Tough Decisions Paid Dividends For Bourne, JMU

HARRISONBURG — Before the triumphs of expanding Bridgeforth Stadium or watching former quarterback Bryan Schor hoist a trophy in Frisco, Texas, and lacrosse coach Shelley Klaes-Bawcombe do the same on Long Island, Jeff Bourne had difficult decisions to make.

And ones no athletic director at any school wants to be part of.

“The reorganization of sports in 2006,” Bourne, now having spent the last 20 years at James Madison, said. “I’ve done a lot of things in my life as an athletic administrator and that’s the toughest period of time I’ve had to work through. That was a very, very challenging time for our program. And for athletic directors that yearn and foster competition and opportunity, to turn around and take it away, it cuts against everything in your soul.”

That year JMU eliminated seven men’s sports — archery, cross country, gymnastics, indoor and outdoor track, swimming and wrestling — and three women’s sports — archery, fencing and gymnastics.

Some were slashed for Title IX reasons and others were axed for various other circumstances.

“It was an objective decision about what was best long term,” JMU deputy athletic director Geoff Polglase, who has worked on Bourne’s staff since 2001, said. “Having to meet with those coaches and tell those 100-plus student-athletes that we were going to discontinue their opportunity to pursue their dream. And in some cases it was their last year of eligibility or just student athletes who had been on campus a few weeks as freshmen, we understood the burden we were putting on them.

“Young men and women who wanted to continue to compete were now having to chose between competing or continuing their education at JMU. For the coaches, it’s never easy to let someone know that they’re no longer going to have a job because you’re disrupting their lives at such a profound level. So to do what we did and to do it with so many people, it is absolutely the hardest thing that I’ve been involved with.”

But both Bourne and Polglase had a similar view of those tough choices 13 years later: JMU’s athletic department wouldn’t be where it is now — having the fortunes in football, lacrosse, softball or any other sport — without the elimination of the 10 programs.

“We’ve always had an unwritten rule, but a verbal rule at this place, that if you can’t do it right, then don’t do it at all,” Bourne said. “And I think when you look at facilities and decide to fund programs, we do it right. We do the same thing with every hire we make.

“And one of the most important things I do every day is look at the individuals we make a commitment to. We want to make sure that everyone of those employees are supported and share our culture.”

Bourne said he wanted JMU to support the sports it was going to have with the fullest potential of those programs in mind. Regular trips to Frisco for football, competing for a spot in the NCAA Tournament for men’s and women’s basketball and hosting NCAA postseason games on campus for lacrosse and softball.

“And having gotten on the other side of it to see how our program has done — as much as I hated to lose programs — there were successes that came out of it,” Bourne said. “I don’t know that if, had the complexion of our programs stayed the same, that we would’ve ever been to be able to do the significant things that we’ve been able to do. We weren’t a large enough of program and didn’t have the type of resources.”

Bourne said when he initially took the athletic director job at JMU, he had head coaches and assistant coaches that doubled as teachers on campus to make additional income. In some cases, there were specific sports programs that didn’t staff full-time assistant coaches.

“I think you could see it was an institution that was popular,” Bourne said about the infancy of his tenure in Harrisonburg. “One of the things I look at is what’s the popularity of the institution for perspective students? Perspective students love JMU and they wanted in, and that’s a sign of an institution on the rise and it was a place that had a great reputation.

“But it clearly had major facility needs and had structural and organizational needs. It needed to be better funded. Coaches weren’t going to be teaching classes anymore. They were going to be spending more time on the sideline with their student-athletes, so there were a lot of early fundamental and operational pieces that were going to have to change.”

And in Bourne’s two decades at the school, they have.

JMU vice president for administration and financing Charlie King, who is in his 24th year at the school and who was on the search committee that hired Bourne, said there were elements of the past jobs Bourne did at Virginia Tech and Georgia Tech that the committee believed would apply well to help the Dukes grow their athletic department.

“It was clear that when we went out looking for an athletic director that we had a couple of goals in mind,” King said. “One was that we wanted a strong leader to build the athletic department that [former JMU president] Dr. Lin Rose and I wanted, and we knew we needed to do a lot with private fundraising and Jeff had the experience at both Techs.”

One of the reasons Bourne said he thought he was hired was his ability to fundraise as the job called for investing time to solve problems outside the immediate athletic department staff.

“It forced me to be in the field among donors and fans,” Bourne said. “We’ve been building a lot of facilities, so to work and collaborate with our external staff and then to work with our university administration, our board of visitors and our donors and that’s all part of a very growth-oriented athletic program. And so, what I’ve done in my role has been more on the external side.”

It’s how the athletic department has become the one generating the most revenue of any with an FCS football program. It’s how JMU can properly fund programs to compete annually for CAA titles and for some sports like football, lacrosse and softball to compete annually for national championships. And when programs are properly supported, the school can hire coaches like Klaes-Bawcombe, current football headman Curt Cignetti, former football headman Mike Houston and former softball coach Mickey Dean.

“Jeff Bourne is the best athletic director I’ve ever worked for,” Houston said this past December as he was departing for East Carolina. “He is just a class act. He is a constant professional and JMU is very fortunate to have him. I think [ECU athletic director] Jon Gilbert is fantastic also. I don’t know him as well yet, but Jeff has spoken very highly of him as well as other people have so I think I’ll have a great relationship there, but Jon will have a lot to live up to my experience with Jeff. And I’m sure he will, and that’s one of the toughest things about leaving. How can you not get attached?”

And what Bourne has done, others away from JMU have noticed as the school and its teams have become the envy of its peers.

“I’ve got to give Jeff Bourne a ton of credit,” Towson football coach Rob Ambrose said. “Since Mickey’s [Matthews] era, they’ve really built a monster down there and he’s done a tremendous job. The facilities are better than anyone else’s. It’s a step above the rest and Jeff has driven that ship and steered it exactly where he wanted it to go, where that university wanted it to go. It’s very impressive.”

Editor's Note: This is the second story in a four-story series on Jeff Bourne's 20 years as athletic director at James Madison.