CAA Commish A 'Regular Guy'

HARRISONBURG — It doesn’t take long to learn what Joe D’Antonio is all about.

He’s the commissioner of the Colonial Athletic Association and a self-described “regular guy.”

D’Antonio is settled, now in the middle of his eighth month on the job after taking over for the league’s longtime commissioner Tom Yeager. Before D’Antonio, Yeager was the only person who held the position.

“I take pride in that I’m just a regular person,” D’Antonio said while sitting near of the top of the bleachers inside the Convocation Center as Elon and Hofstra played Thursday. D’Antonio is in town for the CAA women’s basketball tournament, which is being in held in Harrisonburg through Saturday.

“I take pictures with the cheerleaders and dance teams,” he said. “One of the things I was doing with basketball was taking pictures with the captains of the men’s and women’s teams with the officials. We’re getting it out on social media.

“I like to be involved with the athletes, cheerleaders, dance teams and the bands just to say that we’re appreciative of them. That’s the fun part of the job.

“There’s nothing below me and there’s nothing above me. I’m just a regular guy that’s very fortunate to be the commissioner of the conference and I want to have those personal relationships with people because that’s what makes this job special.”

In less than a year, D’Antonio, who came to the CAA after 10 years with the Big East, has visited every school in the league — including its football-only members — at least once.

His reasoning for doing so is to be visible and approachable to the coaches and student athletes who work and play in conference. He said he also saw every men’s and women’s basketball team play a regular-season game.

D’Antonio said he’s as comfortable negotiating a television contract as he is talking to a CAA football player.

“There’s a lot more to this job than sitting in an office, returning emails and looking at documents,” D’Antonio said. “You have to have balance.”

The other side of job — evaluating revenue streams and executing those television deals — could be seen as stressful.

D’Antonio said the biggest challenges for the conference are all finance related.

At the end of the academic year, the CAA’s media-rights contracts all expire. The commissioner said he’s looking for a rights-fee deal with new potential partners.

The CAA entered its final year of a five-year television-rights deal with the NBC Sports Network at the start of the 2016-17 academic year.

“It’s a minus because we don’t have anything in place definitively,” he said. “But it’s a really big plus for us because I think that we have a whole entrée of availability right in front of us.

“We’re able to then go to the open market as we talk to potential television entities, whether it be on the linear side or the digital side, about what the next step would be for us as a conference. I feel convinced going forward that we’re looking at some kind of hybrid situation of a linear deal and a digital deal.”

On the football side, he said James Madison’s championship season helped the conference gain exposure and value.

“Now, we’re looking at where [the new partner] would provide us the best exposure as a conference and also some kind of a rights-fee deal,” D’Antonio said. “Not an [Power] Five rights-fee deal, but something that might be beneficial to our conference.”

D’Antonio said he wants the deal to benefit football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball and the other sports the conference sponsors. He also said he wants the league to start embracing that mentality as well.

“You can’t look at one of our entities and say, ‘Well, they don’t have football’ or ‘They’re only a football member,’” he said. “What I’ve tried to stress is that we’re all under the CAA umbrella.

“It’s exposing our brand in a positive way, which is what we want to do, so JMU winning the national championship in football and having that CAA attachment to it is a big deal for a Hofstra or Northeastern because they’re part of our CAA family even though they don’t have football.”

One of the things D’Antonio said he’s looking forward to are the conference meetings at the end of May. For the first time, he said, the league will have all 17 athletic directors from both football and non-football playing schools meet to discuss national issues. The league will also host a social event for all of its coaches to meet.

It’s all an effort to keep the CAA strong, he said.

“One of the things that certainly attracted me to the job was that a conference like the CAA provides the last level of that purity in college athletics,” he said. “You have an absolute solid combination of athletic and academic component meshing as one.

“It’s a special place to be.”