budget cuts the school is facing, the 49-year-old Liddy — a popular figure on campus and the ultra successful former swimming coach — was given the news Thursday morning, July 30, by athletic director Bob Grant. “I’m shocked…I’m just numb,” Liddy said Thursday afternoon. “Basically I was told they are eliminating my position due to budgetary constraints.” Associate sports information director Matt Zircher also was laid off from the athletic department Thursday. “This was just an awful day,” Grant said. “Through all this, I didn’t want to cut into any programs or people…but today that changed. It’s all about the economy and has absolutely nothing to do with job performance.” Liddy has been at Wright State — except for a three-year hiatus to coach age-group swimming after his graduation from the school — for 31 years. During Liddy’s 16-year coaching career — in which he was named the conference coach of the year 11 times — the Raiders won seven league championships on the men’s side and nine on the women’s side. He had a combined 228 dual meet wins, developed 170 individual conference champions and 65 conference relay championship teams. While an assistant under WSU Hall of Fame coach Jeff Cavana, Liddy helped guide the Raiders to five Top Ten finishes in NCAA Division II in a three-year span. In his four years as an assistant AD, he has overseen several sports, dealt with human resources and currently directs the operation of the school’s facilities and manages the athletic competitions. He had cleaned out his office by noon Thursday. “This school is all I’ve known for most of my life,” he said quietly. “I’m just numb.” www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/throughthearch/entries/2009/07/30/wright_state_eliminates_hall_o.html
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Post by Raider Grad on Jul 30, 2009 19:49:43 GMT -5
Best of luck to Matt Liddy. He is a good man and always represented WSU well.
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Post by Raider Fanatic on Jul 30, 2009 20:09:11 GMT -5
Hall of Fame coach, veteran athletic official laid off by WSU By Marc Katz, Staff Writer Thursday, July 30, 2009 FAIRBORN — The national financial crisis caught up to the Wright State athletics department today as assistant athletics director Matt Liddy and associate athletic communications director Matt Zircher were laid off. The layoffs are part of a plan to trim about $1 million from the WSU athletics budget, which spends about $10 million a year. Already, the department has made plans to trim scholarships, travel, eliminate the men’s track and field team and reduce the publication of media guides. Liddy, possibly the most successful coach in WSU history, won seven men’s and nine women’s swimming championships in 16 seasons as the school’s head swimming coach. He had been employed by the university — from where he graduated in 1983 — the last 24 years. Liddy held his present job, overseeing game management and facilities, the last five years. Zircher, a University of Dayton graduate, has been with WSU 16 years. “I’m still a little bit shocked,” said Liddy, who was told of his situation this morning at 9. “I spent 24 years of my life at one place. I’ll be 50 in January. I’m going to need a little time to digest this.” Zircher had no comment. Over the past several months, athletics director Bob Grant — who accepted the job just a year ago — has been working on trimming his budget, just as the entire school (and most of the country) has been trimming budgets. “We’re down to that stage where we have to look at personnel,” Grant said. “We’re not firing anybody. These are purely financially-driven. “I don’t anticipate any more (layoffs), but this thing is uncertain.” The university earlier offered incentive-driven buyouts to about 700 employees, with more than a dozen on the list from the athletics department, “including me,” Grant said. Deb Garber of the equipment room has already opted to retire, and equipment supervisor Mike Zink has said he will also retire. Grant said he expects more to follow. “These are good people,” Grant said. “The bottom line is, we’ve got to save costs here.” www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/wright-state-university-raiders/hall-of-fame-coach-veteran-athletic-official-laid-off-by-wsu-229077.html
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Post by Raider Alumni on Jul 30, 2009 20:29:21 GMT -5
This all just reinforces the importance of increasing our fanbase this year. More paying customers = bigger athletic department budget. It's as simple as that. If we want to continue to maintain and improve upon our athletic success, we need to increase our fanbase.
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Post by Nutt House on Jul 30, 2009 20:38:02 GMT -5
Raiders put some names to tough choicesBy Marc Katz Thursday, July 30, 2009 FAIRBORN — Not being much of a financial guy as evidenced by a glance at my messy checkbook, I’m not going to be able to tell you Wright State did the right or wrong thing this morning by laying off assistant athletics director Matt Liddy and assistant athletics communications director Matt Zircher. Liddy had been with the school 24 years and was a graduate. Zircher graduated from Dayton and had been at his job 16 years. But WSU had to make cuts, just like every business you and I have come in contact with over the past year. People may grouse about the cuts, and how they will have to get along with less, but we accept them. There will be fewer media guides this year. Okay. Some teams will have to bus to a game rather than fly. Fine, the players are young enough not to mind. Hotel stays will be shorter and in more spartan places. That can be dealt with. But now we have some names to put with those cuts. Some real names, people we know, who have been out in the community. People are are part of the face of Wright State University. Matt Liddy and Matt Zircher won’t be in the athletics department anymore. Whether it was the right or wrong move isn’t the point. That it happened is the sad part. It’s not like WSU was padding its athletics department. It’s just that right now, cuts have to be made. When those cuts are real people, they’re the deepest cuts of all. www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/wrightstatesports/entries/2009/07/30/raiders_put_some_names_to_toug.html
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Post by raiderscout on Jul 30, 2009 20:51:47 GMT -5
This is a shame. I swam for Coach Liddy from 95-99. He was a great guy and did an excellent job of continuing the success of the most dominant sports program of the university. Best of luck, Matt.
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Post by Raider Rowdies on Jul 30, 2009 21:04:38 GMT -5
This really is a shame. Matt is one of those guys that represented everything good about WSU. I hope we have a kick butt basketball season with a huge fan turnout for all games. I don't want to see us have to let anyone else go.
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Post by Retired Coach on Jul 31, 2009 6:58:42 GMT -5
The poor economy is just a good excuse for Bob Grant to get rid of Matt Liddy. Liddy has been less than supportive of Bob Grant ever since he was hired as AD over Liddy. He dug his own hole with his poor attitude over the past year. You never want to see anyone get fired, but I think this will be a good thing for WSU under Grant's leadership in the long run.
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Post by wolf41 on Jul 31, 2009 11:39:20 GMT -5
I can't offer any insight such as Irish Raider mentioned. Budget cuts are always tough and it is especially hard when it hits swimming, our most successful sport, and Matt Liddy, who is so closely associated with and responsible for its success. I wish both of these gentlemen the best of luck for their future.
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Post by Nutt House on Jul 31, 2009 17:07:25 GMT -5
Venom Flows Around Wright StateBy Tom Archdeacon Friday, July 31, 2009 LiddyWell, it’s been just over 24 hours since Matt Liddy and Matt Zircher were let go from the Wright State athletics department due to what is being called “the bad economy” and already the venom is flowing. Both guys were long-time fixtures at the school. Liddy, an assistant WSU athletics director and member of the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame, swam for the Raiders in the early 1980s and then was Wright State’s super-successful swim coach, winning 16 either men or women’s conference titles and 11 league Coach of the Year awards in his 16 years running the program. Zircher, an associate sports information director, worked 16 years at WSU. Both were deemed expendable by athletics director Bob Grant, who is trying to pare $1 million from the Raiders’ annual $10 million athletics’ budget. Because both Grant and Liddy vied for the AD job when Mike Cusack retired last year, there are all kinds of conspiracy theories being floated by people responding — anonymously, I might add — to stories posted on the Dayton Daily News sports web page. People get real brave — and sometimes quite reckless and hurtful — when they can fire away in secrecy and this is a perfect example. Not only are Grant, Liddy and Zircher being targeted, but everybody from current basketball coach Brad Brownell to former coaches Ralph Underhill and Jim Brown have been splattered in the internet discourse. GrantIn a day’s time, I’ve read people calling Grant a “back-stabber” and a “master manipulator.” He’s been said to feel threatened by Liddy. Someone wondered why he hadn’t been fired because he couldn’t raise money in his previous job as a WSU fund-raiser. Somebody even compared him to Hitler. Liddy has been called an “idiot…a pouter…and dead weight.” Someone said he tried stirring a coup and turning people against Grant. Someone else countered that Grant can do that all by himself. Someone suggested Zircher’s job could have been done “by a trained monkey.” In the process of this mud-slinging free-for-all, Brownell was accused of only wanting a boss who was “a lackey. ” Underhill was painted as a thief and Brown was called a bad coach. I know all these guys. I like them all — naturally, some better than others — and I know all of them to be dedicated to WSU. And most of these charges are flat-out wrong or nastily skewered. Yeah, I think there was some friction between Grant and Liddy — that’s not surprising considering the history — but I don’t think it was debilitating and I wish things would have played out differently. But I also think the bum economy is a big factor here. Not just at WSU, but at so many work places in the Miami Valley. I know Grant’s in a tough spot cutting his budget, but that said — if Liddy’s and Zircher’s positions were decided to be expendable — I wish the university would have found some other position for them after they pretty much gave all their adult lives to WSU. As for the drive-by mudslingers on the Internet, have the courage to use your own name if you are going to smear the name of someone else. Better yet, just skip some of the most hurtful stuff. www.daytondailynews.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/dayton/throughthearch/entries/2009/07/31/venom_flows_around_wright_stat.html
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Post by Raider Fanatic on Jul 31, 2009 19:40:29 GMT -5
This all just reinforces the importance of increasing our fanbase this year. More paying customers = bigger athletic department budget. It's as simple as that. If we want to continue to maintain and improve upon our athletic success, we need to increase our fanbase. I completely agree.
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Post by gerb on Jul 31, 2009 21:49:58 GMT -5
To take a semi-positive angle on this... Whether you agree or disagree with the layoff of Zircher, it's a damn good thing Greg Campbell is there. I'd say with little to no hesitation that that guy is the hardest worker in the athletic department. It's a shame it has to come to this, but if the department has to pull it off with a skeleton crew, Campbell one of the guys you want in there.
Good luck to Matt and Matt.
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Post by Nutt House on Jul 31, 2009 22:00:04 GMT -5
Wright State needs a cash cow By Marc Katz, Staff Writer 10:34 PM Friday, July 31, 2009 FAIRBORN — For those who have to leave and don’t want to, there never seems to be a decent way to exit. Every traded athlete who wanted to stay where he was wants to know what happened to loyalty — whether he was told of the trade in a face-to-face meeting or on the telephone. Every released athlete or fired manager or coach wants to know why he or she suddenly isn’t as useful. It happens to the good people and the bad people, and it happened to Matt Liddy and Mat Zircher at Wright State just two days ago. They’re the good people. Liddy has been at the school 24 years, 16 of them as head swimming coach, winning more championships at the school than practically all of the other coaches combined. And he did it with an inferior pool. For the last five years, Liddy has been an assistant athletics director — his choice — and had various duties, including game management at the Nutter Center. If you think game management is opening the doors and turning on the lights, well, you probably think the basketball team doesn’t practice three hours a day, either. Zircher has been at the school 16 years on essentially a three-man staff that not only kept the media informed about the school’s teams, but acted as defacto traveling secretaries as well. When money’s short, though, nice guys do finish last. Tell me one company around here that has not laid off an employee. Has not laid off a revered employee! Wright State has never been known as a school that overspends on athletics — although I’m certain there have been frivolous expenditures — but it is a young school that has also not been able to lure as many big donations as it would like, and has yet to find a way to entice fans to attend men’s and women’s basketball games. At Ohio State — where cuts also are being made, by the way — there is a cash cow grazing in Ohio Stadium that allows cuts to be kept at a minimum. It would be nice if the teams that played in the Nutter Center could become cash cows for WSU. That’s Athletics Director Bob Grant’s real assignment. Find the money, not cut it. If that happened, maybe some of the cuts made this week — in equipment, scholarships, travel, people — wouldn’t have been necessary. www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/wright-state-university-raiders/wright-state-needs-a-cash-cow-231008.html
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Post by Nutt House on Jul 31, 2009 22:04:47 GMT -5
WSU's Grant scrambling to trim budgetBy Marc Katz, Staff Writer 10:36 PM Friday, July 31, 2009 FAIRBORN — Just a year on the job this weekend as Wright State’s athletic director, Bob Grant has been trying for weeks to avoid what so many other schools across the country are doing: cut sports and personnel. It has proven to be an impossible assignment in a dramatically weak economic climate. Only about halfway to trimming $1 million from a budget of about $10 million, Grant this week had to tell two longtime staffers — Assistant Athletic Director Matt Liddy and Assistant Communications Director Matt Zircher — their jobs were being eliminated. Along with that, Grant has to deal with the NCAA-mandated gender equity policy. The school briefly fell out of compliance after the addition of a men’s track team three years ago, which has now been eliminated as one of the department’s cuts. Even though there are more women than men participating in athletics at the school, the percentage was not as high as WSU’s general population of women. Cutting the men’s track team was not as difficult as making other cuts, since many of the athletes on that team were on other teams at the school. Cheerleaders and the dance team were not as fortunate. Scholarships for students in those areas — always charged to the athletic department — have been eliminated, as has travel money. “It affects a lot of people,” Grant said. “But they do a tremendous job of fundraising, and that will allow them to do many of the same things they do now.” What else? • There is a moratorium on flying for all nonbasketball teams unless funded by each sport’s fundraising capabilities. • Other than basketball, coaches have been asked to recruit in-state student-athletes, thus reducing scholarship costs. “And we will look at reducing scholarships over time,” Grant said. • Budget restraints concerning travel, equipment and supplies. “Do we really need three sets of practice uniforms?” Grant said. “Can we use game uniforms three years instead of two?” The AD also said, “We’re drastically reducing summer-school spending. We used to always allow students to take as many summer-school classes as they wanted. Now we’re putting more pressure on our athletes to do more of their studies during the (regular school) year.” • There will be limited media guides produced for all sports except men’s and women’s basketball. All other media guide information will be exclusively online. Coaches, for the most part, are going along, although there are three vacancies yet to fill — golf, softball and cross country/track and field. At least one assistant’s position — swimming’s Paul Mangen left for another job — will not be filled. “We have to be careful, not frugal,” tennis coach Sean McCaffrey said. “We’re working on obtaining some indoor court time with a local club through an advertising trade agreement instead of having to pay for time. “We’ve also revamped our courts — I actually found a warranty in a desk here that paid for most of it — and sold some court-naming rights. By improving our facilities, more Ohio kids are going to want to come here.” There also are cost-cutting measures being enacted by the Horizon League, of which WSU is a member. Instead of all 10 schools (who participate in each of these sports) attending their season-ending tournaments, only the top six teams in baseball, softball, soccer, volleyball and tennis will be invited. Cutting expenditures is important. So is generating new revenue. “We need to generate more money,” Grant said. “We’re going to work like crazy to get more people to our basketball games.” Men’s basketball has helped in securing guarantees for away games. The men’s opening three-game tournament in Seattle in November will be covered by a $75,000 guarantee. “We’ll be able to make money on that deal,” Grant said. www.daytondailynews.com/dayton-sports/wright-state-university-raiders/wsus-grant-scrambling-to-trim-budget-230998.html
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Post by Raider Alumni on Aug 1, 2009 7:49:04 GMT -5
This is a good time for all of us to write a check to Wright State. We all talk about how much we love our Raiders. Now is the time to back up those words with actions. These cuts are affect most sports with the exception of the basketball program. If things don't turn around we will eventually have to take a look at men's basketball. I don't think any of us want to risk losing Coach Brownell over budget cuts. It's time for Raider fans to step up and show their support for OUR TEAM. Send in a donation for whatever you can afford. Every little bit helps.
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