Lay off Andy Noel?

(The hockey forum has a couple blasts at Andy Noel as the guy who should have leaned harder on CSTV to provide better webcasts. Some other thoughts: )

As athletic director, Andy Noel has a lot of constituencies to serve. Maybe it's hard to juggle them all.

Consider Bob Kane at the very end of his tenure as athletic director -- the man who ran Cornell athletics from not long after the Depression through, what, the early 1980s? 1970s? At the end it was hard to see Cornell's dashing young 200-yard-dash record holder and former Olympian ... who had become, to a student, at least, sort of a representative of the old guard, and a pretty crotchety one at that. He was the guy who was famous (to me) for griping about the Student Senate as a group of 18 year olds who determined the fate of the athetics department when his quarterbacks and cross-country runners and volleyballers sort of did that, too. But ... no matter if Kane was somebody who students liked, he was the guy who got a lot facilities built (the rink, for one) and who hired the coaches who brought Cornell national championships in hockey and lacrosse. (He also signed off on the departure of Lower Alumni Field (just north of Teagle) for an academic building. (Imagine if that remained as an all-weather, maybe even domed, soccer/lacrosse field for 6,000 - sort of like Pricneton's wondrous lax/soccer field.)

So at least Andy Noel deserves credit for keeping Mike Schafer in the fold, for hiring a basketball coach who might give Cornell a shot at the Ivy League title, who found a decent football coach, who shepherded the Lynah expansion, who helped make the wrestling team a national powerhouse, who found Astroturf for the baseball field (thus keeping it safe from becoming the Bill and Melinda Gates Hall), and so forth. So in that regard, as annoying as this CSTV flap may be, we need to keep it in perspective. There are probably a lot worse people who could be running the athletics department.

I don't think Andy Noel doesn't work hard at the things he does, though some people might disagree. Still, I don't think there is a problem with pointing out the things that need to be improved.

I gather from this message board that Noel was responsible for the ticket procedures of years past which many disliked, and the fish-throwing policies, the ban on forms of cheering. Apparently, he should also be working on making the webcasts better. We have the right to blame him if he is ultimately responsible for all of these things, no matter what he is doing well.

Leadership means taking responsibility. Andy is head of the Athletic Dept. so when there are problems/failures, the criticism is legitimately directed at him. He may have done a good job on some things but that doesn't exempt him from responsibility for the rest.

billhoward
(The hockey forum has a couple blasts at Andy Noel as the guy who should have leaned harder on CSTV to provide better webcasts. Some other thoughts: )

As athletic director, Andy Noel has a lot of constituencies to serve. Maybe it's hard to juggle them all.

Oh no! They got to Bill!

Totally not what I expected. I read "lay off" to mean "hand a pink slip to".

billhoward

As athletic director, Andy Noel has a lot of constituencies to serve. Maybe it's hard to juggle them all.

There are probably a lot worse people who could be running the athletics department.

I will give you the fact that it's very hard to please everyone especially when they all have different needs/wants. However, I was never under the opinion that some Cornell fans/alums wanted crappy service. It would seem that it's in the best interest of all of his diverse group of constituents to receive the service they payed for.

I don't think its too selfish to want an AD that is the best, not just better than some other candidate. Ok maybe it is selfish but I'm just a 21 year old soon-to-be graduate who wants to yell the same sort of things I've been yelling for the past three years without worrying about being tossed from the game. Just to be clear though, I never swear during cheers (unless its a particularly dirty penalty).

I'm not sure the arrogant "let-'em-eat-cake" attitude described specifically by Jim Hyla and consistently shown to fans and alums during this ongoing webcast fiasco can be justified on any grounds. Mussolini made the trains run on time, too.

A "pink slip" might be a bit overboard but I could support a thorough head-shaping on how to treat your constituents with some degree of respect and caring.

Al DeFlorio
I'm not sure the arrogant "let-'em-eat-cake" attitude described specifically by Jim Hyla and consistently shown to fans and alums during this ongoing webcast fiasco can be justified on any grounds. Mussolini made the trains run on time, too.

A "pink slip" might be a bit overboard but I could support a thorough head-shaping on how to treat your constituents with some degree of respect and caring.

Hear, hear.

You should appreciate that he has been supportive of the arts. Certainly he's supportive of writers. Of checks.

Bill, I gather you have never spoken to this man or seen how he interacts with students and alumni?

Several rambling points (in no particular order) on Andy Noel the athletic director from hell:

1. I don't give him credit for bringing in Jim Knowles to coach football. Knowls interviewed Cornell. He's an alumnus who wanted to come back. Not too many coaches beg to go SEC ---> Ivy League.

2. He failed to defend Alumni fields from the Biotech building. It's probably something out of his pay grade, but there wasn't even a whisper of dissent.

3. The students pay for sports debacle. Athletic sites are for the most part set apart from academic and residential buildings (a trend that is only growing as opens spaces are eaten up and athletes move further towards East Hill Plaza). General indifference by students for most sports results in low student turnout. I have to imagine that the prospect of paying to see these games tips the scales against trekking over to see the basketball, volleyball, lacrosse, etc. teams play. Furthermore, with cash a dwindling commodity and students using cards for more and more, there is even the chance kids won't have cash to get in. Aside: I know that athletes support athletes by attending each other's games. Have they had to pay admission too now? One would imagine NCAA rules say yes.

4. Give credit for Andy keeping Schafer? OK. Thanks, Andy. You didn't screw up. You could have let him go to another school, but then you might have been shown the door too. Way to let Mike keep winning while you look at yourself in the plasma screens at the wrestling center.

5. Credit for bringing Donahue in to coach the hoops team. No argument. It was a good pick. I didn't hear anything about giving him an extension when he was a top candidate for the Penn job this summer though.

6. He never stands up for his own students and is always willing to spin it back on us. Take the Armond Hill basketball incident in 2002. The band plays by his picky little "no suck" rules and still loses. The AD at Columbia blames Cornell for the whole thing and Andy remains publically silent trying to make the whole thing go away. The last word was basically that Cornell students are wrong for being yelled at by visiting coaches. [see e.g. [www.columbiaspectator.com] ]

7. The athletics department image is awful. The website (I know I know, CSTV has us by the balls... we can only change it every third blue moon) is frustrating to use. The pop up ads are obnoxious. Somehow we still don't have online ticketing?!

8. Huggy bear.

9. Occassional-Access. It's been beaten to death.

10. He's just a jerk in person. See any time he ever interacts with students. Go to a basketball game he deigns to attend some day. Because it's easier to control than hockey (fewer people, easier to get around), I can almost guarantee at some time he'll lecture cheering students for not being exclusively positive. Or just look at how he treated Jim this weekend. If you can't have a pleasant conversation with Jim, you need some sort of therapy. Maybe Andy's just bitter about not getting any snickers.

11. When's the last time athletics put together buses for students to see away games for anything? It'd be ince for students to ride together to Colgate or Syracuse for football, hockey, or lax some time. I'm not sayig the bus would have to be free to students, just charge enough to break even. Look at Quinnipiac for a school that has it's students excited about sports. How many buses did they run to RPI last year for the playoffs?

12. The annual hockey ticket line joke.

13. Lies. Like the bit in the Sun last week about personally seeing fish hit H players in the head and go down their shirts. I've been at every Cornell/Harvard game since he took over. As funny as it would be for fish to go down someone's shirt, I sure don't remember seeing it or hearing about it and it sure hasn't happened since the fish toss assault began three(?) years ago. Or how he had is associates tell the band post-armond hill that the Ivy AD's had passed new rules on band placement at basketball games to keep them away from road teams. Amazingly, no other athletic department of band has heard of this...

Lay off Andy? How about fire Andy. The state of the athletics department isn't as strong as the results on the fields have implied. Sure it's a golden era for Cornell with respect to Ivy titles but it's like blaming or congratulating the president for presiding over economic growth or recession when these things are largely cyclical and outside of his direct control. Frankly, it's about time Cornell is competitive in more Ivy sports. It has the advantage (like it or not) of recruiting kids not acadmically qualified for other Ivies. I have hope that Pres. Skorton is more in tune with student concerns than Rawling/Lehman ever were. He comes from a Big Ten school with athletics tradition. Not a bad time for him to bring in one of his friends from the midwest to paint the locker rooms pink and clean up the athletics department.

Chris '03
10. He's just a jerk in person. See any time he ever interacts with students. Go to a basketball game he deigns to attend some day. Because it's easier to control than hockey (fewer people, easier to get around), I can almost guarantee at some time he'll lecture cheering students for not being exclusively positive. Or just look at how he treated Jim this weekend. If you can't have a pleasant conversation with Jim, you need some sort of therapy. Maybe Andy's just bitter about not getting any snickers.

What happened with Andy and Jim?

Josh '99
What happened with Andy and Jim?

[elf.elynah.com]

Thanks. Dick. (Andy, not you.)

Nice to see you've gotten calmer in the warm haze of life as an alum. Thanks for sharing.

Partly off-topic: As Cornell has grown in the decades since the sixties, perhaps the biggest mistake has been erecting four- not seven- and seven not twelve-story buildings. The sprawl of academic buildings has pushed athletics fields farther away from central campus. Soccer players and wrestlers would probably have less hassle getting to practice if they were enrolled in the vet college. Tennis isn't even on campus. Thank goodness Hoy Field was saved by installation of artificial turf.

I admire how Princeton has a) integrated athletics facilities into the campus and b) kept them closer to central campus.

billhoward
I admire how Princeton has a) integrated athletics facilities into the campus and b) kept them closer to central campus.

Princeton: 4600 Undergrads, 2000 Grads, $11B endowment = $1.6M per student
Cornell: 13600 Undergrads, 6000 Grads, $4B endowment = $204K per student

Princeton has a lot of options that Cornell just doesn't. On the other hand, Cornell can offer lots of things that Princeton just can't - no one institution can be all things for all people.

I didn't know volleyball was a Puritan sport. From the v-ball thread:

Willy '06
Unfortunately Dan (the guy with a C on his chest) is in fact a senior. Will, the U, is also a senior. And I, the guy with the red and white striped jacket am an alum but dating a junior on the team (so one more year!) The dancing tradition was started with Pat... a high jumper on the track team... and was much more suggestive. During the Penn game Andy Noel sent someone to first tell us to not talk during the Princeton timeout, but that dancing was ok. Then we were told dancing is not allowed. Andy Noel is a joke.

How come eLynah posters employing avatars of Andy Noel all have them right-side up?