“After we faced Butler in the 2010 national championship game, I remember specifically talking to Brad Stevens about how Butler’s run would allow so many people to see all the good things about the university, many of which had little to do with basketball. The Cinderella Strategy shows just how busy Butler has been over the past decade, and how the university has taken full advantage of the opportunity it earned in 2010. Butler built a model basketball program and, more importantly, a model institution.”
Graham Honaker serves as Executive
Director of Principal Gifts at Butler University where he is in his ninth year. He has worked on various campaigns at Butler including the Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse and the Butler Beyond Campaign. He serves on the boards of the Milan ’54 Hoosiers Museum and Project 44, and is a trustee for the Robert Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership. He holds an undergraduate degree from Wake Forest University and a master’s degree from Indiana University. He lives in Indianapolis, IN, with his wife Sarah and two daughters, Kate and Bella.
Mike Krzyzewski, Head Men’s Basketball Coach, Duke University “Butler’s unwavering commitment to academic and athletics achievement and to the principles captured in the Butler Way have made the school a perfect fit for the Big East Conference.”
Val Ackerman, Commissioner, BIG EAST Conference “As a native Hoosier, I have great respect for Butler University and its basketball program. The values-oriented culture, innovative programs, and inspired leadership have been at the core of Butler’s ascent both on and off the court. The Cinderella Strategy is a must-read for leaders looking to build their own winning foundation.”
Gregg Popovich, Head Coach & President, San Antonio Spurs
Jerry Logan is the Director of Academic
Operations and a Lecturer in the Recreation, Sport, and Wellness program at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. He holds a Ph.D. in Higher Education from Boston College and an M.Ed. in Higher Education Administration from the College of William and Mary. Jerry lives in Beverly, MA, with his wife Lisa and their three children.
Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and ORIGINALS, Host of the TED podcast WorkLife
Graham Honaker Jerry Logan
“Butler is the ultimate underdog story: a small school with limited resources that has become an athletic powerhouse. This book chronicles how much of their excellence can be traced to character and culture. There’s no better place to see how an ethos of humility and generosity can make teams more than the sum of their parts.”
the Cinderella Strategy
Advance Praise For the Cinderella Strategy
THE
Cinderella Strategy Culture
Risk-Taking
innovation
The Game Plan Behind Butler University’s Rise to Prominence
Graham
Jerry
Honaker
Logan
In 2010, Butler University’s men’s basketball team made a stunning run to the national championship game, becoming the smallest school to make the final in the modern history of the NCAA tournament. In 2011, they did it again. With back-to-back turns as America’s favorite underdog, Butler basketball provided its university back home in Indianapolis with an unprecedented opportunity. The Cinderella Strategy details how Butler started its move toward the Final Fours as far back as 1989, forged a synergy between a bigtime athletic program and a serious academic institution in the process, and then leveraged the Cinderella story for all it was worth. Graham Honaker and Jerry Logan analyze how the university’s decision-makers took full advantage of this opportunity, delving into the brilliant marketing of Butler’s live mascot program, the authentic branding of “The Butler Way,” and the critical move into the Big East conference. Through these and other tactics, Butler transformed its academic reputation, enrollment, fundraising, and campus infrastructure, all in an era when many other small, private universities have struggled to survive. The resulting story interweaves basketball luminaries like Boston Celtics Coach Brad Stevens, Villanova Coach Jay Wright, and San Antonio Spurs Coach Gregg Popovich with the tireless efforts of so many lesser known but equally talented individuals within the Butler community. The Cinderella Strategy reveals how Butler has shattered the odds time and time again, both on and off the court. In the process, it offers a heartening case study of how a complex organization can find, manage, and multiply success, without having to trade its soul in the process.
Cover concept and design: Return Design, Emily Nasiff
THE
Cinderella Strategy THE
Cinderella Strategy The Game Plan Behind Butler University’s Rise to Prominence
Graham
Jerry
Honaker
Logan
The Game Plan Behind Butler University’s Rise to Prominence
Graham
Jerry
Honaker
Logan
The Game Plan Behind Butler University’s
Pediment Publishing, a division of The Pediment Group, Inc., Battle Ground, Washington 98604 www.pediment.com Š 2021 by Graham Honaker and Jerry Logan All Rights Reserved. Published 2021. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020924976 ISBN: 978-1-59725-954-5 No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the copyright owner or the publisher.
To Sarah, Kate, and Bella —for supporting my passion for books, basketball, and Butler G.H.
To Lisa —how sincerely I’ve loved you all along J.L.
Advance Praise for The Cinderella Strategy “After we faced Butler in the 2010 national championship game, I remember specifically talking to Brad Stevens about how Butler’s run would allow so many people to see all the good things about the university, many of which had little to do with basketball. The Cinderella Strategy shows just how busy Butler has been over the past decade, and how the university has taken full advantage of the opportunity it earned in 2010. Butler built a model basketball program and, more importantly, a model institution.” —Mike Krzyzewski Head Men’s Basketball Coach, Duke University “Butler’s unwavering commitment to academic and athletics achievement and to the principles captured in the Butler Way have made the school a perfect fit for the BIG EAST Conference. The wisdom, experience, and leadership of Jim Danko and Barry Collier have helped us successfully navigate the latest chapter in the conference’s proud history and all but guarantee that our stature will continue and our future as a dominant force in college sports remains bright.” —Val Ackerman Commissioner, BIG EAST Conference “As a native Hoosier, I have great respect for Butler University and its basketball program. The values-oriented culture, innovative programs, and inspired leadership have been at the core of Butler’s ascent both on and off the court. The Cinderella Strategy is a must-read for leaders looking to build their own winning foundation.” —Gregg Popovich Head Coach and President, San Antonio Spurs
“Butler is the ultimate underdog story: a small school with limited resources that has become an athletic powerhouse. This book chronicles how much of their excellence can be traced to character and culture. There’s no better place to see how an ethos of humility and generosity can make teams more than the sum of their parts.” —Adam Grant New York Times bestselling author of THINK AGAIN and ORIGINALS, host of the TED podcast WorkLife “I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Butler University. It’s a feel-good place that pays homage to the past but marches into the future with distinction and dignity. Butler nearly won that championship in 2010, but in many ways they won the hearts of America.” —Jim Nantz CBS Sports “College basketball is big business. There are questionable policies and rules, contradictions and hypocrisy, yet still those that keep things in proper perspective. Graham Honaker and Jerry Logan highlight one program among the good guys: Butler. The Butler basketball program is an authentic reflection of the campus community. Butler has established a strong culture, recruited and hired people who fit that culture, and has been remarkably patient in allowing them to do their work. This is a success story, and a well-told one at that.” —Jay Bilas ESPN
“I was introduced to the values of the Butler Way when I arrived as a student-athlete. We stress the importance of those same values to our team today. Holding true to the Butler Way has been critical to the success of Butler Basketball for three decades, and that success has played a major role in the growth of our University during that time. In The Cinderella Strategy, Graham and Jerry show how pervasive this mindset has become throughout campus and how the core values, particularly servanthood, unity, and passion, have transformed our University.” —LaVall Jordan Head Coach, Butler Men’s Basketball “As someone who has experienced firsthand the benefits of basketball success to Butler’s opponent in that fateful game, I have come to admire their success on and off the court. Both the basketball team and university that leveraged their remarkable success to gain real prominence did things right through ridiculously hard work, real creativity, a collaborative spirit, amazing leadership, and with the utmost integrity. Much has been written about the morality of college athletics. Butler is a testament to the value of doing things right. It is also a tale all colleges and universities should study to understand how to build sustainable success in these very challenging times. I encourage everyone who cares about education, sports, and leadership to read this book with care and consideration.” —Blair Sheppard Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus of the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University “Having been away from Butler for 17 years, I was shocked when I brought our daughters back to campus for college visits. The dynamics and structures, along with the beauty, of this university are a testament to vision, leadership, and winning basketball games…The Butler Way.” —Thad Matta Former Head Men’s Basketball Coach at Butler University and The Ohio State University
“The impact that basketball success can have on a private university is well documented, and there are no greater examples than Gonzaga and Butler. Before, both Gonzaga and Butler were known within their respective regions, but not much beyond that. With help from sustained basketball success, both schools have seen historic growth and now have a national brand. The Cinderella Strategy shows you how this transformation has happened at Butler. There has never been a better time to be a Butler (or Gonzaga) Bulldog!” —Mike Roth Athletic Director, Gonzaga University “Having served as the managing director of the NCAA Division I men’s basketball tournament for the past seven years, I’ve seen firsthand the type of opportunities offered to universities year after year in terms of national exposure. As a Butler alum, I’ve also seen firsthand how the university has grown by leaps and bounds over the past decade. The Cinderella Strategy relates in fascinating detail the story of how those two entities—March Madness and Butler—propelled each other to heights few ever imagined.” —JoAn Scott Managing Director, Men’s Basketball, NCAA “When I initially joined Butler University as the Dean of the Lacy School of Business, I questioned the value of linking the success of the university’s academic programs with the success of its athletic programs. Graham Honaker helped me understand the power of doing so. In their new book, Graham and Jerry now share this wisdom with others; a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how a well-run athletic program can be a force of good for a university.” —Stephen Standifird President, Bradley University
“Butler University’s creative business model for success has been as impressive as any institution that I’ve observed in my 33-year association with college athletics. As a former Division I Men’s Basketball Coach and current college basketball commentator, I have followed Butler’s remarkable run in a most highly competitive and ever-changing marketplace of college athletics. It only takes one step inside the iconic and venerable Hinkle Fieldhouse to fully sense there’s something uniquely special about The Butler Way. The Cinderella Strategy demonstrates how the winning formula has not only been implemented in the proud tradition of Hinkle and the athletics program, but also encompasses the entire campus culture. This is an essential read for those who recall Butler’s epic Final Four runs and want to further understand what the Butler achievements on the court meant to the Butler community in a broader context. In fact, it’s a must-read for anyone in need of a compelling, feel-good story and a blueprint for how a university nudged its own destiny forward when facing overwhelming odds.” —Steve Lavin FOX SPORTS 1 broadcaster and former Head Men’s Basketball Coach at UCLA and St. John’s “Even outside the headliners, many college sports programs have their day in the sun, though among ‘Cinderella’ breakthroughs only Butler’s 2010 and 2011 NCAA basketball runners-up did it twice in a row. What makes this tale deserving of model status is, in a ten-year lookback, how athletics—among faculty an oft-reviled adjunct to academia—wound up improving the whole university in substantive ways. I know of no parallel to either achievement or to this, Graham Honaker’s and Jerry Logan’s exceptional analysis.” —Bob Hammel Former Sports Editor of the Bloomington Herald-Times and Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame Inductee
“It’s a miracle—and I know a little bit about those—what Butler has done over the past decade. The thing about the Milan Miracle is that our team was really good, which is a part of the Cinderella story that often gets overlooked. Talent and good decision-making and performing under pressure are not fluky. The Cinderella Strategy shows this is exactly what’s been happening at Butler. Their team—faculty, staff, students, administration, trustees, and alumni—is good, and people are taking notice. I’m proud of my alma mater. Go Dawgs!” —Bobby Plump Member of 1954 Milan High School State Championship team and Butler basketball teams from 1954-58 “The Cinderella Strategy is a well-written narrative of how a small university established a culture that fostered a cycle of increasingly bold initiatives from new and bigger opportunities. Even having lived and in some small way contributed to this growth, the transformation at Butler still amazes me. The observations and experiences captured in this book are well worth your attention.” —Matt Howard Starting Center on Butler’s 2010 and 2011 Final Four teams “Few universities have moments that define their very own B.C. and A.D. calendar quite like Butler. But the Final Four appearances themselves weren’t responsible for Butler’s rebirth. Strategic and very capable leaders capitalized on the momentum and deftly applied basketball’s Butler Way to nearly every corner of the institution. External audiences jumped aboard, including benefactors who are supporting Butler’s academic programs in record numbers. Butler’s fundraising resurgence is a clear reminder that donors invest in organizations rooted in character that possess both an exciting vision and demonstrated progress.” —Dan Saftig Senior Consultant and Principal, Marts & Lundy, Inc.
“Butler’s Cinderella run to the NCAA championship game was the tipping point in taking a great university to greater heights. Its athletic ideal, ‘The Butler Way,’ became a critical part of the institution’s brand strategy in both lived and expressed ways and has led to unprecedented success in enrollment, fundraising, and broad-based awareness of the institution. The Cinderella Strategy tells a great story of how this athletics success catalyzed an entire community of scholars to tremendous outcomes by doing things a better way, the Butler Way.” —Jason Simon CEO, SimpsonScarborough “The story of Butler’s back-to-back runs to college basketball’s national championship game has been told in multiple ways. The story behind the story is how Butler leveraged that success to enhance a small, private liberal arts college in Indianapolis. Graham Honaker and Jerry Logan chronicle those developments, explaining how the Butler Way represents more than hoops.” —David Woods Beat Writer, The Indianapolis Star
10 The Cinderella Strategy
The Cinderella Strategy 11
12  The Cinderella Strategy
TA BLE OF CON TEN TS 14
Authors’ Notes
21
Introduction
27
Section One: Searching for Cinderella
28
Chapter 1: How the Cinderella Story Became a University Resource
41
Chapter 2: How Big-Time Athletics Came to Butler University
58
Chapter 3: How Butler Built a Flagship Program
90
Chapter 4: How Presidents Manage Risk and Leverage Basketball
105
117
Chapter 5: How Butler Rewrote Final Four History
Section Two: Net Gains
118
Chapter 6: Unlocking New Markets
135
Chapter 7: Boosting Enrollment and Shaping the Student Body
145
Chapter 8: Breeding a Marketing Machine
158
Chapter 9: Transforming Philanthropy and Infrastructure
179
Chapter 10: Branding Culture, the Butler Way
199 200
Section Three: Beyond Butler Chapter 11: The Cinderella Strategy
223
Epilogue
231
Acknowledgments
237
Methodology and Sources
241
Endnotes
Authors’ Notes
O
ne of my first cinematic memories was watching the film Hoosiers. Ranked by USA Today as the greatest sports movie of all-time, Hoosiers recounts the story of a small-town Indiana high school basketball team that wins the state championship. It’s based on the legendary Milan Indians team that won the 1954 Indiana state title—the smallest school in state history to pull off such a feat. Milan’s victory over powerhouse Muncie Central ranks as one of sports’ greatest David versus Goliath moments. Little did I know at the time that the film would forever change my life. I became obsessed with basketball and cared much more about March Madness than Darth Vader and G.I. Joe. I struggled with chemistry and math, but by age 12 could recite NCAA champions and Wooden Award winners from years past. My obsession with basketball, particularly the college game, would even impact my future vocation. Flash forward twenty-five years. I was in Louisville, Kentucky, having dinner with my wife Sarah at a local restaurant. I lived there at the time and was a fundraiser for the business school at the University of Louisville. On the bar television, the Butler University Bulldogs were battling the Florida Gators in the 2011 South Regional Final with a trip to the Final Four on the line. Butler had just forced overtime. I feigned having conversation with Sarah, but my eyes were fixated on the game. Butler battled a more talented, Billy Donovan-coached Florida team and pulled out a 74-71 victory. The win meant a second consecutive Final Four appearance for the Bulldogs. The real life, modern-day version of Hoosiers had just played out before my eyes. I turned to Sarah and proclaimed, “That’s the greatest sports accomplishment I’ve ever seen.” A few months following Butler’s epic win, I hopped on the Butler University human resources site and came across a job in the University’s Advancement 14 The Cinderella Strategy
department. Without consulting my wife, I submitted my résumé and hoped for a return call. I got one. From the first time I set foot on Butler’s picturesque Indianapolis campus, I fell in love. Warmth and charm permeated the Indiana limestone, and everyone I met embodied the term “Hoosier Hospitality.” Yet, one attraction cemented my crush on Butler—Hinkle Fieldhouse. Built in 1928, the iconic gym was the site for the final scenes of Hoosiers. I didn’t have a tape measure to gauge the height of the rims, but merely being in the building evoked memories of watching the film as a young child. I was fortunate to receive an offer and have been at Butler ever since. Since moving to Butler, I’ve witnessed its Cinderella story unfold firsthand. The university’s growth over the last decade has been incredible, and this book tells the story of how those two Final Fours spurred transformational change for the entire institution. In many ways, the leadership, foresight, and strategy that have enabled Butler to reach new heights as an institution are as impressive as the on-court accomplishments of its men’s basketball program. I was compelled to collaborate with Jerry on this book because I believe the story is so unique. Butler’s transformation in such a short time was hard for even an insider to believe. I also wanted to share insider stories involving basketball luminaries like Jay Wright, Gregg Popovich, and Bobby Plump, the hero of the 1954 Milan team who inspired Jimmy Chitwood’s character in Hoosiers. Even the Butler die-hards would not be aware of such tales, nor of the specific metrics—growth in endowment, admissions, and annual fundraising chief among them—that provide empirical evidence of Butler’s rise. But there was another motivation, one I can trace all the way back to my childhood, when my heroes lived on the hardwood. I wanted to illustrate that a university and a big-time basketball program could win by doing things the right way—in this case, the Butler Way. The Butler Way sustained the university’s image in an era where a litany of powerhouse athletic programs, including Louisville, Louisiana State University, Arizona, North Carolina State, and Kansas, find themselves under a cloud of suspicion. Although there are numerous books and case studies on the business principles of companies like Marriott, Starbucks, and Southwest Airlines, very few focus on the university setting. Yet, as I’ve observed firsthand the leadership of people The Cinderella Strategy 15
like Brad Stevens, Jim Danko, Barry Collier, Thad Matta, Chris Holtmann, and LaVall Jordan, the urge to share what I’ve learned has become even more urgent. There are still causes for hope in American universities and big-time college athletics programs. Our aim in this book is to take you inside one such place. Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski, the winningest coach in college basketball history and the one whose team ended Butler’s first Cinderella run in the 2010 title game, gave an online commencement speech to the graduating class of 2020 at Duke. He cited advice his mother once gave him and recounted the following: “Just before I started high school, I had to go on a bus—a city bus. The night before, she said, ‘Michael,’ and whenever she said ‘Michael,’ I knew there was something that was very important. ‘Sit down, Michael. Tomorrow, make sure you’re on the right bus.’ I said, ‘I know my way around the city,’ but she said, ‘That’s not what I’m talking about. Tomorrow, you’re going to meet a lot of new people. You’re going to start driving your bus. You’re going to drive your bus for your entire life. Make sure that you put good people on your bus. And if you get on someone else’s bus, make sure they’re good people.’” My decision to come to Butler has allowed me to ride a bus with truly exceptional people and embark on the journey of a lifetime. Along the way, I’ve been able to witness one of the most remarkable transformations in modern higher education history. —Graham Honaker Indianapolis, Indiana
16 The Cinderella Strategy
I
did not know a soul at Butler University when I decided I wanted to study the institution: no faculty or staff, no students or alums, no trustees or administrators, nothing. I didn’t even have a secondhand connection, a person who knew a person. So, I reached out to the athletic director at Boston College, where I was a doctoral student at the time. His name was Brad Bates, and although I didn’t know him either, he felt like my only hope. I scheduled a meeting with Brad and explained the project I had in mind for my dissertation: I wanted to explore how Butler had leveraged two straight Cinderella runs to the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four in order to benefit the entire university. In an ideal world, I would have been able to compare and contrast multiple universities for my dissertation, but as a graduate student I did not have the time or the resources to do so. I had to choose just one Cinderella. So, I printed brackets from past iterations of the NCAA Tournament and identified every mid-major program that advanced to at least the Sweet 16. I removed teams whose runs were either too distant for me to talk with members of the university community who’d experienced it or too fresh for them to have a full sense for what was possible with so sudden and sizable a stroke of good fortune. From there, I picked a handful of teams that had the most compelling stories and conducted a more granular analysis, gathering information on basic institutional characteristics, turnover in key personnel, and the records of its basketball team since the Cinderella run. In a small notebook, I scribbled a chart comparing the pros and cons of my top two choices, circling the variables that seemed to offer the most compelling case. Every circle fell on the left column, under the name “Butler University.” Brad Bates listened patiently as I explained all of this. When I finished running him through my logic, I made the ask: “Barry Collier is the AD at Butler. Any chance you know him and would be willing to connect me?” I figured Barry would be the key contact at Butler. From afar he seemed like a point of continuity at the university, having held his position both before and after the Cinderella runs. If he would vouch for my study, then I’d probably be able to get enough access at Butler to actually conduct the research. There was only one problem. Brad knew Barry as well as I did, which is to say not at all. He offered to reach out on my behalf, but more than a month later I’d heard The Cinderella Strategy 17
nothing. I followed up with Brad, though it was perfunctory—already I was kicking around plans to study a different university where I might at least have some initial connection to build on. Hope against hope, Brad emailed back with Barry’s email and cell phone. Like a good millennial, I went with email first. No response. Phone next. Voicemail. Finally, a few weeks later, I caught Barry. “Sure,” he said with a cordial twang, “You can come.” Simple as that. Barry indicated that I was barking up the right tree: when he’d been hired as the men’s basketball coach at Butler in 1989, even then—more than two decades before the first Final Four berth in 2010—it had been central to the president’s vision to invest in and leverage basketball for the greater good of the university. The story was there, and it ran even deeper and longer than imagined. I felt like I’d hit the jackpot, but much like Butler on the heels of that first Cinderella run, I had only the slightest sense for what that might mean in the years ahead. I fell in love with Butler on paper. On the ground, though, it’s rare that anything can live up to the expectations constructed in the lofty remove of our own minds, rarer still that it can exceed them. Yet, Butler did. I came into the university cold, knowing no one and striving to keep my distance as a dispassionate observer. By the end of the project, I found myself rooting for Butler as if it were my own alma mater. I discovered that the men’s basketball program is an echo of the institution itself: underdogs that have managed to hold tight to the same clear-headed humility and fierce commitment to excellence that got them to the big stage in the first place, even as they seem to grow into their place on that stage more and more with each passing year. As a lifelong college basketball fan and a higher education professional, finding an institution to believe in often feels like a long shot. Scandals and bad press have rocked big-time college athletics from the start, but they’re plenty prevalent in the ivory towers of academia as well. In contrast, the quintessential story from Butler’s 2010 Final Four was that, on the morning of the national championship game, Butler players went to class. Of course, this was possible only because Butler had the enormous good fortune of making the Final Four when it was scheduled to be played only six miles from campus. Yet, it was not a ruse. When CNN informed then-President Bobby Fong that reporters were 18 The Cinderella Strategy
coming to campus to investigate players’ classroom attendance, he told them the same thing that Barry Collier would tell me years later: come on. We have nothing to hide. Simple as that. Though Graham and I came to Butler in very different fashions, it is our mutual hope to share more broadly what has been an open secret for decades: that it’s worth believing in Butler. There’s no previous connection needed. Sure, it helps to know a (different) Brad or a Barry, but Butler’s story and the individuals who have helped to write it are much bigger than that. This book is an attempt, though far from exhaustive, to reveal the many patient hands and sound decisions behind Butler’s rise to prominence. It does, after all, take a village to raise a banner. Or two. —Jerry Logan Beverly, Massachusetts
The Cinderella Strategy 19
20  The Cinderella Strategy
The shot. C OURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
Introduction The Cinderella Strategy 21
H
ow did Butler University do it? How did a regional, private university rise to national prominence in little more than a decade? How did a small Midwestern institution move into a peer group that included some of the most renowned schools in the United States? How did the Butler Way come to capture the hearts of so many people well beyond the state of Indiana? Yes, the answer is partly about Butler’s improbable feat of reaching backto-back Final Fours in 2010 and 2011—the smallest school to reach a Final Four in the history of the modern tournament. Yet, as spectacular and unlikely as those runs were, they were a catalyst for a much larger movement already afoot. Butler’s phenomenal rise was institutional. It was long in the works. And, it has been lasting. Former President Bobby Fong said of the school’s 2010 Final Four run that Butler had “caught a wave,” but that brief moment in time was really just symbolic of “the larger story of Butler University.”1 This book’s intent is to tell that larger story. The story has to be told inside out, and the timeline widened. We’re used to hearing the intense media coverage of an institution when their team makes a Cinderella run and maybe to hearing brief reports in the aftermath about admissions numbers rising, or merchandise sales skyrocketing, or web traffic swelling. But such stories do not address the real questions. How did a university position itself for such a run in the first place and, more importantly, what did they do with the attention and the momentum in the years to follow? For many years Butler was a respected but little-known school tucked into an affluent but not haughty Indianapolis neighborhood. Even then, however, members of its community were laying the groundwork for transformative growth. When the Final Fours struck, Butler used its sudden basketball fame as a catapult to becoming a nationally ranked academic player over the ensuing decade. From 2010 to 2020, the campus transformed. Under the leadership of Fong’s successor, President Jim Danko, and with broad intra-university buy-in, Butler embraced a significantly more innovative approach to education, attracting attention and accolades that differentiated it in a crowded market. Brilliant marketing of its live bulldog mascot’s pug-ugly but Churchillian face shaped its national identity in a variety of areas, from admissions to social media to
22 The Cinderella Strategy
public relations. At a time when applications were dropping nationally, Butler’s more than doubled, aided in part by a waddling, four-legged admissions rep who paw-delivered acceptances on the doorsteps of prospective students. Likewise, it was far more ingenious than coincidental that 2010, the year of Butler’s basketball breakthrough, launched for the university a huge increase in philanthropic support, a surge that was lasting, not emotion-based, and that continues today. The decade included three of BU’s best fundraising years on record. The university also announced its largest gift ever, and its endowment grew by $100 million. It is essential to consider the timing. Butler achieved all of this growth in an extraordinarily difficult period for all higher education, especially for smaller, private schools. Something largely unquestioned for generations—the lifetime financial benefits of a four-year college degree—came under widespread scrutiny as more and more students assumed a staggering personal, loan-based debt load. Detractors of the traditional four-year degree questioned its value, especially as annual tuition increases outpaced inflation year after year at many institutions across the country. Meanwhile, the number of college-eligible students was in decline in many regions, and precipitous declines in state funding signaled a shifting value proposition coast to coast. Under attack, too, was higher education’s perceived failure to innovate. More and more college majors seemed unrelated to marketable employment necessities. In speeding through a digital revolution, universities seemed locked in traffic, unable to assess something as simple as whether certain four-year programs might be completed in less time, at less cost. Meeting budgets became an acute challenge for private universities. In 2013, a survey of business officers administered by Inside Higher Ed and Gallup revealed that only 13 percent of chief financial officers were confident in the business model for their institutions over the next decade.2 The climate was especially problematic for private, liberal arts institutions. In a 2018 Education Next article, Stephen Eide contended that “small mid-tier private schools tend to have modest endowments, and after decades of tuition hikes comparable to those of their elite peers, are now dangerously at risk of pricing themselves out of the market.”3 The late Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen The Cinderella Strategy 23
famously predicted that half of the country’s colleges and universities could face closure during the 2020s.4 A sober reminder of this forecast hit close to home for Butler when 128-year-old Saint Joseph’s College, an hour and a half north of Indianapolis, closed due to financial problems in 2017. This closure reflected the challenge of operating in the backyard of massive, prestigious public institutions like Indiana University and Purdue University. As Eide noted, “As rare as private school closures are, public school closures are even rarer. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that, over the last quarter century, only four four-year public schools have shuttered, compared to 124 four-year private nonprofit closures.”5 Yet in this climate, with a modest endowment, high tuition, competition from public institution neighbors, and a declining population of college-eligible students, Butler has flourished. This book examines why and how Butler beat the odds. As college basketball fans know, finding success when the stakes are high is sometimes about survival and sometimes about luck, but those explanations often belie the talent and effort that are essential ingredients in extended postseason runs. In many ways, it’s no different at the university level. Accordingly, we explore how decision-makers at Butler seized the unexpected lightning strike of high-profile athletic success, leveraging it to develop other institutional functions and elevate the profile of the entire university. Through interviews and correspondence with members of the Butler community, primary document and secondary source analysis, and field observations on Butler’s campus, a picture emerges of why this Cinderella story became a lasting university resource. It is the evolution of a strategy developed and nurtured by administrators in a variety of offices, including admissions, advancement, athletics, and marketing and communications. By capitalizing on its opportunity, Butler became the envy of many regional and “mid-major” schools that dreamed of using athletic success to build national prominence. That’s not hyperbole. The president’s office and athletic department enter the 2020s having fielded numerous inquiries from other institutions asking how to bottle Butler’s magic. As is often the case with things that appear on the surface to be magic, the real trick boils down to commitment to a cause, honed day in, day out over years and years and years. As one of the story’s 24 The Cinderella Strategy
central figures, Athletic Director Barry Collier, says, “There’s no silver bullet. There’s no magic potion that allows that to take place. There’s a philosophy in place. The key is to establish a value-based program and then stay true to that.”6 Butler has been doing this for decades, and our sense is that, hidden in small towns across the country, other colleges and universities are doing the very same thing as they wait for their moment in the sun, too. In this gloom-and-doom era of higher education, we want this book to be a resource for higher education leaders and professionals. We also believe that many of the approaches contained here extend well beyond the realm of higher education. Each organization is unique in its history, challenges, and resources, but Butler’s story offers a variety of principles and ideas that can be translated into many different contexts. To that end, the book is structured in two halves. The first section shows how Butler positioned itself for growth by refurbishing the men’s basketball program and ensuring its alignment with the university’s mission; the second section details how the university leveraged the Final Four success, with each chapter honing in on a major university-wide function. The book reads as a narrative, with the idea being that if we’ve told the story well enough and with sufficient detail, then each reader will be able to pick and choose the pieces that apply most to their own context. In the final chapter, we offer a conclusion to the story by putting everything together into a “Cinderella strategy” with broad implications for other organizations. Along the way, in chapters three through ten, we’ve also tried to highlight some of the counterintuitive themes that emerge from Butler’s story through “strategy point” boxes that offer additional food for thought. Lastly, in trying to capture Butler’s transformation, our side intent is to give the Butler community reasons to take pride in and appreciate their university’s miraculous growth and to give due credit to the many individuals who contributed to its development. This is a vast, diverse crowd: students, faculty, administrators, trustees, community leaders, coaches, athletes, and incredibly generous philanthropists. In his book Underdawgs, David Woods wrote that “the story of Butler’s back-to-back trips to the national title game is the greatest story of college basketball’s modern age.”7 Equally compelling is what Butler has accomplished as a university in the ten years following. The Cinderella Strategy 25
26  The Cinderella Strategy
SECTION ONE
Construction of the Butler Fieldhouse, circa 1928. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY
Searching for Cinderella The Cinderella Strategy 27
1
CHAPTER
How the Cinderella Story Became a University Resource
T
o understand Butler’s rise to national prominence, it is essential to have a sense for the resources at its disposal. The asset that beamed Butler broadly into the hearts and minds of people outside this Indianapolis community was of course the twin Final Four runs, when stories about the university and its team were broadcast to millions of people the world over. At the core of that asset, and what made it so magnetic, was the Cinderella story, with its timeless appeal. For this reason, the Cinderella story must be viewed not just as something that plays out in brackets and gymnasiums, but as a resource, suddenly and widely available for its holder to use for all its worth in the years that follow. To flesh out the nature of this resource for universities, 28  The Cinderella Strategy
The 2010 national championship game at Lucas Oil Stadium. C OURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
it helps to understand something called the “halo effect”: what it is, how the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament augments it, and how a couple of March’s most well-known Cinderellas—Gonzaga and George Mason—capitalized on it before Butler took its turn in the spotlight. The Halo Effect “The name of the game at American higher education institutions,” wrote the late scholar J. Douglas Toma, “is institution building.”1 Colleges and universities grow by the people they are able to pull into their orbit year after year—prospective students, researchers, donors, lawmakers, alumni, employers, on down the line—making prestige, more often than not, the first point of attraction. Prestige is an abstract concept. It derives from the difficulty in assessing higher education’s chief products, namely teaching, research, and learning. In the absence of widely understood metrics for these goods, the general public—and to a certain degree even those within higher education—develop a basic sense of the best institutions and extrapolate from those institutions a The Cinderella Strategy 29
set of characteristics by which to judge the quality of other institutions.2 Do you actually know, for instance, whether that epidemiologist from Harvard is a good epidemiologist, or do you know that Harvard is one of the most prestigious universities in the world and therefore likely to count only the leading epidemiologists among the members of its community? There are different ways to build prestige, but Toma made a career out of studying what amounts to an inside track: high-profile athletic success. The key to translating athletic success into academic reputation is a concept that scholars have dubbed the halo effect. The halo effect is, in short, the great hope of investment in big-time athletics at prestige-seeking universities. The basic blueprint is fairly straightforward: investment in a major spectator sport can yield high-profile wins that garner national attention; with the right touch, institutions can parlay this widespread interest into name recognition, image enhancement, and increased resources, whether tangible ones like funding or intangible ones like institutional pride and identification. These fruits, in turn, can feed growth across the entire institution, setting off a cycle of prestige and resource generation that might lift the university into ever-more prestigious company. In this way, a successful, big-time athletic program can become “an instrument of total institutional enhancement.”3 The halo effect is well-known within the study of higher education, with economists and historians providing ample signs of its power. Often, the most compelling bits of evidence are the success stories: dig into the history of the Ivies like Harvard and Yale, or public flagships like Louisiana State University and University of Georgia, or private giants like Notre Dame and University of Southern California, and you will find athletics pulling significant weight at some point in the institution’s rise to academic prominence.4 Yet, in these examples and in so many other conversations about college sports, “athletics” is code for football. Since the birth of intercollegiate athletic competition in America, football has been the popular centerpiece.5 Alongside the halo effect, there is a complementary but overlooked theory that warrants attention. Toma devised it with another scholar named Michael Cross, and together they called it the “good story phenomenon.” The gist is simple: the outside attention that high-profile athletic success garners for an 30 The Cinderella Strategy
institution might be in some way proportional to the appeal of the on-field narrative. When “people ‘buy into’ a particular team because its season has the movie script quality of being unexpected,” the halo effect mushrooms.6 If this is true, then institutions hoping for prestige on the football field are looking in the wrong place. If you want a good story, then basketball is the best bet, and March is an open book. The Onset of Madness In its infancy, college basketball flourished in both rural and urban settings but remained a local phenomenon. Beginning in the 1930s, the game grew more commercialized and slowly came to resemble “a scaled-down version of college football” in terms of its popular appeal and revenue-generating capacity.7 In 1979, however, a confluence of events “helped to catapult basketball, and especially the NCAA Tournament, into the national consciousness.”8 The first was the rise of cable television, and specifically ESPN, which launched that year and acquired the rights to broadcast the tournament’s opening-round games beginning the following year; as ESPN’s founder Hink and Dickie V. C OURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS would later reflect, the network’s explosive growth in subsequent years stemmed primarily from college basketball. Not coincidentally, in December of that year, Dick Vitale called his first game for the new network, providing the sport with an enthusiastic, signature voice that would resound for decades to come. The second factor was the creation of the Big East, an athletic conference built around men’s basketball and comprising universities in major television markets on the East Coast. The brainchild of former Providence coach and athletic director Dave Gavitt, the conference began play in 1979–80 and by The Cinderella Strategy 31
1985 did what no other conference had ever done, landing three teams in the Final Four: winner Villanova, runner-up and defending champion Georgetown, and St. John’s. In little time, the Big East provided evidence that a basketball-centric conference could prosper in much the same way as football-based conferences at the time. Third was the spark that lit all these wires: the original Cinderella story played on the budding sport’s largest stage. In the 1979 NCAA championship game, “nearly a quarter of all television sets in America” watched Larry Bird’s small conference, underdog Indiana State team attempt to topple Magic Johnson and Michigan State’s powerhouse program.9 Though Indiana State lost, within six years the country witnessed two dramatic upsets in the championship game and the expansion of the tournament field from forty teams to sixty-four teams. Since that time, a number of universities have been able to leverage the postseason success of their men’s basketball teams to increase their national prominence.10 Indeed, in the present day there is evidence to suggest that men’s basketball represents a much more prudent investment than football, while offering the possibility of similar institutional returns.11 Although a competitive, big-time men’s basketball program still requires a substantial financial outlay, it is much less expensive than football—three to four times cheaper by some measures.12 Further, while the sport certainly has its aristocrats, on the whole it offers a far more level playing field than football; the rankings are more fluid, individual games more winnable, a national championship more accessible.13 This egalitarian quality is evident in college basketball’s postseason tournament, which features 68 teams compared to four in the college football playoff, and reserves slots for each conference champion regardless of the conference’s strength. In fact, it is precisely the enormity of the NCAA Tournament that sets the sport apart from both a commercial perspective and a publicity perspective. Simply put, March Madness is big business. The tournament is a commodity with unparalleled staying power and reach.14 CBS Sports and Turner are in the middle of a twenty-two-year deal to broadcast March Madness, for which the rights fee is $19.6 billion over the course of the agreement. Turner’s president David Levy justified a recent extension to this deal by claiming that “there is 32 The Cinderella Strategy
no other event that captivates an entire nation for over three weeks and across all platforms—television, digital, and social.”15 Since 2006, television ads during the tournament have generated more than $8 billion in revenue, with the price of a thirty-second commercial during a Final Four game costing $700,000.16 Given that the tournament is such a cash cow for the NCAA, generating more than 90 percent of its annual revenue, the organization funnels a significant portion of that revenue into a basketball fund that rewards success in the tournament with payouts, over six-year terms, to athletic conferences. Based on these payouts, in 2013 each victory in the tournament was worth $1.5 million; by 2018, the number had grown, with Loyola Chicago securing $8.5 million for the Missouri Valley Conference with their five-game run to the Final Four.17 The following year, the tournament generated more than $867 million of total revenue, and conversely, the cancellation of the 2020 tournament due to the COVID-19 pandemic cost the NCAA $375 million.18 Beyond the sheer economics, there is one additional quality about March Madness that appeals to administrators at universities outside of the most prestigious athletic conferences: a championship is not necessary in order to unlock the institution-building capacities of athletic success. Tournament darlings from the past two decades—Loyola Chicago, Florida Gulf Coast, Wichita State, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), Lehigh, Northern Iowa, Davidson, George Mason—were never the team lifting the trophy when “One Shining Moment” and the tournament’s closing montage faded from television screens. Rather, for each of those teams the common thread is the development and, for however brief a moment, possession of the Cinderella story. The narrative differs from team to team and season to season, perhaps turning one year on the performance of a transcendent player, as it did in 2008 with Stephen Curry at Davidson; another year on a memorable shot, as it did two years later with Ali Farokhmanesh’s three-pointer in the final minute of Northern Iowa’s win over Kansas; another year on a thrilling style of play like Florida Gulf Coast’s combination of alley-oops and grins that quickly earned the moniker “dunk city.” Yet, there are two features that nearly all Cinderellas share. First, they tend to hail from “mid-major” athletic conferences outside of the most powerful The Cinderella Strategy 33
five to six affiliations, which is often a more important determinant than their actual tournament seed. Second, they must emerge from the tournament’s first weekend to at least earn a spot in the Sweet 16, thereby extending the media cycle and capitalizing on the “good story phenomenon.” With a good story and a national platform, prestige-seeking universities can begin to see the dividends after years of investment in the sport of men’s basketball. Gonzaga’s Sweet 16 Resource Gonzaga represents the gold standard for modern universities looking to leverage men’s basketball. Gonzaga’s Cinderella story began, as all do, in relative obscurity. As journalist Greg Bishop observed, “those who looked at Gonzaga before 1998–99 did so mostly by accident.”19 In terms of basketball success, the school had precious few claims to fame: a single noteworthy alum in NBA Hall-of-Famer John Stockton, who graduated in 1984, and only one previous appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 1995. The basketball program was low budget, with a relatively modest footprint on campus: there was no administrative staff, the coaches earned meager salaries, and the college bookstore and local malls carried no basketball-specific apparel. Contrary to big-time programs, where players dine like royalty, Gonzaga’s team often had to race to the student center after practice to grab food before it closed. In this way, the program echoed the precarious fortunes of the larger university, where financial pressures were severe enough to warrant consideration of withdrawing from Division I athletics altogether. Amid this backdrop, the men’s basketball team earned the program’s second berth in the NCAA Tournament in March of 1999 and caught fire, storming to the Elite Eight before losing to that year’s eventual champion, Connecticut. Along the way, Gonzaga remained such an unknown commodity to the rest of the country that their head coach Dan Monson concluded each of his press conferences with instructions on how to pronounce the institution’s name.20 During the summer of 1999, as debate about the fate of the institution’s athletic programs continued, Monson accepted the head coaching position at the University of Minnesota, a big-time program in a power conference. According to Bishop, “the dollars were so different, the gulf in resources so 34 The Cinderella Strategy
Gonzaga head coach Mark Few (center). COURTESY GONZAGA ATHLETICS
wide, that Monson thought he had no choice.”21 In many ways, the loss of a star player or an ascendant coach is often the final chapter in the Cinderella story. Though Gonzaga had already identified assistant coach Mark Few as its head-coach-in-waiting, and though a number of talented players from the previous season were returning, Monson’s departure brought the university to an existential consideration of how much it wished to invest in men’s basketball. 22 University leaders chose to funnel more resources into the program, and Gonzaga entered the 1999–2000 season with prospects for continued success and a spot in the AP Poll’s top twenty-five teams in the country. Yet by the end of December, after facing a difficult schedule with many road games against powerful conference opponents, Gonzaga had fallen out of the top 25. Upon winning the West Coast Conference tournament, they received another 10-seed in the Big Dance and again pushed past the tournament’s opening weekend into the Sweet 16. The following year, Gonzaga weathered the departure of several key players who had graduated and earned another spot in the tournament, this time as a 12-seed. Once more, they scored an opening-round upset, beat a fellow upstart The Cinderella Strategy 35
in the second round, and found themselves in the Sweet 16. With this third consecutive Cinderella run, Gonzaga laid the foundation for its transformation into a big-time program and created a blueprint that scores of other mid-major programs have since attempted to follow.23 Reflecting on the value of these three Sweet 16 appearances a decade later, two Gonzaga faculty members—Kenneth Anderson and Eddy Birrer—were the first to conceive of the Cinderella story as an institutional asset. In Gonzaga’s case, they dubbed it the “Sweet 16 Resource” and argued that it had been the principal source of Gonzaga’s sustained competitive advantage over other mid-major basketball programs for the subsequent two decades. By bottling lightning three years in a row, Gonzaga’s basketball program harnessed “an element worth preserving in much the same way a corporation would seek to protect and preserve a patent critical to its success. Effective management (e.g., decision-making) of that resource subsequently led to extensive media exposure for the university’s basketball program, enabling Gonzaga University as a whole to capture the attention of a greater number and broader range of potential students, athletes, and donors.”24 Several factors stand out in Gonzaga’s leveraging of this unique asset. First, the university has demonstrated an exceptional ability to retain its coaching staff and particularly Mark Few, who entered his 22nd year at the helm with the start of the 2020–21 season. Second, the athletic department quickly initiated fundraising for and construction of a $25-million basketball facility that, in concert with continued on-court success, has dramatically affected the caliber of player Gonzaga is able to recruit. Third, Gonzaga prioritized regional and national media exposure, particularly on ESPN. Lastly, the university’s top administrators gave the athletic department autonomy to take full advantage of the Sweet 16 Resource.25 Anderson and Birrer’s work, combined with that of journalists like Greg Bishop and Reid Forgrave, pulls the curtain on Gonzaga’s fairy tale to reveal a crucial reality: a set of actors and a sequence of decisions were in operation both before and after the on-stage success. As Forgrave put it, “these moments seem random and magical, but behind every unexpected story in college basketball are years of smart planning.”26 Forgrave, in fact, traced the 36 The Cinderella Strategy
“exact moment” when Gonzaga began to lay the groundwork for its rise to the summer of 1998.27 At that time, Gonzaga’s athletic director Mike Roth and several other key decision-makers rebranded the athletic program’s logo and colors, scheduled more high-profile opponents for the basketball team, and, most importantly, used a substantial portion of the department’s budget to purchase regional television coverage for the team. From there, Forgrave pinpoints two additional factors that have contributed to the uniqueness of Gonzaga’s transformation. The first—continuity in leadership positions—is familiar, though in addition to the coaching staff Forgrave does well to note that Roth has held the athletic directorship since 1997. The second is the university’s location in Spokane, Washington. Citing interviews with athletic department staff and former players, Forgrave posits that Gonzaga’s isolated, down-home setting has not only attracted a certain type of team-first recruit to the basketball team, but has also furnished the program with a fierce and generous booster community. Civic and alumni pride have mingled to elevate place over individual, with the men’s basketball team as the chief catalyst. Most significantly, all of these accounts indicate that Gonzaga’s NCAA Tournament success has been leveraged for the benefit of the entire university. Bishop spoke of the “ripple effect born of basketball,” and Forgrave cited the university’s parallel growth as “perhaps the biggest miracle of all.”28 Anderson and Birrer, as longtime members of the Gonzaga community, offered the most substantive treatment of this idea. They contended that a clear “link exists between the Sweet 16 Resource and the overall university’s competitive position,” and delineated the full package of benefits that emanates from this Mike Roth congratulates Mark Few after a win relationship, including gains in over Xavier. C OURTESY GONZAGA ATHLETICS The Cinderella Strategy 37
enrollment, exposure, fundraising, merchandising revenue, brand recognition, and prestige.29 Further, they argued that collaboration between university and athletics leadership enabled the men’s basketball program to “generate resources to strengthen the university’s mission, instead of the university being forced to prop the program.”30 The sustained success of Gonzaga’s basketball program over the ensuing years, including their long-awaited breakthrough into the Final Four in 2017, has only further bolstered this synergy. Gonzaga’s case points to four basic but essential features for understanding the Cinderella story as a resource. First, Gonzaga’s unusual postseason success constituted a distinct resource in need of careful management. Second, this success was a product of decisions stretched across campus and across significant periods of time; each of the aforementioned authors opening a window more than a decade wide in order to understand Gonzaga’s transformation. Third, the story is deeply contextual; as Forgrave argued, the Gonzaga blueprint was “specially fit for that place and for that moment in time.”31 Fourth, there is a glimmer of evidence that under the right circumstances Cinderella success in men’s basketball does indeed produce a halo effect across the entire institution. By diving into one additional and slightly more modern Cinderella story at a university on the other side of the country, one can get a sense for how this halo effect can be managed. George Mason’s Leverage Group Perhaps the glass slipper has fit no team more snugly than George Mason University during the 2006 NCAA Tournament. In the tournament’s opening two rounds, the 11-seed Patriots defeated two of college basketball’s bluebloods, Michigan State and North Carolina, to advance to the Sweet 16. The following weekend they beat Wichita State and Connecticut to earn a coveted spot in the Final Four, where they would lose to the eventual champion, Florida. To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of this surprise run, in 2016 The Washington Post ran an oral history of the event that led with this preface: “In March 2006, an unheralded team from an overlooked university known even to locals as a commuter school took the nation on a magic carpet ride.”32 The oral history, combined with other retrospectives and contemporary 38 The Cinderella Strategy
media coverage, revealed the frenzy that enveloped the team and the university during these weeks. Back on campus in between games, players received standing ovations in class and were swarmed by students who felt the team had changed the course of the university’s history in a single weekend. The athletic department received over 100 media requests in a single day, including one from CBS—the host network for all of March Madness—to follow the team for as long as it remained in the tournament. The day after the team defeated North Carolina, the university bookstore received 180 online orders for merchandise before noon, well more than the five or six orders its staff was accustomed to receiving each day. By the end of March, the bookstore had sold more than $800,000 in merchandise that month alone, $175,000 more than the entire previous academic year.33 As Alan Merten, George Mason’s then-president said later of the Cinderella story, “It completely took over the whole university.”34 Though Merten’s comment paints the university as a passive recipient of the hysteria, later on he revealed a coordinated attempt on behalf of his administration to seize control of the moment: “We had a group that got together every morning in March. It was called the Leverage Group. We were asking ourselves the question, how can we get attention from this for our academic programs and for the university? We had everybody working on it, every step of the way.”35 In the aftermath Robert Baker, Director of the Center for Sport Management at George Mason, assessed the results of this leveraging effort. In the two years following the basketball team’s Cinderella story, Baker found dramatic increases in web traffic, booster club funding, licensing revenue, admissions inquiries and applications, GPAs and SAT scores of the incoming class, alumni activity, and school spirit. He estimated the value of the university’s total media exposure to be a staggering $677,474,659. Baker downplayed the idea that this litany of benefits sprang solely from the Final Four appearance, arguing instead that the basketball team’s success “shed light” on a transformation that was already underway at the university, accelerating the process “like a surge of adrenaline.”36 This acceleration has had lasting effects. Three years after the Final Four run, President Merten continued to refer to it as “the gift that keeps The Cinderella Strategy 39
on giving”; ten years later, he dubbed it “one of the highlights of my life.”37 The moment is now firmly embedded in George Mason’s institutional narrative: it is one of seventeen “defining events” in the university’s history highlighted on its public website, and it receives extensive coverage in an online account of Mason’s history developed by the University Libraries.38 Whether told by nostalgic sportswriters or university officials, George Mason’s Cinderella story has the feel of catching lightning in a bottle. And perhaps that is not too far from the truth. From a sporting perspective, George Mason was one of the last teams to be selected for the tournament field. By the luck of the draw, they played their third and fourth round games in Washington, DC, just fifteen miles from the university’s main campus in Fairfax, Virginia, giving them de facto home games. And, of course, they had to win four straight basketball games, the last of which was a two-point overtime victory over the second-ranked team in the country. From a managerial perspective, the timing was equally fortuitous. President Merten suggested that, had the Final Four run happened either earlier or later in the university’s history, it would not have had the same wholesale effect on the institution’s transformation.39 Along these lines, Baker attributed the successful leveraging of the moment to the ability of the university’s leadership team at the time; the presence of a charismatic coach in Jim Larrañaga, who ran a respectable program and was a strong institutional citizen; and, the team’s senior class, all of whom graduated and reflected well upon the student body.40 After his analysis of the economic and cultural aspects of the Final Four run, Baker concluded that, “if properly managed, this type of athletic success can translate into much more for an institution.”41 Yet, given all of the moving parts in Mason’s equation for success, two questions follow: What does it mean to “properly manage” this moment? And how “much more” can athletic success produce for an institution? To find the answers, there is no better Cinderella story to explore than the one that took root in basketball heartland, at a small, relatively unknown university in Indiana.
40 The Cinderella Strategy
2
CHAPTER
How Big-Time Athletics Came to Butler University
I
n the fall of 1928, Butler University was on the move. Founded in 1855 as North Western Christian University at Thirteenth Street and College Avenue, the small Indianapolis college relocated its campus in 1875 (to Irvington), changed its name in 1877 (to Butler University), and by 1923 was readying itself for yet another transition. North of the city, Fairview Park had been developed decades earlier as the final stop on the city’s first electric trolley line. To attract visitors, the streetcar company leveraged its power grid to outfit the sprawling grounds with popular forms of entertainment, from a merrygo-round to motion pictures.1 The trolley buzz, however, soon faded, and the timing seemed good for Butler. Having outgrown its Irvington location, the The Cinderella Strategy 41
Butler’s campus at Fairview Park, with Jordan Hall in the foreground and Butler Fieldhouse in the background, circa 1927–1941. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
university pounced on the open space in Fairview. By the spring of 1928, two buildings stood at Fairview Park. The first was Jordan Hall, a massive granite structure with “walls three feet thick, wide corridors, high ceilings, and four broad staircases [that] provided airy spaciousness.”2 Construction had been delayed on the building while one of its architects and two of the university’s board members toured Europe, seeking inspiration from its hallowed seats of higher learning. The final design, approved by consulting architects from New York City, called for three Gothic-style buildings connected at the joints by two towers to provide one hulking showpiece for the “new Butler” that the university’s power brokers had envisioned more than a decade earlier. Practically speaking, the scale was necessary, too: the building was to house nearly all operations for a university with an enrollment of 1,864 students. When the dust settled that year, Jordan Hall had cost the university $917,000. 42 The Cinderella Strategy
The second structure on the new campus was an architectural marvel as well. Set a few thousand feet over the eastern shoulder of Jordan Hall, its stature rivaled that of Butler’s central academic building, though its feel was far more homespun. Its design traded granite for brick, Gothic influence for agrarian. From the fields of Fairview, architect Fermor Spencer Cannon raised an outsized barn. Simple yet sturdy, vast yet warm, its beauty was evident from the outset. At the building’s opening earlier that year, a member of Butler’s board and one of the original forty-one incorporators of the structure proclaimed it “the last word in convenience and utility of construction. In fact, we are told that there is in this country no similar building of as large a capacity or superior construction.”3 He spoke to a crowd of 12,000, some 10,000 more than the university’s student body but still a few thousand shy of the number the barn could hold. The occasion? Notre Dame was in town to christen the new fieldhouse with a basketball game against Butler, several months before the school was to open academic operations on its new campus. With an adjoining 36,000-seat football stadium, the fieldhouse had cost around $1 million to complete. For more than a decade, Jordan Hall and Butler Fieldhouse were the only permanent structures at Fairview Park. The rest of the 240-acre campus lay untouched between them, a tangle of trees, field, and muddy unpaved road. Yet, the empty space provided ample room for Butler’s leadership to imagine the institution that might take shape in the shadow of these two monuments. For Butler historian George “Mac” Waller, writing on the occasion of the university’s sesquicentennial more than 70 years later, the interplay of the academic building, the athletic plant, and the untapped campus between them proved an enduring image and a turning point in the university’s history: “Spacious grounds, a handsome main building, and a spectacular athletic facility nourished the vision of a greater university that would claim a place in American higher education.”4 Almost immediately, though, there were problems with this foundation. Three years into life at Fairview, Jordan Hall was falling apart from head to toe: beams in its bell tower had splintered, the roof leaked, mortar crumbled, the boilers failed, and the basement flooded with every storm. One board member, The Cinderella Strategy 43
an architect himself, proved prescient in a suspicion nursed during the building’s construction: “The ground on which Jordan Hall was rising,” he contended, “was unstable.”5 The same could have been said for the university itself. The Rise and Fall of Big-Time Athletics at Butler From the outset, bad luck was sown into Butler’s story. Major institutional decisions wilted in the heat of larger political and economic developments across the country. The school opened as the country hurtled into the Civil War, moved its campus to Irvington amid the Panic of 1873, and opened operations at Fairview Park right on the cusp of the Great Depression. However, one particular misfortune—the university’s loss of accreditation soon after the move to Fairview—was entirely its own doing and stemmed directly from its pursuit of athletic prominence. In retrospect though, the story carries with it one key lesson: luck can change over time. Butler followed a blueprint similar to that of many other universities across the country in the construction of its athletic program. Loosely organized club teams in football and baseball appeared soon after the university’s move to its second campus in Irvington in 1875. Swiftly, football moved to the fore: Butler tussled sporadically with other schools in the early 1880s before joining a league with five other colleges and universities from the state in 1886. Yale graduates trickled into Indianapolis to train the team, players petitioned the board for equipment on account of the prominence they were bringing the institution, alumni began to jockey for control of the entire athletic operation, and a donor funded the construction of a 2,300-seat football venue that opened in 1905 and gave the program an instant advantage over its in-state rivals. To the board of directors, which was long “dominant in the management of the university,” all of these measures seemed suddenly necessary if Butler were simply “to be a ‘standard college.’”6 World War I checked the growth only momentarily, and “after the war, Butler set its course for big-time intercollegiate competition” in earnest.7 Consistent with the times, the attention and resources given to football represented an early attempt on the directors’ behalf to leverage the sport’s popular appeal. On the heels of the war, the board sensed the institution faced 44 The Cinderella Strategy
a pivotal moment in its history: enrollment was surging, Indianapolis was on the rise, and, with the right decisions, Butler was positioned to ride both waves. As Waller suggested, the use of football to service this ambition was a straightforward decision: “A ‘new’ Butler had been under discussion since 1914. The small college at Irvington was to become a real university on a new campus to serve the capital city’s needs for a major institution of higher education. The directors felt compelled to transform its athletic program accordingly. The public wanted big-time athletics.”8 Expansion moved rapidly: the university hired Pat Page, a disciple of the famed Amos Alonzo Stagg at the University of Chicago, as athletic director and multisport coach, and paid him more than the university’s president right out of the gate; seating at the football field was expanded four-fold and still could not accommodate crowds for football games against Butler’s biggest rivals; fueled by student initiatives, the university popularized its blue and white color scheme, bulldog mascot, and “Butler War Song”; and the board of directors apportioned more than 25 percent of an annual $35,000 emergency fund to bolster the athletic program and simultaneously ceded control of the department to a standing committee of twenty-five alumni boosters. Faculty and administration pushed back on the expansion, and for a time Butler wobbled. Page’s salary was wrenched into line with that of senior faculty members at the institution. As football began to turn a profit and the athletic program was able to pay back loans from the university’s endowment, Page sought to capture an additional portion of the profits for equipment needs and requested an increase to the athletic program’s annual subsidy; the directors, however, responded by tightening control on spending practices and checking the program’s budget. Page resigned in 1926, and the next year proved fateful as the university pivoted again and renewed its chase for big-time athletics. In 1927, the directors made three key decisions that dramatically altered the shape of athletics at Butler in the short-term, though the effects would reverberate for generations to come. First, they hired George “Potsy” Clark as athletic director and coach for both the football and baseball teams. Clark was a bit of a rough character, and evidence points to his penchant for skirting the university’s standards for admission and brokering payments for players from The Cinderella Strategy 45
boosters. With Potsy Clark’s hire, salaries for Butler’s top athletic personnel again zipped past those of the president and senior faculty. Second, the directors incorporated a School of Physical Education and Athletics that existed outside of the purview of any faculty or administrators but nevertheless governed all facets of the athletic program as well as the physical education curriculum. Third, and most significantly, the university broke ground on the fieldhouse at Fairview Park. On the surface, this last decision appeared outrageous: the basketball facility was to rival Madison Square Garden in size, yet rather than a bustling metropolis, the building site was the unformed campus of a university so small its entire community would fill only 10 percent of the arena. However, a look inside the fieldhouse decision reveals much about the board’s desire to curry favor in the state of Indiana, their reliance upon basketball to do so, and the amount of risk they were willing to assume in service to this aspiration. By 1927, Indiana’s love affair with the sport of basketball was decades deep, and the most precious possession in the relationship—shared by all towns, tiny or teeming, across the state and handed down from generation to generation— was the state high school basketball tournament. Herbert “Herb” Schwomeyer, the tournament’s native chronicler, described the cultural phenomenon of Hoosier Hysteria as a “basketball frenzy which sets in at the beginning of each season, and reaches its peak with the crowning of another State High School champion.”9 After its inauguration in 1911, the tournament bounced between four different sites, but in 1927 the Indiana High School Athletic Association (IHSAA) proposed a deal that could anchor both the tournament and Butler on the state’s landscape.10 Waller recounted the specifics: “If a 13,000-seat fieldhouse and stadium were built, the IHSAA would pay $40,000 for a tenyear lease plus $6,000 annually from April 1928 to April 1933, renewable for ten more years and thereafter for five-year periods, with successive rents capped at $10,000 annually. The association would require use of the fieldhouse four days in March each year for the state boys’ basketball tournament and use of the stadium two days each fall for the state football contests…The university was to receive all profits from concessions and would be protected from liability. Heat, light, dressing rooms, and janitorial expenses would be borne by 46 The Cinderella Strategy
the university. Since this offer was contingent on availability of the fieldhouse by March 1928, the board acted promptly to accept it and start building.”11 The deal carried plenty of risk, especially for a university chronically strapped for cash, but basketball was and still is a language of the heart in Indiana: in building the fieldhouse, Butler was courting the entire state. Deal in hand, the directors raced forward. In April, they approved the creation of a separate athletic corporation, consisting of forty-one board members and alumni, to finance the construction project. In October, they parceled forty acres at Fairview Park to the new School of Physical Education and Athletics for the facilities. On March 7, 1928—months before the rest of the university would complete its move across town from Irvington—Butler’s basketball team opened the new venue with a victory over Notre Dame. President Robert Aley canceled classes the following day, prompting some students to hoist him on their shoulders in celebration, while others led cheers for the basketball team and professors joined in from the windows of their classrooms.12
Packed parking outside Butler Fieldhouse, circa 1928–1935. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
Barely a week later, the high school state tournament took center stage. The fieldhouse crawled with people; outside the venue tickets resold for as The Cinderella Strategy 47
much as $25—the equivalent of around $360 in today’s dollars—for a chance to see Muncie Central defeat John Wooden, playing in his final game for Martinsville, on a last-minute basket.13 Here, within a span of just ten days, was surely the mass euphoria upon which Butler’s directors hoped to capitalize in the years ahead. Almost just as quickly, however, the fieldhouse attracted a different kind of attention. In April 1930, the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools suspended Butler’s accreditation, and the university’s athletic program received the brunt of the accrediting agency’s criticism. Three years prior, North Central and the Carnegie Foundation had released a set of guidelines regarding the institutional governance of intercollegiate athletics; Butler was in violation of every directive. Though numerous other institutions in the region were similarly culpable, the “grandiose scheme for athletic prominence” that the directors had begun to implement in 1927 “had made the university an obvious scapegoat.”14 Under Potsy Clark, exorbitant coaching salaries, lax admission and academic eligibility standards, illegal recruitment of and benefits for athletes, and lavish road trips proliferated through the athletic program. However, the feature that “set Butler’s transgressions apart from abuses of other institutions” was the establishment of an autonomous athletic corporation.15 The implications for governance were clear: the president and faculty had no control over any aspect of athletics. A single faculty member oversaw athletes’ eligibility and all other decisions—appointment of coaches, scheduling, financial aid—rested either with the board of directors or the corporation. Worse still were the financial implications of the arrangement. The corporation had assumed significant debt to build an athletic facility that could swallow the university whole. Of the million-dollar investment, some $750,000 remained outstanding, and rather than generating revenue to pay off the loans, the athletic department was now running a deficit each year. As Waller made clear, this situation was the “principal issue” for Butler’s accreditors: “In North Central’s view, Butler had incurred a moral obligation to make good on the athletic corporation’s indebtedness if income failed to meet expectations. Directors had mortgaged the university’s meager endowment that was dedicated to education. If the athletic corporation defaulted, endowment would 48 The Cinderella Strategy
be depleted.”16 The fieldhouse had become a lightning rod—both the symbol and substance of college athletics grown out of scale—and for a time, its glow cast a shadow over the entire university. Reclaiming Athletics As they had with the deal to construct the fieldhouse, the board of directors again moved quickly. Policy was easiest to rectify: within months, faculty and administration had resumed oversight of athletics. Coaching salaries were brought into line with the faculty scale, and a faculty committee was appointed to manage matters of eligibility. In turn, Potsy Clark soon left for greener pastures. Various arms of the university sought to manage Butler’s image in the press and with the general public, while the directors attempted to assuage faculty concerns that rumors and misunderstandings of North Central’s action were percolating through the student body and prospective students. And quietly, without many of the other directors’ knowledge, board president Hilton U. Brown forged an agreement with a donor to create a trust that would cover the debt on the fieldhouse and the stadium if the athletic corporation defaulted. By March 1931, the accreditors judged the retrenchments sufficient and renewed the university’s accreditation. The university still labored to find its balance in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. In 1932, new president Walter Athearn was inaugurated in the fieldhouse but saw none of its charm, labeling the building both a “dead horse” and a “veritable millstone about the neck of Butler University.”17 Later that year, Athearn was forced to consider putting more money into the dead horse on account of its leaky roof, the need for a new basketball floor, and another proposal from the IHSAA, this time to share the cost of installing new bleachers. Around this same time, a former Butler athlete who had gained entry to the university with a falsified transcript and then departed after eligibility requirements were tightened published a fictional, though thinly veiled account of the athletic program’s indiscretions entitled Star’s Road. Additionally, DePauw University continued to refuse to play Butler in any sport, a boycott that began in 1930 with the discovery that one of Butler’s basketball players had previously played professional baseball. Thus, while the policy changes and coverage of The Cinderella Strategy 49
the athletic corporation’s debt helped reverse course, a more stable influence was necessary over the long-term. In this regard, Butler at last found a stroke of good fortune: through all the tumult, perhaps the most important asset in the athletic program’s recovery had been there all along. Paul “Tony” Hinkle had played for Pat Page at the University of Chicago and joined him in the coaching ranks at Butler in 1921. He coached basketball, football, and baseball throughout his time at the university, and from 1934 until his retirement in 1970, he served as the head coach for all three sports as well as Butler’s athletic director. Howard Caldwell’s meticulously researched biography demonstrates how Hinkle crafted the blueprint for a new kind of athletic program with basketball at its core. In many ways, he operated counter to the prevailing practices in big-time athletics that had begun to proliferate at Butler under his former boss Potsy Clark. Most important was Hinkle’s loyalty to the institution and its mission: “He was proud of the university’s academic reputation, a reputation Coach Tony Hinkle. COURTESY SALLY WIRTHWEIN that carried over into a strict interpretation of the rules as they pertained to athletes.”18 Hinkle had little taste for recruiting, eschewing fluffy sales pitches in favor of a “factual rundown” of the university and relying mostly on the “fieldhouse mystique” to bring players through the doors.19 Toward the end of his tenure, when the university began to offer athletic scholarships, his grand gesture for doing so was apparently to ask a recruit his shoe size and then tell him that Butler did indeed have that size in stock.20 The offer of footwear speaks to Hinkle’s willingness as athletic director to run his department on a shoestring budget: contrary to lavish 50 The Cinderella Strategy
athletic spending at other universities, he was famously reluctant to cough up any money at all, whether his or the university’s.21 Amid these constraints, Butler still had one more chip in its favor—the fieldhouse. Despite its inauspicious beginning, the building soon became an unrivaled asset, with Hinkle leveraging it to establish a basketball program of local and occasionally national renown. Big-time programs wanted to play in the facility, allowing Hinkle to schedule prominent opponents throughout the entirety of his coaching tenure. The IHSAA state tournament brought a stream of the state’s best players into Hinkle’s backyard year after year, meaning his rosters were often stocked with native Hoosiers and local heroes. Hinkle took “the best of what was left after the big schools carved the pie” and drilled them in a relentless system of play built upon fundamentals, well-defined roles, and constant ball movement.22 (It should be noted that when the ball moved, it was easier to see on account of its orange color, one of Tony Hinkle’s most lasting and ubiquitous contributions to the sport.) The formula worked. In 1928–29, the first full season in the new fieldhouse and Hinkle’s third as head coach, the team was recognized as national champions by the Veterans Athletic Association of Philadelphia. He won 100 of his first 126 games as head coach and posted winning seasons in thirteen of his first sixteen years before being called away from the university for military service during World War II.23 By that time, the foundation for the right kind of athletic success was firmly in place. The war transformed the campus at Fairview Park. The fieldhouse morphed from basketball arena to barracks, its hardwood floor taken up and stored, appropriately, in a barn.24 The navy first inhabited the space, the army soon followed, and for a two-month span more than 1,000 cadets from both arms of the military actually lived and trained in the facility together. Enrollment at the university dropped from 1,730 students at the start of the war to 1,088 in 1944 as Butler students joined the armed services, but faculty kept busy teaching physics, geography, history, English, and math to the cadets on campus. When Tony Hinkle returned at the end of 1945, the university stood on perhaps the most solid ground in its history. Funds from the military programs had enabled Butler to finally pay off the fieldhouse, and president M. O. Ross, The Cinderella Strategy 51
who had taken the reins in 1942, managed to balance the annual budget for the first time in 90 years. That January, enrollment soared to 2,216 on the strength of the G. I. Bill, allowing the university to add faculty as well. Ross kept the university on a “slow but steady course” while Hinkle tended to the athletic program, leading the basketball team to its first NCAA Tournament in 1962, where it upset Bowling Green to advance to the Sweet 16 in the twenty-five-team field.25 When Ross retired in 1962, the campus that comprised only three buildings at the beginning of his administration had come to include two residence halls, a student center, a theater, an observatory, and buildings for both the College of Pharmacy and the College of Religion. Hinkle coached his final basketball game in 1970 before a reported crowd of 17,000 in the fieldhouse that had been renamed in his honor four years prior. It was the end of an era, or two really, as only a couple of years later the IHSAA state championship vacated the fieldhouse for good as well. Though Hinkle remained at the university for another twenty years as a special assistant to the president, and though he maintained an office in the fieldhouse, there is strong suspicion that he had been forced to retire from his coaching duties as the university and the athletic program shifted gears under president Alexander Jones. During Jones’s time in office from 1962 to 1976, Butler “lost momentum” as both the board’s leadership and the president “sought no innovative measures to move the university forward and embrace larger visions or ambitious new goals.”26 Enrollment lagged. The endowment, a persistent weakness for the university, remained paltry and grew even more so when the administration began to draw from the fund in the latter years of Jones’s term to meet an annual budget that had more than doubled. Hinkle Fieldhouse fell into disrepair as the athletic program, operating with a meager budget, ran up deficits and losing seasons. The campus at Fairview Park, once buzzing with the growth of a new Butler, fell dormant again. Why History Matters at Butler Dr. Susan Neville is the Demia Butler Chair of English Literature at Butler. Neville arrived at Butler in 1983 and twelve years later assumed the 52 The Cinderella Strategy
chair, a post laden with historical significance. The Demia Butler Chair was established in 1869 by the university’s founder, abolitionist Ovid Butler, in memory of his daughter, who seven years earlier was the first woman to graduate from the university’s four-year curriculum; the post itself was the first endowed chair in the United States that was designated for a female faculty member, and when Catharine Merrill assumed it that year, she became only the second female to hold a full-time professorship in the country. The chair’s lineage is undoubtedly one reason why its current occupant is so attuned to the historical undercurrents of the university. When Butler’s basketball team made its surprise run to the Final Four in 2010, Neville suddenly found herself with a book deal from Indiana University Press and a short window in which to place the madness that had just descended upon her campus into page and context. In a slim paperback entitled Butler’s Big Dance, she meditated on how a sudden burst of basketball success summoned the university’s faded past: “Our connection to the tradition or history is what we lost for a while … It was as though a fog we’d been laboring under was somehow lifted and some true experience was revealed, revealing in turn the text and the tradition, revivifying all of it.”27 When asked about this particular passage years later, Neville doubled down on the idea: “It’s like the end of a story. You see the end of a story. It’s prefigured all the way through, and it could be a lot of different endings or a lot of different climaxes. It doesn’t mean it’s the end of the whole story, because there will be other stories, but you know you can go back through everything, find a thread, and pull it through.” Butler’s history is a dynamic force in the present day. Though the strong consensus is that the story of how the university prepared for and then leveraged its Final Four runs began in earnest in 1989, the threads can be traced back even further. The primary actors did not start from scratch; instead, they were able to tug on a rich past and then weave it across the contours of the present. For that reason, a full understanding of Butler’s cultivation of the Cinderella story as a resource requires an awareness of four distinct but interwoven threads from the university’s first forty years at Fairview Park. First, the suspension of accreditation marked a distinct point of divergence The Cinderella Strategy 53
in the university’s pursuit of big-time athletics. It is unclear how lasting a scar it left on the institutional memory; likewise, it is difficult to know what direct influence, if any, it had on the way that Tony Hinkle ran the athletic program or that Hilton U. Brown, who served as board president from 1903 to 1955, managed the directors in subsequent years. Howard Caldwell, Hinkle’s biographer, asserted that the “actual effect of the suspension was minimal.”28 Yet, its immediate impact on the relationship between the university and its athletic program, between Jordan Hall and Butler Fieldhouse, was plain. The distance between the two poles of the new campus at Fairview Park was widening until the suspension checked the breakneck expansion of athletics, forced the program back into line with the central mission and governance of the institution, and chased Potsy Clark out of town. Second, the combination of the suspension and Clark’s controversial tenure seems to have accelerated a critical shift in focus that began in the early 1920s: basketball, and not football, would be the university’s flagship sport. It was not so in the early years. At the Irvington campus, the football team played on one of the state’s premier fields while the basketball team held court in a gym so small that there was not a single seat for spectators; in fact, the university actually had to cancel the 1913–14 basketball season because no other teams were willing to play in the facility.29 The basketball team eventually inherited a building the government had constructed for an officer training program during World War I, and by 1919 seating could nearly accommodate a student body numbering around 600; by contrast, around the same time seating was expanded at the football stadium from 2,500 to 10,000 and still overflowed during the team’s biggest games. In the 1920s, Pat Page’s coaching, the basketball team’s success, and the fast-growing popularity of basketball in the state brought the sport even with football at Butler.30 When the university moved to Fairview Park, plans for the Butler Bowl, which adjoined the mammoth fieldhouse, called for an equally imposing 72,000-seat stadium. However, the bowl’s capacity never reached more than its original 36,000 seats and was reduced to 20,000 in 1955 to make room for, of all things, an outdoor theater that housed off-Broadway musicals. The de-emphasis of football in the wake of Potsy Clark’s departure created 54 The Cinderella Strategy
enough space for basketball, with all its native advantages, to cement its status as the university’s most popular sport.31 Third, despite its shaky financing and leading role in the accreditation episode, Butler Fieldhouse provided the university with an unparalleled asset. As the locus of Hoosier Hysteria, the fieldhouse annually attracted the eyes and admiration of the entire state. Its enchantments also profoundly shaped the type of basketball program that the university was able to field, drawing undersized yet talented locals who were unafraid of the big stage and the big-time op- Oscar Robertson of Crispus Attucks shoots a jumper during ponents that paraded the 1955 state high school title game at Butler Fieldhouse. through the building COURTESY THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR year after year. As such, the fieldhouse gave Butler a direct claim on the affections and a prominent place in the memories of generation after generation of Indiana natives. Beyond basketball, the facility proved a unique leverage point for the university, foreshadowing how basketball could open doors to other opportunities. In the three decades following its completion, the fieldhouse welcomed two US presidents: President Herbert Hoover drew a crowd of more than 22,000 to the fieldhouse for a campaign speech in October 1932, just eleven days before he ran for reelection against Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and President Dwight Eisenhower followed in 1954 to address the National Institute of Animal Agriculture. The barn proved versatile as well. In the 1930s alone, an indoor track meet called the Butler Relays drew sizable crowds, turned a profit The Cinderella Strategy 55
in each of its ten iterations and saw Jesse Owens tie a world record in the 60yard dash in the 1935 event; 125 pianos and 825 pianists sprawled across the floor for the world’s largest piano recital; and a six-day marathon bicycle race attracted around 30,000 people to campus. After the fieldhouse played its part in World War II, in 1954 it served as the stage for the apotheosis of the Cinderella story when tiny Milan High School won the IHSAA state tournament on a last-second shot by Bobby Plump. Butler further staked its claim to the story when Plump spurned Indiana University to play basketball for Butler and, later, when Hoosiers—the film that immortalized the Milan Miracle with its release in 1986—shot its climactic scenes at Hinkle Fieldhouse.32 In these early years, the fieldhouse demonstrated a magnetic capacity to capture the general populace and, in the process, to stockpile historical events that could in themselves become assets over time. Finally, throughout his lengthy tenure as athletic director and head coach, Tony Hinkle played a vital role in nurturing a culture within the athletic department that echoed the ethos of the university as a whole. He was beloved almost from the start, with board president Hilton U. Brown observing ten years into Hinkle’s tenure at Butler that the young coach was already “the idol of the school.”33 Reflecting on his old coach’s personal magnetism, Plump recalled “I had a lot of big offers coming out of Milan High School. I chose Butler because Coach Hinkle and the administration showed interest in me as a player and a person.” Indeed, Tony Hinkle’s cultural sway seems by every account to have arisen organically: he was simply himself—modest, loyal, diligent, selfless—day after day after day, and over time his steady integrity permeated the fabric of the institution. His passion for place and university flooded everyday images: he lived two blocks from the fieldhouse, worked concessions at the facility in the offseason, raked the dirt and tended the grass at the baseball field, weeded the ground around the fieldhouse, and perhaps most tellingly, wept when Wabash students burnt a “W” in the football field on the eve of a rivalry game.34 Of course, it also bears noting that Hinkle quickly developed into a brilliant coach, particularly in the sport of basketball—it is difficult to imagine any lasting cultural effect without a corresponding talent for the job. Yet, the concrete 56 The Cinderella Strategy
Bobby Plump (25) and Milan High in the Fieldhouse, 1954. COURTESY MILAN ’54 HOOSIERS MUSEUM
results borne out in win-loss records enabled Hinkle to shape the university in a far broader, more difficult-to-measure fashion. As Susan Neville asked years after his passing, “Why did we all love Tony Hinkle so much? He had a commitment to the university and the university had a commitment to him. What do we retain from him, perhaps unconsciously … Was it transmitted directly or is it woven into the fabric of the institution in some invisible way?”35 By the late 1980s, these four historical threads—a chastened resolve to build an athletic program in service to the institution, a commitment to basketball as the flagship sport, a singular facility with an almost spiritual hold on the community, and an exemplary cultural influence—were frayed and fading, but far from gone. With the right vision, and a willingness to invest in their restoration, they could be pulled forward once more.
The Cinderella Strategy 57
3
CHAPTER
How Butler Built a Flagship Program
I
n order to even begin positioning itself for a Cinderella story, the men’s basketball program at Butler required fixing. The starting point for the dramatic turnaround in the men’s basketball program at Butler is unequivocal: 1989, when Geoffrey Bannister assumed the presidency and tabbed Barry Collier as head coach. When Bannister formally took office on January 1, 1989, he inherited a bundle of issues identified during the administration of his predecessor, John Johnson. A trustee review of the first three years of Johnson’s presidency, issued in 1981, asserted that “the athletic program appeared lacking in viability. Its staff required ‘restructuring.’ Public relations was weak and unimaginative. It was failing to project an image of Butler’s real worth as 58 The Cinderella Strategy
Barry Collier (left) and Tony Hinkle outside the Fieldhouse in 1989. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
a high-quality institution.”1 Three years later, the Nelson Report, essentially a feasibility study for an upcoming capital campaign, again highlighted the university’s relative obscurity as a concern: “Butler had an image problem. Beyond the immediate area it was known only for its pharmacy college and its dance program. Those and other educational assets were as good as the best in the state, but even many city people whose support would be sought remained without a clear perception of the university or its potential as a vital resource.”2 Contemporaries recall Geoff Bannister as “quirky but visionary,” “a very bright guy,” and a native of New Zealand, “so he didn’t really know basketball.” He was also a geographer. As Susan Neville suggested, this disciplinary perspective helped provide a keen understanding of the relationship between people and place, suggesting an equation to solve Butler’s image problem: “Here’s Indiana. Indiana prides itself on basketball teams, and we want the university to grow. What we need to do is put money and excitement into the basketball team.” In the recollection of Dr. Joseph Kirsch, a chemistry professor at Butler since 1970, there was one additional piece to the formula: the Fieldhouse. “I think Geoff Bannister basically said something to the effect of, ‘You know if we had The Cinderella Strategy 59
Figure 1: Butler Men’s Basketball—Success Over Time
40
Win Totals
30
20
10
1989–90 1990–91 1991–92 1992–93 1993–94 1994–95 1995–96 1996–97 1997–98 1998–99 1999–00 2000–01 2001–02 2002–03 2003–04 2004–05 2005–06 2006–07 2007–08 2008–09 2009–10 2010–11 2011–12 2012–13 2013–14 2014–15 2015–16 2016–17 2017–18 2018–19 2019–20*
0
NCAA Tournament Round
Win Totals
a little tiny gymnasium, I’d probably just say we’re doing fine. Let’s move on,’” Kirsch recalled. Instead, “Geoff Bannister said something to the effect of, ‘Good God. We’ve got this building that seats 12,000 people. We need to utilize that.’” Like so many other presidents at prestige-seeking institutions across the country, Bannister saw that a gamble on big-time athletics could net a large enough return to address multiple shortfalls at the university; the difference was that, with the university’s location in Indiana, the fieldhouse, and Tony Hinkle’s legacy, Butler possessed a competitive advantage over many others in the field. From the outset of Bannister’s presidency, men’s basketball “was more or less declared the flagship sport,” according to Barry Collier, the man Bannister hired to lead the program. Even so, the university faced an uphill battle. As Dr. Bruce Bigelow, who joined the Butler faculty in 1980, recalled, when Bannister shared his vision for the men’s basketball program, “a lot of people just laughed.” The central question, if Butler would ever be able to reap dividends from this investment, became how to rebuild and then sustain a program that, at the time, was more flagging than flagship. Win-loss records and postseason performance generally provide a fair 60 The Cinderella Strategy
barometer of an athletic program’s stature over time, and a look at Butler’s from 1989 into the present day provides an overview of the program’s development. Figure 1 provides the broad strokes of a narrative: building the program in the early 1990s, breaking into the postseason in the mid-to-late ’90s and early 2000s, declining briefly, and then, with a Sweet 16 appearance in 2006–07, surging into a period of unprecedented and fairly well-sustained success, punctuated by back-to-back appearances in the national championship game in 2009–10 and 2010–11. To drive this turnaround, Butler made consistent efforts in four distinct areas: winning basketball games, transforming the resource base in the athletic department, nailing hires in the key positions of athletic director and head coach, and nurturing a compelling organizational culture. Yet even as the picture is one of gradual growth from a wide lens, zeroing in on each of these four areas reveals a more jagged ascent. Winning Basketball Games David Woods, a longtime beat writer for The Indianapolis Star, has covered Butler basketball for many years. He published an ode to the history of Butler basketball in 2009 that details the program’s most memorable teams, players, coaches, and games. After Butler made its first Cinderella run to the national championship game, he published a second book entitled Underdawgs the following year—this time with a much more well-known press—that provided an inside look at the season. When the team promptly waltzed to the national championship game for a second consecutive season, he revised and expanded the second book in 2012 to capture the sudden surplus of magic. The accounts are well-researched and well-told, reanimating the on-court ebbs and flows of Butler basketball’s finest moments. The quality of Woods’s work makes it unnecessary to dwell too long on this dimension of Butler’s success. Yet, a brief account is important, for wins are the foundation in the construction of a flagship program, and without them the other pieces crumble in time. As previously noted, Butler built its road to the Final Four with steady gains over time. The team climbed the ranks within its conference, a regional collection of schools known as the Midwestern Collegiate Conference (MCC) before its renaming as the Horizon League in 2001. With a conference championship The Cinderella Strategy 61
win in 1997, Butler finally broke through to the NCAA Tournament; a few years and a few tournament berths later, Butler began to win some games in the postseason, crashing the Sweet 16 in 2003 and again in 2007, in the process earning a reputation as a plucky mid-major. From there, Butler appeared in the next four NCAA Tournaments, took up frequent residence in the AP Top 25 poll, notched multiple conference championships alongside a couple of 30-win seasons, and became the first team in the history of the tournament to reach consecutive Final Fours without being a 1- or 2-seed. Unlike many Cinderella stories, Butler has managed to sustain this success: in the nine years since its second Final Four in 2011, Butler’s overall record is 192-111 (.634), despite moving to more competitive conferences in the Atlantic 10 in 2012 and the Big East the following year. Over that same time period, Butler has earned five NCAA Tournament appearances and gone 6-5 in the Big Dance. However, the arc has not been without its wobbles, and often on the heels of the program’s biggest successes. As Collier remembered, the Sweet 16 in 2003 was a “particular attention grabber” for those around the program; yet, Butler followed it with records of 16-14 and 13-15 in the two subsequent seasons. Brad Stevens was an assistant coach at the time, under head coach Todd Lickliter. With hindsight, it is easy to view those years as only a blip in the larger trajectory, but Tracy Stevens, the current vice chair of Butler’s board of trustees and Brad’s wife, made clear their difficulty: “We had those tough years after the 2003 [Sweet 16]. We had a couple tough years. Those were really hard on Todd and Brad. They had a handful of kids leave. Those were some tough years.” Later on, a few years removed from the Final Four and competing in the Big East for the first time, the program hit another trough in 2013–14. Following Brad Stevens’s departure for the Boston Celtics, approximately 50 agents representing up to 75 coaches reached out to Barry Collier, who had returned to Butler as athletic director in 2006, regarding the opening.3 Stevens and his predecessors had turned the position into a hot ticket, but Collier stayed in-house, selecting former Bulldog and current assistant Brandon Miller to guide Butler into its inaugural season in the Big East. The results were bleak. The team finished with a 14-17 overall record, going 4-14 in conference play. Worse still, that fall Collier announced that Brandon Miller had taken a leave 62 The Cinderella Strategy
of absence for medical reasons. Miller did not return and the reasons for his departure were never revealed. Chris Holtmann, another internal appointment, stabilized the program again from 2015 to 2017. He was named Big East Coach of the Year in 2017 and was 70-31 over his three seasons at the helm, earning NCAA Tournament berths all three years and making a run to the Sweet 16 in 2017. When Ohio State poached Holtmann, Collier again moved swiftly and hired former player LaVall Jordan, the first Black head coach in any men’s sport at Butler. In his first year, Jordan went 21-14 and narrowly missed a Sweet 16 appearance before turning in a 16-17 record the following season. Butler bounced back to turn in a 22-9 mark in the abbreviated 2019–20 season, with only COVID-19 preventing them from making yet another NCAA Tournament appearance. The 2004–05, 2013–14, and 2018–19 campaigns stand as Butler’s only losing seasons in over the past 30 years, each representing a moment of adversity when the future was uncertain. Much as Tony Hinkle did in a different era, Butler navigated these downturns by staying the course. As Barry Collier reflected several years after Jordan’s hiring, “I’ve learned that you have to look deeper than just wins and losses because these things take time.”4 Even so, those inside the program have long maintained high expectations for their performance. Early in the 2002–03 season, Lickliter posted a goal for the team in the locker room: two years prior, they had finally won an NCAA Tournament game, so the next logical step for the program was to win two games and advance to the Sweet 16. Joel Cornette, a senior on the team, thought the goal looked a little off. As Tracy Stevens remembered, “Joel took a Sharpie, crossed it out, and wrote ‘national champions.’ He wasn’t looking for the next step. He was looking for the biggest step.” Collier himself echoed this mindset in Woods’s 2009 book: “There’s never been this grand design 20 years ago to arrive at this point, because we really don’t think we’ve arrived. We’re trying to get better than where we are now.”5 Coaches continued to recruit to Butler’s system, finding “those types of kids who had a chip on their shoulder, and played really, really hard.” They also took the long view, keeping their highs and lows in perspective. “There wasn’t that big of a difference between the level of teams we had in the early 2000s The Cinderella Strategy 63
and the Final Four teams,” Brad Stevens reflected. “The first team I coached on as an assistant [in 2000–01] was really good. The second team that went to the Final Four was not that much better, so I don’t think we really felt the difference between the teams so much.” College basketball is big business, and the skill level of the players combined with the seriousness with which teams, schools, media, and fans treat the games can obscure the fact that it is still, on some level, a bunch of kids trying to manipulate an inflated orange rubber ball. By staying the course, Butler positioned itself for on-court success over the long-term amid the sometimes unpredictable twists of the short-term. Stevens believes that, with talented players in place, it was “all of the intangible stuff ” that so often gave Butler an edge in two- and four-point games. From the outside, the commitment to recruiting a certain type of player, the consistent drilling in the intangibles, and the belief that mounts in pulling out so many tight victories can start to look like magic. As David Woods confessed, “Butler has made my other beats difficult. They make you believe that anything is possible when often it’s not. I can’t tell you how many times I’d be in the press area sketching a story as if they’d lost because I was on a tight deadline, and they’d end up winning.” Even so, the program did catch some lucky breaks over the years. Stevens pinpointed one Butler team that was better than those both before and after it: the first Final Four team in 2010. “Gordon was the difference,” he said, referring to Gordon Hayward. “He was a different level of player.” He was also a late bloomer and a local kid, and it is arguably those two factors that left any room at all for Butler in his recruitment; had his growth spurt hit just one year earlier, he likely would have been a blue chip prospect and on the radar of every program in the country.6 When Hayward left Butler early for the NBA, the team still managed to return to the Final Four in 2011, but to get out of the tournament’s opening weekend they had to win their first game on a buzzer-beater and their second in one of the craziest endings to a game in NCAA Tournament history. Games and seasons can turn on the slightest bounce. When the bounces landed in Butler’s favor, they were ready to capitalize; when luck broke the other way, they simply tried to get better the next day. It has proved a winning approach from the beginning. 64 The Cinderella Strategy
Resourcing Athletics On June 8, 1989, The Indianapolis Star ran a story on the front page of its sports section with the headline “Plan for Hinkle Fieldhouse will bring upgrade.” Next to these big bold letters was a large black-and-white photo, clearly staged. Toward the middle of the frame, a young tall man in a dark blazer, tie, and khakis holds a large sheet of paper in his right hand and gestures to its contents with his left. Beside him, on the photo’s edge, stands a much older and shorter man, hunched, balding, in suit and tie himself. He holds the other end of the paper with his left hand and follows his companion’s gesture. Both show little expression, their eyes angled sharply downward so as to look almost closed. The paper, partially unrolled like a scroll, is in the center of the frame, angled upward from aged hand to youthful one, its contents inscrutable. Behind the pair on the left side of the frame stretches an empty, splotched expanse of pavement, the parking lot for the massive building that rises over the first man’s shoulder and is, presumably, empty as well. The picture glows in retrospect: it’s Barry Collier, talking to Tony Hinkle, a blueprint for the future suspended between their hands! But the generic headline, the bare bones article, and the featureless image convey the dismal state of Butler basketball at the time. Yes, Barry Collier was returning to his alma mater as part of its “renewed commitment to men’s basketball”; yes, the $1.5 million renovation of the fieldhouse was a “major priority for the institution” and would be finished in time for the tipoff of the 1989–90 season; and yes, Butler still had Hinkle—both the man and the building—in its back pocket.7 But, at the time there was little reason to believe that these pieces would coalesce into a definitive turning point in the university’s history. Only a decade prior, the program was plagued by a crumbling resource base: Tony Hinkle’s successors at both the athletic director and head coaching positions lacked sufficient funding to compete at the most basic level. The basketball program lacked a recruiting budget, and the fieldhouse fell into disrepair. “Bill Sylvester would padlock the nets so no one could play during the summer,” John Dunn, a player at the time and later chairman of Butler’s board, said of the then-athletic director. “He didn’t want to have to replace the floor.” Barry Collier was Dunn’s teammate and is fond of recalling how The Cinderella Strategy 65
the locker room paint that was peeling when he played was still peeling when he returned as head coach 13 years later. In fact, when filmmakers arrived at the fieldhouse in 1985 to shoot the climactic scenes of Hoosiers, the “interior of the building required very little alteration to appear as it did in the 1950s” when Milan High School won the state tournament.8 In these shabby confines, the team piled up 14 losing seasons in the first 19 years after Hinkle’s retirement, routinely finishing at or near the bottom of the Midwestern Collegiate Conference standings. Attendance dwindled as well, running around 1,000 on average and rarely eclipsing 2,500. “When I first came to Butler in the early ’70s,” Joe Kirsch recalled, “the lower part of the fieldhouse would have people in it, and the upper part would be empty. The faculty would sit in the upper part, turn their kids loose, and they’d play around the outside,” oblivious to the Division I basketball game going on below. According to David Woods, of the 612 season ticket subscriptions for Collier’s first season as head coach in 1989–90, only fifteen were paid. Fifteen! The other 597 were on the house.9 Yet, Collier’s hire turned out to be momentous, and despite his modest deflection of this idea almost 30 years later, he made clear that Bannister’s initial investment was the first breath of life for a moribund program: “There was a coaching change. I actually was the one who was hired and given the resources, and I’m not sure that if they hadn’t just given the resources to the people they had at that time they would have been just as well off. We were at the bottom.” Collier pinpointed four types of resources as essential to success: facilities, financial aid, staffing, and operating expenses. Bannister promised and delivered in all four areas. The facelift at Hinkle was a “cosmetic but helpful” boost to the university’s central athletic facility. In terms of financial aid, Butler made three critical shifts by moving partial scholarships to full scholarships in men’s basketball, allowing athletes to live off campus, and funding summer classes for players. The university “fully staffed” the men’s basketball team with assistant coaches and an administrative assistant, and though the “pay wasn’t very good,” the positions were now in place. Finally, the “operating dollars picked up to allow more resources for recruiting, more resources for traveling, scheduling, 66 The Cinderella Strategy
equipment, pretty much A to Z.” Together, these changes represented a “pretty significant increase for Butler—it probably didn’t put us anywhere near on the same level as our competition, but it certainly closed the gap.” Within a couple of years, the university arrived at another critical decision point with regard to its resource base for athletics: changes in NCAA legislation forced Butler to revisit its commitment to football. In January 1991, the NCAA required all Division I schools to compete at the Division I level for all sports. Butler’s football team played in Division II at the time, leaving the university with three options: pull all other sports down to Division II, raise football to Division I, or drop football altogether. None were palatable. Dropping all other sports to Division II seemed unwise, especially given the university’s ambitions with men’s basketball. Likewise, dropping football was a nonstarter given its contribution to the enrollment picture and its significance to alumni. The remaining option, jumping to Division I football, would have required the university to triple the number of scholarships allotted to the sport and make corresponding adjustments to its offerings in women’s athletics to comply with Title IX. So, Butler banded together with several other like-minded institutions to devise a fourth option: the creation of the Pioneer Football League, a non-scholarship football league consisting of Division I institutions. The decision cemented a distinct split in Butler’s approach to college athletics’ two primary revenue-producing sports—football and men’s basketball—that began more than 50 years earlier in response to the accreditation sanctions. This solution, though further solidifying the athletic department’s resource base, did not appeal to everyone in the university community; “there were alumni that were very, very unhappy,” Kirsch recalled. Nevertheless, Butler’s resolution of “the football question” has proven a major asset over time. The philosophy remains the same today and differentiates the university from many of its peers in the big-time athletics arms race. Both Barry Collier and Bruce Arick, Butler’s longtime vice president of finance and administration, referenced conversations with peers at unnamed institutions who were envious of Butler’s position in not having to support a struggling, big-time college football program. Collier reflected in general terms on the difficulties that many institutions in the five major football conferences face: “The group of five are losing their rear ends The Cinderella Strategy 67
financially for the most part. There are big subsidies from the universities. We don’t really have any interest in that. All this is tied together with being a relatively small private university. You’d be silly to chase something like that without having the wherewithal financially to do it.” The de-escalation of football into the present day is apparent: the stadium, once envisioned to hold 72,000 fans, is a cozy 5,647-seat facility nestled between Hinkle Fieldhouse and a row of stately brick dorms. Yet, despite being a “friends and family sport,” the football program succeeds in the areas that matter most to the leadership in Butler’s athletic department: it provides a great student-athlete experience, wins games, serves as a credit to the university community, and remains fiscally responsible. With its priorities in men’s basketball and football clear, the foundation for growth was in place. Yet, even as the men’s basketball team ascended, the department’s ability to generate revenue remained grounded. By the summer of 2006, the resource base needed an overhaul, and once again Barry Collier returned to campus with a vision for the job, this time as athletic director. Collier had been the men’s basketball coach at the University of Nebraska since 2000. Earlier in his career, he had held posts at the University of Idaho, the University of Oregon, and Stanford University. Drawing from these different experiences, he identified a number of areas in which the athletic program at Butler lagged behind its competitors: “We weren’t doing the same things that other Division I schools were doing in terms of driving attendance, branding, fundraising, and sponsorships. We were kind of nipping around the edges a little bit.” With the budget set for 2006–07, any major economic changes had to wait for at least a year, leaving Collier with time to do some digging. He soon found that athletic revenues had been flat from 2001 to 2006, despite the men’s basketball team making a Sweet 16 appearance in 2003; central to this problem was the ticketing strategy for the university’s flagship sport. At the time, Hinkle Fieldhouse could seat 11,000. During the 2005–06 men’s basketball season, in which the team turned in a respectable 20-13 record, the athletic department sold around 22,000 total tickets for its 13 home games. For some games, fans could grab a general admission ticket for as low 68 The Cinderella Strategy
as four dollars. Even then, the reported attendance for those games indicated to Collier that a significant number of those in the stands were not paying anything at all. “Here’s one thing that I found—and people in the city in sports would tell me this, too—that if you couldn’t get a free ticket to a Butler game it’s because you were just brand-new in town, because all you had to do was call somebody.” In addition to the ease with which seemingly anyone could get into the building, one particular group occupied the arena’s prime real estate. “The entire east sideline was nothing but media seating,” Collier said. “We had zero courtside seating. Here’s the funny part about all this. I asked, ‘Well, who sits there?’” Hearing the answer, Collier asked a logical follow-up: “What media sit there because we’re not getting any coverage?” The solution was obvious. “Well, that’s all changing,” Collier recalled deciding. “We’re putting in courtside seating. We need revenue for God’s sake!” Ultimately Collier discovered that this antiquated approach to ticket sales for the flagship program was tied to a larger and more central problem: trying to do too much with too little. A look at data from exit interviews with senior student-athletes in previous years clued him in to a budding crisis. As part of the interviews, senior athletes were asked the classic “repeat customer” question: Would you return to Butler if you could go back to high school and choose again? For two years running, 50 percent of respondents said they would choose to go elsewhere. The evidence was damning. “If this were the case at any institution, or in any business,” Collier said “The alarm would go off. You would stop everything. We were messing up here somehow.” The alarm sounded particularly shrill in this case because the problem was isolated to athletics; the rest of the student body did not have the same reaction to their university experience, as data from the same “repeat customer” query to the student body at large demonstrated. Pressing further into the issue, Collier discovered a lack of resources at the root once more. “The reasons were our facilities are run down. We spend the night on Aunt Susie’s floor in Chicago when we go up to play soccer. We don’t get a pregame meal. I have to buy my own shoes. We were non-scholarship in football, and we didn’t pay for the shoes of the football team. So if you don’t mind playing barefoot, it’s a pretty good deal. Our two soccer programs were The Cinderella Strategy 69
paying $200 per person out of their own pockets for their competition fee. I asked, ‘What’s that?’ Well, that’s what we used to pay for their practice gear and their shoes. We didn’t even buy shoes. High schools don’t even do that. So no wonder.” Collier approached Butler’s president at the time, Bobby Fong, to inquire about additional funding, but the answer was firm: the university would not provide any more money for athletics. Exacerbating the situation, at the time a three-percent driver in the athletic budget was reducing the university’s contribution each year. Fong would allow the athletic department to reinvest any funds generated from ticket sales, but that stood as only a longer-term solution. The short-term required difficult decisions within athletics. In 2007, Collier made two critical yet unpopular adjustments. The first was a no-brainer—raising ticket prices for men’s basketball. The decision met some resistance within the university community: there was a certain quaintness to paying four dollars for admission to a Division I basketball game, and it kept Butler’s most tradition-laden sport accessible to faculty and other segments of the university. The second was “incredibly difficult” yet just as necessary given the dire need to reconfigure the department’s financial structure: in January of that year, Collier announced that Butler would drop men’s lacrosse and men’s swimming with the start of the next fiscal year, lowering the number of university sports from 21 to 19. The latter decision made gripes about the change in ticket prices seem like small peanuts. “When we dropped those two sports in ’07 in the middle of all this mess, I heard, ‘Somebody’s going to complain about the price of tickets,’” Collier recalled. He wasn’t having it. “That’s not going to register on the complaint list because of the kids that we looked in the eye and said, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong when you came here, but we’re dropping your program. You have to go away now.’ Can you imagine what that was like?” With the benefit of hindsight, however, it becomes clear that from this low point the athletic department positioned itself to pursue longer-term sustainability by driving revenue. Work on ticket sales and fundraising began immediately with the implementation of a priority points system for the 2007–08 basketball season. The system, still in place today, allows season ticket 70 The Cinderella Strategy
holders to accumulate points based on a set of eight scaled measures, such as their giving activity to both Butler Athletics and the university and their loyalty to the men’s basketball program as expressed through consecutive years as a season ticket holder. Boosters are then able to select the exact seat they would like within their season ticket zone based upon their point rank. With the system in place, the men’s basketball team played its part in driving ticket sales as well. They followed a second Sweet 16 berth in 2006–07 by posting a school record 30 wins the following season and scoring another victory in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. By the 2008–09 season, season ticket packages ranged from $249 for upper level adult seating to $389 for the lower level and $999 for the new courtside seating.10 Meanwhile, other fundraising efforts gained momentum. Sensing the budgetary pinch, a number of trustees quietly funneled their charitable gifts toward the athletic department. The department also began to realize payoffs from the university’s ButlerRising capital campaign, a six-year effort that raised more than $154 million for the institution by its completion in 2009. The locker rooms in Hinkle Fieldhouse for three women’s teams were upgraded and the baseball stadium received a significant overhaul, but the Butler Bowl was the main focus of the drive and with it “securing the place of football and soccer within the University’s future.”11 The Bowl received a new turf field and scoreboard, and ButlerRising funds combined with donations to the Bulldog Club, the athletic department’s booster organization, enabled a multi-million dollar renovation completed in 2010 that included the installation of bleachers salvaged from the RCA Dome, former home of the Indianapolis Colts, to expand seating from 2,000 to over 5,000 as well as the construction of a 3,300-square-foot press box.12 With these gains in ticket sales, fundraising, and facility improvements, Butler Athletics began to fortify its fiscal situation. When the Final Fours hit, they accelerated a movement that had already been building for several years. Specifically, the Final Four runs propelled Butler to make three immediate moves that further transformed the athletic department’s resource base. First, the university increased its outlay for coaching salaries in the men’s basketball program. John Hargrove, who was chairman of the board at the time of both The Cinderella Strategy 71
Final Four runs, recalled losing both Barry Collier and Thad Matta in earlier years because Butler could not offer competitive salaries. During the first Final Four run, Brad Stevens became one of the hottest names in coaching and the threat of losing another successful head coach to a larger program loomed large. Hargrove recalled flying home to Florida the morning after Butler had lost to Duke in the national championship game, turning on his phone on the runway, and listening to a message from Barry Collier. Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike and mad booster of the University of Oregon’s athletic program, was flying to Augusta, Georgia, for the Masters Golf Tournament and wanted to swing through Indianapolis to talk to Stevens about the opening at Oregon on the way. Collier and Hargrove moved quickly to counter and within two days had signed Stevens to a twelve-year extension with an annual salary approaching seven figures. The following year, after a second Final Four run, Collier and Hargrove again approached Stevens about restructuring. As Hargrove recalled, Stevens came up with “this goofy figure after the Connecticut game. I said, ‘Where’d you come up with that?’ He said, ‘Well, I added it up for my assistants, who are underpaid. This is what I want to pay them. He didn’t want anything for himself.” Though the salaries for both the head and assistant coaching positions still paled in comparison to those offered by college basketball’s leading programs, Butler was able to increase its competitiveness while also clearly signaling to Stevens his value to the institution. Second, the university launched the Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse, an extensive renovation to the Butler Athletics’ centerpiece facility that ultimately cost $36 million. The scale of the project was massive, but the success of the men’s basketball team emboldened the university. As Collier explained, “We hadn’t done anything close, remotely close, to the work that we did on Hinkle for 80 years. The amount of money that was put into that would not have been possible, and I think we would’ve been maybe scared away from raising those dollars to taking on that if we hadn’t had that success and thought it was possible.” By the start of the 2014–15 season, renovations had outfitted the fieldhouse with new office space for administrators and coaches, an academic support center, a sports medicine center, a strength and conditioning facility, 72 The Cinderella Strategy
new office/locker room suites for both basketball teams, a new scoreboard with video capability, and more comfortable seating in the arena. Most importantly, the overhaul managed to “keep Hinkle, Hinkle,” bringing the fieldhouse into the modern era with enhancements to the student-athlete and fan experiences alike, while simultaneously preserving the building’s historic charm and even restoring much of the interior to its original 1928 feel. Third and finally, the Final Four runs enabled Butler Athletics to realize the dream of so many mid-major programs around the country: a move up the athletic conference ladder. In 2012–13, the university transitioned from the Horizon League into the Atlantic 10. However, the real prize came the following year, when Butler again traded on its postseason success and joined the Big East. The effect of the conference switch on revenue and publicity is hard to overstate. Joe Kirsch, Butler’s faculty athletic representative (FAR), recalled a meeting with other FARs when Butler was still in the Horizon League. At some point during the meeting, he asked the league’s commissioner how much money the conference received from its television deal. “Joe,” the commissioner said, “We pay them.” By 2009–10, Butler had made some gains, landing a deal with a local television station that carried no rights fee but still resulted in all but four of the men’s basketball team’s games appearing on television that year; the Big East, however, represented a different ball game with regard to television revenue and exposure.13 In 2013, the conference had splintered as its members’ interests diverged: schools with strong football programs had been defecting to other power conferences over the past few years, prompting the “Catholic 7”—a group of seven basketball-centric Catholic institutions—to reform the Big East while keeping its name and its trademark conference tournament location at Madison Square Garden intact. Butler joined the Catholic 7 along with Creighton University and Xavier University. At the same time, the Fox Sports Media Group was also trying to get its new sports channel, Fox Sports 1 (FS1), off the ground. The two entities reached an agreement, with FS1 paying the Big East $500 million over twelve years for media rights to the conference’s athletic contests. According to reports at the time, the deal meant that conference members like Butler would receive a $3 million annual payout.14 The Cinderella Strategy 73
By joining a much stronger basketball league, which places multiple teams in the NCAA Tournament every year, Butler also opened the door for additional revenue from the NCAA’s basketball fund, which, as a point of reference, awarded $1.5 million per tournament victory to a team’s athletic conference in 2013.15 The presidents of the Big East schools devised a formula whereby three-quarters of all accumulated funds from the NCAA Tournament would be divided equally among its ten members, with the remaining quarter going to the schools that participated in that year’s postseason. Thus, Butler Athletics has not only reaped the benefits of qualifying for the tournament four times since its move to the Big East, but has also profited from the success of its conference counterparts, most notably Villanova’s national championship runs in 2016 and 2018. To be sure, competing at a higher level has demanded additional investment, and even still funding for athletic programs at Butler remains far less than at its Big East brethren; as of 2020, for example, Butler’s men’s basketball budget of $4.8 million ranked last in the Big East.16 However, as the university’s longtime CFO Bruce Arick made clear, increased revenues offset the uptick in university expenditures: “As we changed conferences, new investment was needed, but greater return was there as well. As the program got more successful and moved into different conferences, the revenue that they were able to generate through tickets and conference distributions and everything else grew sufficiently to more than cover the additional investment in making those moves and so forth.” In looking at the opportunities for revenue-generation and publicity, Arick called the move to the Big East both a “home run” and a “no-brainer,” a common sentiment across the university. By revamping Hinkle Fieldhouse and conference-hopping to the Big East, Butler transformed the prospects opened up by the Final Four runs into concrete, long-term assets. The fiscal picture within Butler Athletics in the present day is remarkably different from only a decade ago. In the fourteen years since Collier’s return as athletic director, athletics-generated revenue has increased tenfold, with the gains plowed right back into the department. In particular, on the heels of the Final Four runs, “athletics’ ability to generate revenue is just substantially different than what it was,” Arick concluded. Ticket sales have driven most of the revenue increase. Collier recalled that 74 The Cinderella Strategy
during his eleven years as head coach in the 1990s, the men’s basketball team sold out a single game. In 1996–97, when Collier led the program to its first NCAA Tournament berth in thirty-five years, attendance averaged 4,334, not even half of Hinkle’s capacity. By contrast, the 2016–17 season saw nine sell-out crowds stuff the Fieldhouse, and the 2019–20 season saw the highest recorded average attendance for men’s basketball in school history. Season ticket sales increased by slightly more than 50 percent from Butler’s first season of Big East play in 2013–14 to the 2019–20 season. Augmenting the dramatic rise in the number of season ticket packages sold have been increases in price alongside the new priority points system, as Table 1 demonstrates. Table 1: Season Ticket Pricing in 2008–09 and 2016–17 Seating
2008–09
2016–17
Courtside
$999
$2,900
Lower level
$389
100-level center
$790
100-level sideline
$740
100-level baseline
$595
Upper level
$249
200-level center
$680
200-level sideline
$595
200-level baseline plus
$475
200-level baseline
$295
300-level padded
$295
300-level unpadded
$195
Furthermore, in addition to ticket sales and conference payouts, revenue has also expanded significantly due to licensing, sponsorships, concessions, commissions, and parking, all driven “in large part because of men’s basketball success,” according to Collier. Speaking to The Butler Collegian in the summer of 2013, Associate Athletic Director Mike Freeman noted that the months-old move to the Big East had already yielded “clear increases in the areas of season The Cinderella Strategy 75
ticket sales, sponsorship revenues, and licensing” from the Bulldogs’ previous year of competition in the Atlantic 10. “If you look at right now compared to last year,” Freeman elaborated, “we’re way ahead on new season tickets sold, the vast majority of our sponsors have renewed, and we’ve found about six or seven more that have come on at a significant level.”17 Joe Gentry, then Director of Corporate Sponsorships, further detailed the potential impact of the conference leap. “I know that the TV deal will have our games reach 90 million homes,” Gentry said. “People will see Butler all over and this will help our exposure to prospective students, people will see our gear and this will help with our licensing, and corporate sponsorship when the ads on the scorer’s table can be seen on national TV all the time.”18 Within four years of the move, Gentry could speak with experience. “The Big East name is something we can use regionally and nationally,” he said in 2017. “When we can tell ad agencies every game is on national TV, then they can pitch that to national advertisers.”19 Within two years of the move to the Big East, Collier estimated that corporate sponsorship had increased by 350 percent based on the Final Four appearances and the subsequent conference moves.20 As a result of all these developments, the university’s subsidy to its athletic program—perhaps the key indicator of the health of an athletic program from an institution-wide perspective—has plummeted. At the conclusion of the 2005–06 fiscal year, the university was subsidizing 80 percent of the athletics budget; with steady gains in revenue and fundraising, the subsidy dropped to 30 percent over the ensuing years and is holding steady at that rate in the present day. According to Arick, the university is comfortable with this position. “I would say athletics at Butler is as close to being ‘a tub on its own bottom’ as we see at Butler. And they obviously are not entirely on their own bottom because we do have some subsidy, but we have locked that in with some agreement on escalation. Otherwise, they are sustaining themselves with our operating revenues and fundraising and those types of things. I think it’s a good model.” Navigating Personnel Changes In June 2017, the university found itself in familiar territory: without a head coach for the men’s basketball program. That month, Chris Holtmann 76 The Cinderella Strategy
accepted the head coaching position at Ohio State, succeeding another former Butler coach in Thad Matta. It was the third such vacancy since Brad Stevens moved to the Celtics in 2013. Butler was coming off of a Sweet 16 berth and its third consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance under Holtmann. News broke of his departure while the Butler’s trustees were on campus, and vice chair Tracy Stevens, who had caught wind of the news beforehand, recalled the scene: “I can’t remember which meeting I was in, but I was kind of sitting there going ‘Wait for it, wait for it, wait for it,’ and then everyone’s phones went ‘Bzzzzz,’ and it started. Everyone was incredibly concerned about the turnover, and how that was going to be handled. Because after Brad was there we had Brandon Miller, who then got ill and left so he was only there for a year, and then Chris was the interim coach and was only there a total of three years as the head coach. Everyone was really worried about the constant changing. The tone of the board was somber. The fact that a coach was leaving resulted in kind of a gray cloud over the meeting. Their concern was both emotional— because they’re emotionally attached to the basketball program—and more of an intellectual concern of what this would mean for a program that’s incredibly important for the university.” The collective mood makes sense even though Butler had weathered a number of previous departures. Yet, this time around, Tracy Stevens was not concerned. Holtmann himself expressed similar confidence in a tweet directed toward the Butler community: “We all know that at Butler, despite change, those special and amazing moments will only continue. I’m certain of that. It’s Butler.”21 Holtmann posted his tweet on Friday, June 9; by Monday, June 12, the Bulldogs had a new coach in place. By the end of the summer, the athletic office had sold hundreds of additional season ticket packages. Who could inspire such confidence in the future of the program? On one level, the answer was LaVall Jordan, Butler’s new 38-year-old head coach with only one year of head coaching experience at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, during which he tallied a record of 11-24 and finished last in the Horizon League. On the surface Jordan’s hire might have appeared odd given his résumé, which did not exactly scream “Big East head coach” at the time. Yet the Butler community, almost to a person, was thrilled with the hiring The Cinderella Strategy 77
Barry Collier (left) and LaVall Jordan. COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
decision, as evidenced by the surge in season ticket sales. Why? On another level, the answer to the question of who could inspire such confidence was Barry Collier. With little fanfare outside of the Butler community, Collier has honed something of a magic touch in the hiring process. His counterpart at Gonzaga, Mike Roth, recognized Collier’s exceptional track record and the fruit it has borne: “During our run now of twenty-two NCAA Tournaments, we have had one AD and two head coaches, with Mark Few being the head coach for twenty-one of those appearances. At Butler they’ve had multiple head coaches and assistants, yet the train keeps rolling. There is no doubt or question in my mind that is due to the one constant—Barry Collier.” John Dunn, Collier’s former teammate at Butler and also former chairman of the board, explained at the time of LaVall Jordan’s hire that “Barry just has a knack for knowing a person, reading a person, and then inspiring them. He handled Brad in a great way, he handled Holtmann in a great way, and now he’s going to do the same with LaVall.” Tracy Stevens echoed this sentiment: “He’s really good, and he does it by himself. There’s not a search committee. There are no board members interviewing potential coaches.” She pinpointed his demeanor, his 78 The Cinderella Strategy
track record, and his institutional knowledge of the basketball program as the primary reasons behind his hiring success. “It’s absolutely ‘In Barry we trust,’” she concluded. “I certainly don’t profess to have any secret sauce,” Collier said when asked about his hiring practices, “but I always look for the best combination of five things that I can find and also take into account the understanding of our program and what we’re trying to do.” Integrity is the non-negotiable—“you can’t get to second base if you don’t have that”—followed by a high IQ, a relentless work ethic, and great communication skills. The succession of head coaches, and the consistent ways in which people speak about them, seems to indicate that Collier is not paying lip service to these qualities, particularly the integrity piece; however, it might be the fifth quality that distinguishes his approach—relative experience. The distinction hinges on his definition of relative: “I say ‘relative’ because you don’t have to have a ton of experience if the experience you do have is good. That ties into this understanding of the program from within. If you’ve got experience within the program, we don’t really see the need to completely change what we’re doing because it’s been successful.” To that end, Collier noted that Brad Stevens had an eight-month interview as an assistant coach, Chris Holtmann a fifteen-month interview as first an assistant and then an interim head coach, and LaVall Jordan the longest interview period of all given that Collier recruited him years ago as a teenager to play at Butler. In a sense, both perspectives on Collier’s ability are true. There is more than a hint of magic in his string of hires, particularly in pegging Brad Stevens as his first big hire only eight months into the job as athletic director, in the process making the 30-year-old first-time head coach the second youngest in all of major college basketball. Many people at Butler have stories of their first encounter with Stevens, most of which sound similar to John Hargrove’s: “Todd Lickliter was replaced with this kid. He looked so skinny. I remember going to a breakfast to meet him. I was at his table, and I think I was vice chair of the Board at the time, and he was wearing this button-down collared shirt and tie. And the shirt collar was so big, he just looked like a kid. I said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m Brad Stevens, the new basketball coach.’ You could have knocked me over with a feather.” The Cinderella Strategy 79
STR ATEGY POIN T
Give your best player the ball…and get out of the way In the epic 1954 Indiana State Championship game, Milan’s Bobby Plump held the ball at midcourt as the clock ticked down. The score between Milan and Muncie Central was knotted at 30. Plump’s teammates cleared out so he could beat his man by either driving to the basket or pulling up to take a jump shot. Plump did the latter and his game-winning shot as time expired cemented his and Milan’s legend and ultimately inspired a recreation of the exact play in the movie Hoosiers. Milan’s strategy is a reminder that there are times when talented people need to be given room and freedom to operate on their own. This requires trust and, counterintuitively, can be a deep expression of teamwork. In a Washington Post retrospective on the Milan Miracle, Plump’s teammates recalled that they “wanted him to be the shooter.” His coach Marvin Wood confirmed that “all of his teammates were comfortable with him—they had faith in him, trust in him.”23 In a similar regard, Butler’s hiring success with their flagship sport is in large part due to giving Barry Collier the reins. Collier doesn’t rely on search firms or even search committees. He uses guiding principles, sharp observation, and his gut, and the results speak for themselves. Presidents Fong and Danko, along with Butler’s trustees, have recognized Collier’s talent and cleared out for him to use it, even—and perhaps especially—in the most consequential of situations.
Yet, from another angle, one can see Collier’s hires as a continuation of a practice that began in 1989 when Geoff Bannister, searching for someone who “bled Butler blue,” hired Collier himself as a 34-year-old with no head coaching experience to lead the revival of Butler basketball. Likewise, the habit of promoting from within by sliding people down the bench from assistant to head coach persisted in Collier’s absence, when his departure made room for 80 The Cinderella Strategy
two of his former assistants—first Matta and then Lickliter—to assume the reins. By the time Collier returned to Butler, the expectation that the head coaching position, when vacated, would pass from assistant to assistant like an heirloom was deeply ingrained in the players.22 Hiring wizard or not, Collier does stand as a point of continuity in the long arc of Butler’s rise and the key decision-maker in Butler’s ability to weather the coaching changes that so often put an end to the Cinderella story at other institutions. Furthermore, his ability to develop and support these coaches deserves attention. Perhaps it is less about the initial hiring decision and more about the many daily decisions that follow in a relationship between an athletic director and a head coach. Collier emphasizes that all Butler coaches should “make decisions that are good for fifteen and twenty years, not two and three and five years.” Asked if he found this to be the case during his time at Butler, Brad Stevens jumped on the question: “Every day. Every day. If we had to suspend a kid for not going to class, he’s all for it. If we went on a three-game losing streak, he never focused on it. If we had a great year, he would invest more in the program. If we had a bad year, he would invest more in the program. He knew we had to do things the right way because we had a role to represent the school. He always was forward-looking.” Even when the offer from the Celtics came for Stevens, Collier’s backing persisted and “made it almost impossible to leave, to the point where it made us uncomfortable with how well he was supporting us when we left.” Because of relationships like this one, the Stevens family remains “as invested, as involved, as we’ve ever been” at the university, even with their move to Boston. Nurturing Culture in Athletics The front of Hinkle Fieldhouse is nearly as unadorned today as it was back in 1928, when the building first opened. Save for a few black awnings with small white numbers marking different entrance gates, it is unclear where a first-time visitor ought to enter. As it turns out, all the doors are open and any of them work just fine. Just inside the middle gates sits a modest display case stocked with jerseys, trophies, images, and placards documenting the building’s history. Front and center in the case stands the 2010 West Regional trophy, The Cinderella Strategy 81
commemorating the team’s first trip to the Final Four. In April 2017, two dark blue road jerseys curled around the trophy’s base. In white block letters the name “Smith” stretched across the top of the left one, the number 44 in white with slim gray trim beneath it. To its right a number 33 jersey, same hue and slightly larger font, curled around the side of the trophy, the name “Cornette” fading from view. The jerseys belonged to Andrew Smith and Joel Cornette, both former big men for the Butler basketball team, both “Butler guys” through and through, both having died young the previous year. Smith joined the program Andrew Smith. COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS later, a member of both Final Four teams, and passed earlier—in January 2016 of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and leukemia at the age of 25. Cornette, who played on the 2003 Sweet 16 team, was 35 when he passed to coronary atherosclerosis in August 2016. Down the hall from this display at either corner of the front concourse are curved walls, the one on the left backing the men’s basketball offices and the one on the right backing the spirit shop. The displays are mirror images: on a gleaming white field, shining silver text heralds “The Butler Way.” Beneath, in the dark blue of a Butler road jersey, the definition is crystallized: “Demands commitment, denies selfishness, accepts reality, yet seeks improvement every day while putting the team above self.” “The Butler Way” is the watchword for the organizational culture of Butler Athletics. It greets you from the start and seems to permeate every nook and cranny of the program: one can scarcely get through a conversation with Butler folks, whether casual or formal, without 82 The Cinderella Strategy
the mantra taking center stage, often unbidden. People describe it in different terms, citing stories and exemplars from different times, yet leaving this much clear: the Butler Way bears many fingerprints, and they belong to the coaches and players who cycle through but rarely depart. Tracy Stevens is married to the guy whose name pops up as much as any other, but it is people like Joel Cornette and Andrew Smith, she suggested, who were “the epitome of the Butler Way.” Through tragedy and triumph, culture, she concluded, has been “by far the biggest asset” for Butler Athletics. Coaches deserve much of the credit for the formulation of the Butler Way. Predictably, it stretches back to Tony Hinkle. “There’s a direct line, a handshake,” wrote Susan Neville in 2011, “between Hinkle and the later coaches including Collier, Matta, Lickliter, the current assistant coaches, and Brad Stevens.”24 The line is spiritual, transmitted in the character of those who nurtured the athletic program closest to the community’s heart. Yet, it is also tangible: Collier pinpointed five core concepts for the program—humility, passion, unity, servanthood, and thankfulness; Matta inherited the ethos and christened it “the Butler Way”; Lickliter came next and wrestled the thing onto paper, with Stevens as both his scribe and co-author. When the concepts were finally codified, Stevens typed up the results; years later, as the Butler Way continued to gain currency, he framed his original steno pad notes and gave them as a gift to Lickliter. Today, the prototype of the Butler Way still hangs in the family room of the Lickliter home. The image speaks to the alchemy within Butler Athletics: everyday materials transformed through everyday effort into a showpiece of lasting value. Indeed, the years that Lickliter and Stevens spent honing their philosophy were angled always toward the future. “He and I would labor over how to present everything,” Lickliter recalled. “We wrote missions, we wrote visions, we wrote the creed—everything imaginable, we put down. We wanted a program. We didn’t want to have just a team. We wanted this to be something that would be passed on and would allow sustainability.” If the head coaching position is an heirloom at the university, the Butler Way is the substance of real value, tended and polished by each successive generation. Those who have since followed Lickliter and Stevens, from Miller to Holtmann and on to Jordan, have The Cinderella Strategy 83
preserved its essential quality even as the resources and attention all around it have grown. Yet, if the coaches are the brains behind the Butler Way, it is the players who have so often given the culture its soul. David Woods’s work is chock full of stories wherein Butler players embody this culture, but the two that Tracy Stevens highlighted as her favorites capture the delicate balance at its heart: “We made the tournament [in 2001] and Wake Forest was really good. They interviewed Wake’s players the week before the game saying, ‘Do you know where Butler is?’ They were like, ‘Minnesota?’ ‘Butler, no I’ve never heard of them.’ ‘What’s Butler?’ They were all dismissive of it. They didn’t know where Butler was, or know anything about it. When we played, the halftime score was like 45 to 13.” (Pretty good recall: the actual score was 43 to 10 at the half.) “We just demolished them,” she continued, “and the teams ran down the tunnels together to go to the locker room after halftime. Brandon Miller, who was a Bulldog through and through, said, ‘I bet you know where Butler is now.’” She followed that story with one of the more popular ones from Butler lore, when in 2003 the Bulldogs were competing in their first Sweet 16 since
Todd Lickliter (left) and Brad Stevens. COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
84 The Cinderella Strategy
Tony Hinkle’s days as coach: “This was well written about, but there was a story about after they lost to Oklahoma in Albany, New York. [Seniors] Joel Cornette and Brandon Miller were walking down the tunnel, and they had just lost, so their careers were over. There was trash on the floor, and they stopped, picked it up, and threw it away. They were like the biggest competitors ever with huge hearts.” Taken together, the two stories illustrate on the one hand an abiding “chip on the shoulder” mentality and, on the other, a persistent privileging of others over self. Like so many underdogs, Butler has managed to intertwine confidence with humility. Yet, following the program’s first Sweet 16, this balance demanded attention as the team’s ethos flickered. The years between the program’s first and second Sweet 16 appearances in 2003 and 2007 stand as a crucible period in the formation of a durable culture. When Todd Lickliter assumed the head coaching position in 2001, he inherited “some of the finest players” in the program’s history. After those players graduated following the first Sweet 16 appearance, Lickliter assumed the coaches would be able to trade on the program’s success to recruit “the next level of player.” Instead, the team stumbled to a 16-14 record in 2003–04 and then a 13-15 record the following year, its first losing season since 1989–90. The coaching staff racked their brains for solutions and, at some point, somebody gave Lickliter a copy of a book about getting unstuck. “I gave one to every coach,” Lickliter recalled. “We went through it. I’ve got notes all over mine. We learned the lessons.” Those lessons centered on recruiting. “What I learned in particular is that vetting is incredibly important. There needs to be alignment,” Lickliter said. As an example he referenced a typical recruiting practice at other big-time programs, where coaches attend an AAU game, see a player they like, and offer him a scholarship based on that sliver of exposure. “You can’t do that if you want to have a program like Butler,” Lickliter concluded. “You don’t know enough.” Instead, coaches committed to “recruit with substance,” which entailed giving prospective student-athletes the “full picture of the environment” at Butler, talking about “fit and reality,” and stressing that the program only wanted those who would “sincerely seek a degree.” Soon, the team was back in the Sweet The Cinderella Strategy 85
16, and when Lickliter took the head coaching position at Iowa in 2007, he again left the roster stocked with the right type of players for his successor. Through this period the coaching staff tested, refined, and solidified its approach to recruiting in the wake of unprecedented on-court success, doubling down on the Butler Way. “I don’t know that we’d have been as good,” Lickliter reflected, “if we hadn’t gone through that trial, committed to an identity, and decided that we weren’t wavering from it.” The key change was to recruit players whose values already matched the Butler Way. To wit, when a local principal asked Lickliter to come speak to the students at his school on the topic of instilling values, Lickliter told him, “I can’t. We don’t instill them. We just enhance them.” Barry Collier echoed this idea that recruiting boiled down to the Butler Way or the highway, so to speak. Prospective student athletes, he said, “are not coming here just for sports. If that’s the case, we’re in the wrong house. Actually, we don’t ever get to that house if that’s the case. Recruits can either self-select or we select out before you ever get here.” Brad Stevens lived through this crucible experience with Lickliter, and it clearly shaped his approach to recruiting and his ability to keep the program grounded in its value system even as it ascended to new heights. “One of the best things we did was the way we recruited,” remembered Stevens. “Sharing the values of the school was something we were doing for a long time, and it’s not going to be perfect, but generally if a kid chose Butler, it was for the right reasons.” Others on campus backed this notion of the athletic department’s culture serving as a buffer against the trappings of success for the men’s basketball program: “I think keeping your feet on the ground is the right thing,” Joe Kirsch reflected. “When you begin to fly and you’re not a bird, there’s something wrong.” Speaking prior to Chris Holtmann’s departure, Michael Kaltenmark, a 2002 alum and the current Director of Community and Government Relations at Butler, located the cultural through-line in the upper levels of leadership: “I have a feeling if we played a Final Four in Indianapolis this weekend and classes were in session, Jim Danko and Chris Holtmann would make sure our players were in class just like Bobby Fong and Brad Stevens did the day of the game. If we had that opportunity, we would do it because that’s just 86 The Cinderella Strategy
how we operate. It’s what we do. I feel like we’ve stuck true to the Butler Way. We’ve held on dearly to that because we understand that that got us to where we were and the second you start thinking you’re bigger than that, then that’s when problems happen.” Multiple people have cited Collier’s and Stevens’s workaday response to the madness of the first Final Four as grounding. In Underdawgs, David Woods detailed how Stevens’s “aim to maintain normalcy” extended into subsequent seasons.25 Characteristically, though, Stevens himself deflected attention right back onto the players: “Going from fairly anonymous to pretty well-known happened to all of us overnight. If we weren’t at Butler and we didn’t have the foundation, the values, it may have been harder to handle. We talked about all of the values so much that I didn’t see a lot of the issues. Our guys were incredible. They used their platforms well. Social media was just coming into being a problem, but our guys were so good. They cared about their school and they still do.” In the end, it becomes clear: the culture of the athletic department—the Butler Way—turns on the endless loop of relationships between player and coach. It connects past, present, and future, revitalizing a dormant basketball program, animating an entire athletic program, and lighting the path forward when the glow of so much national attention might have otherwise threatened to blot out the whole thing. Likewise, it is the fruit of this culture, if not portions of the culture itself, that have made the athletic program so consistently valuable to the university as a whole. One final story encapsulates this entire web of relationships between player and coach, basketball and university, pride and humility. Marc Allan, former news manager and adjunct instructor in the School of Journalism at Butler, talked of a walk-on named Alex Barlow who played his way into a starting position on the team during the 2012–13 season. “What I always tell my classes,” he recalled, “is that most of us are Alex Barlow. We don’t have the talent: we’re not LeBron James, we’re not Michael Jordan. If you work hard, maybe you get an opportunity, or maybe you prove yourself, or maybe you’re just thrust into the situation and you make the most of it. Whatever it is, Alex Barlow is our lesson. One time I was really angry at The Cinderella Strategy 87
my class. This is a class called ‘Writing for Print Media.’ It’s the intro class for journalists. A lot of them were just being lazy, and I was trying to think of what to say to them. I brought up Alex Barlow. I emailed Brad Stevens afterward, and I said, ‘I really appreciate that you started Alex because it’s a lesson for my students to see that if you work hard, you do what’s expected of you, you have a positive effect on others, then you can advance over other people.’ At this point, Brad had already coached in two national championship games. He was an enormous star on campus. He was an enormous star in the world. I emailed him, and he emailed me back in six minutes. Literally six minutes. He said, ‘Alex is a great kid. He always affects the game the same way. He always affects the team the same way. That’s the kind of person that you look for when you’re trying to build a team.’” While only a snapshot into everyday life at Butler in the aftermath of the Final Fours, Allan’s story signifies the structure that has enabled the university to manage success well and to step carefully toward another iteration of itself: an alignment between the flagship sports program and the larger institution at a missional level. Forging such an alignment, however, does not happen overnight.
STR ATEGY POIN T
Let tragedy shape the mission For all of the accomplishments at Butler over the past decade, the university has experienced a number of tragedies as well. The premature death of Andrew Smith, a stalwart on both Final Four teams, hit the Butler community especially hard. Samantha Smith, Andrew’s widow, has carried on his legacy with the establishment of Project 44, a nonprofit with the mission to save forty-four lives through bone marrow transplants. To date, the organization has added thousands to the bone marrow registry and saved eight lives. In 2016, the United States Basketball Writers Association (USBWA) named Andrew and Samantha as recipients of its Most Courageous Award, citing their public
88 The Cinderella Strategy
battle with cancer and advocacy for bone marrow registry. Brad and Tracy Stevens serve as honorary board members and helped arrange for the Boston Celtics to host a Project 44 Night in March 2019. “Andrew spent nearly every day of his battle with cancer being an advocate and voice. And the only way I knew to honor him was to carry that on,” Samantha said. “Andrew always said that his fight with this disease would be 100 percent worth it if he could simply help one person. Project 44 is a celebration of that selflessness. Project 44 is saving lives and giving hope. I can think of no better way to honor and remember Andrew, a man known for his kindness, empathy, and strength.” Smith’s #44 jersey is prominently displayed in Hinkle Fieldhouse—a reminder that his impact lives on at the university.
The Cinderella Strategy 89
4
CHAPTER
How Presidents Manage Risk and Leverage Basketball
F
rom Barry Collier’s first year as head coach in 1989 to his return as athletic director in 2006, Butler developed a flagship program with ultimately limited value to both the athletic department and the greater institution. This ceiling was in part a product of the athletic side of the house not being in order. Even as the basketball team continued to win games, Collier’s first two years as athletic director were spent tending to the athletic department as a whole, making the difficult decisions necessary to transform its resource base and bolster the student-athlete experience across all sports. Over time, these problems were resolved, with ticket sales and fundraising on a steady rise and over 90 percent of Butler’s student-athletes answering the 90 The Cinderella Strategy
Brad Stevens seated between Barry Collier (left) and Bobby Fong (right) at his introduction as head coach at Butler in 2007. C OURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
“repeat customer” question positively. John Dunn, former board chairman, confirmed the pivotal quality of Collier’s work as athletic director: “It all goes back to Barry Collier, and I’m not just blowing smoke up his butt. He changed the way the university looked at athletics.” Yet, even as the athletic department began to realize the full benefit of its flagship program, a portion of the ceiling remained, hindering the university as a whole from reaping the same full-bodied return. From Geoff Bannister’s initial decision to invest in men’s basketball in 1989, the formation of a big-time athletic program was always in service to a larger university that was attempting to alter its own fortunes. Yet, by tracing efforts to leverage basketball across presidential administrations—and in particular focusing on the types of risk that each different executive was willing to assume—it becomes clear that fusing the energies of a program and an institution on the move took time and frequent negotiation. Only with Jim Danko’s arrival as president in 2011 were the flagship program, athletic department, and university aligned to take full advantage of an unprecedented resource: back-to-back Final Four appearances. The time frame for this story spans three presidential administrations: The Cinderella Strategy 91
Geoff Bannister (1989–2000), Bobby Fong (2001–11), and Jim Danko (2011–present). (Gwen Fountain served in an interim capacity from 2000–01 as a bridge between Bannister and Fong.) When discussing the influence of each chief executive with those who worked at Butler under their administrations, a pattern emerges that is best articulated by Bruce Arick, who joined the community at the beginning of Bannister’s presidency and by 1997 had assumed the position of vice president for finance. Arick described Bannister and Danko as “accelerator presidents” with Fong sandwiched between them as a “stabilizer.” Numerous others echoed this idea of an ebb and flow between presidencies, with each person gravitating toward the three CEOs differently based on their own strategic focus or personality. Yet, in taking the long view, the broad consensus matches Arick’s words: “I think each of them brought to the table for Butler exactly what it needed at the time.” The Bannister Presidency As noted previously, Bannister receives credit across the board for his vision and initial investment in a flagging men’s basketball program. In some ways, this whole thing was his idea. Yet, the strategy is curiously absent from an essay Bannister penned in 1993 entitled “The Idea of Butler University,” in which he kick-started a strategic planning cycle by imagining Butler as it would appear twelve years in the future during its sesquicentennial. The few direct references to athletics rehearsed its traditional benefits, such as community building and engagement of trustees, and placed it in the same breath as intramural activities in fostering physical activity and 92 The Cinderella Strategy
Geoffrey Bannister, 1989. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
building character within the student body. Over the course of fourteen pages, Bannister offered no hint of the momentum building in Hinkle Fieldhouse that, years later, would constitute a significant portion of his legacy. One can only speculate at the reasons for this omission, and indeed as higher education scholars have pointed out, despite their apparent centrality to university budgets and strategy, big-time athletic programs rarely appear in mission and vision statements.1 Perhaps Bannister wished to avoid this tension surfacing at a time when dollars were tight and ambitions were vast at Butler. Perhaps he reasoned it would have distracted from the central focus of the essay, the pursuit of a “collegiate university” ideal at Butler. Perhaps, despite the investment in men’s basketball, athletics remained functionally disconnected from the university’s decision-making apparatus, as suggested by the fact that the five planning committees for “Strategic Plan 2005,” which charted a course for the university from 1994 to 2000, featured no representatives from the athletic department. Yet, one additional explanation arises from what, with hindsight, seems a formative passage: “The university is a learning institution, and all of Butler’s members share this mission. The registration clerk who oversees the grading systems and maintains records is monitoring the student’s progress and helping the professor to teach and the student to learn; the groundskeeper tending a newly planted tree is developing an environment conducive to reflection and creating a practical demonstration of the university’s commitment to the appreciation of beauty; the coach who guides a team to success by challenging students to find their own limits of physical as well as scholarly competence is building institutional reputation, alumni confidence and student capacity; the librarian cataloging a new addition to the collection, the computer programmer debugging software, the secretary typing an examination, the assistant tracking down a professor for a student appointment, the budget manager tracking expenditures, the development officer asking for assistance, the trustee weighing policy and promoting the university, the public relations officer pitching a story, and the alumni, parent and career planning staff member maintaining bridges to the broader community, are engaged in the same process.”2 Here, Bannister positioned athletics as one of many functions that exist The Cinderella Strategy 93
outside of the traditional teaching-learning-research axis yet buttress it nonetheless, alluding to athletics’ connection to student learning while also recognizing its capacity to bolster Butler’s reputation and community. In this view, athletics is an institutional citizen, but one piece of an operation that hums only when all constituents pull their weight with whatever tasks and resources fall to them. This explanation sounds hokey, but grows less so as one becomes familiar with the ethos at Butler. There are distinct echoes of this perspective, for instance, in Brad Stevens’s stance on the basketball program years later: “We all have a role to play, and we’re all playing our role for the benefit of the organization.” In line with this notion of institutional citizenship, Bannister backed up his vision with risk-taking and investments across the entire university. In this regard, the investment in athletics did not stand out because it was par for the course with an accelerator president in office. When asked if she sensed any trade-offs as resources were funneled toward athletics, Susan Neville replied, “No, because other things happened at the same time.” She continued, “From my point of view in the English Department, Dr. Bannister also helped us find money to start a visiting writers series, which is now one of the biggest visiting writers series in the country. It’s well-funded, and we’ve had Nobel Prize winners and Pulitzer Prize winners. Sometimes we’ve had eight to twelve writers a semester visiting. So that also brought people onto campus. It was, from my point of view, a kind of synergy. There were risks taken: let’s put more money into basketball, let’s put money into this, let’s put money into trying to get something more for theatre, into a new dorm.” Joe Kirsch, the chemist, noticed the same pattern of spending, particularly with regard to the grounds: “Geoff made a significant contribution to the university in turning it into what it is today. And not only through basketball but other things, too. When Geoff came here we had kind of a drive-through campus. It looked like a commuter school. One of the major things he did was a major renovation not of buildings, but of the actual site. When you go out there and walk across the malls and you’ve got the fountains and the benches, that was Geoff Bannister.” Indeed, the campus transformation is the most visible feature of Bannister’s legacy and the one most often mentioned in tandem with his investment in men’s 94 The Cinderella Strategy
basketball. As described by the “Commission on the Future of Butler University” in 1986, the campus Bannister inherited did not match its increasingly residential quality, stating that the “landscaping was limited, the automobile dominating, and buildings presented an institutional and sterile atmosphere. Principal entrances and boundaries of the campus were poorly defined.”3 Bannister churned the landscape outside his office in Jordan Hall, turning the central mall into “a small lake” to address the campus’s long-standing drainage problems.4 By the end of his term, however, Bannister had dressed up the ground between Jordan and Hinkle, an impact as lasting as the teak wood benches that suddenly sprouted all over campus and came to symbolize the makeover. However, this portfolio of improvements came at a cost. As Arick framed it, “with some of that acceleration that we saw during President Bannister, financially we started bumping up against some barriers.” Bannister himself spelled out one such barrier in a letter to the community dated October 24, 1994. The university had just wrapped the “Partnership for Excellence” capital campaign, which brought over $75 million into its coffers, $25 million of which was designated for the endowment. According to Bannister, the influx of endowment funding “allowed us the luxury of leaning more heavily than would have otherwise been prudent on our endowment income.” Bannister reported that these “heavy endowment draws” were at an end, yet they left their mark on the university’s financial picture.5 Strapped for cash, yet feeling the need to spark a stagnant university, Bannister had depleted portions of the endowment to jump-start a wide variety of programs and capital improvements. Athletics was no exception in this regard, with the $1.5 million renovation of Hinkle Fieldhouse constituting a “capital expense to the university.” When Bannister’s successor sought to shore up these cracks in the financial base, the athletic department would be forced to operate under a hard set of constraints. Basketball could still serve as a leverage point, but in terms of funding additional growth and building on its success, the athletic department was largely on its own. The Fong Presidency Bobby Fong was, without question, a sports fan. In profiles and published The Cinderella Strategy 95
accounts, references to his passion for baseball and the New York Yankees seem always to go hand in hand with his scholarly love for Oscar Wilde.6 He owned more than 30,000 baseball cards, wrangled his way into teaching courses on the sport at two previous institutions, and published in the Baseball Research Journal.7 When Fong departed Butler to assume the presidency at Ursinus College following the 2010–11 academic year, the spring issue of Butler Magazine celebrated his tenure with an article entitled “Ten Great Seasons,” which Bobby Fong, 2001. featured a ribbon of photos framed COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES to look like baseball cards along the top of the pages and a watermarked baseball scorecard filled the background. When Fong passed in September 2014, a service at Butler’s Clowes Memorial Hall concluded with a rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”8 The enduring image of Fong’s presidency is that of a sports fan as well: the diminutive executive hoisted atop the shoulders of three football players, beaming from ear to ear, arms extended to balance the jubilation of a sudden take-off and four fingers raised on each hand. Butler had just made its first Final Four, and Bobby Fong was crowd-surfing. At the end of his tenure at the university, Fong cited this moment as his top memory; his reason for doing so is telling: “I was deeply touched that I could be seen as somebody who was accessible and approachable enough by the students to do more than shake hands.”9 For Fong, the basketball euphoria presented an opportunity to showcase the Butler community by rallying around its students and allowing them to thrust the institution upward. Fong’s track record screamed liberal arts when, as a dean at Hamilton College after previous appointments at Berea College and Hope College, he 96 The Cinderella Strategy
was recruited for the presidency at Butler. After initially rebuffing the idea, two experiences changed his mind: through a conversation with a dance mistress in upstate New York he learned of Butler’s sterling ballet program; and then he watched as a close friend’s son chose to attend Butler over Dartmouth. One sees the flowering of these seeds ten years later in Fong’s public responses to the Final Four berth. In giving an interview for The New York Times, he positioned Butler’s Department of Dance as “just as uniquely important to the university as the men’s basketball team.”10 Ten days later, his op-ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “How Butler Won the NCAA Tournament” used the crowd-surfing image as a hook to champion the academic chops of the university’s student-athletes. Butler had “caught a wave,” but the wild ride on both the campus and the hardwood was “a metaphor, a trope, for the larger story of Butler University” that centered, always, around its academic mission and values.11 Here, as he did throughout his tenure, Fong envisioned athletics and specifically men’s basketball as a “front porch” to the university. During the Final Fours, the crowd on the front porch “looked through the windows of the university in admiration of its academic seriousness.”12 Fong’s appreciation for Butler’s student-athletes and his deftness in using the sudden platform furnished by the Final Fours to share Butler’s story with the general public are unmistakable. Yet the front-porch ideal both focused and limited his vision for how the men’s basketball program ought to be leveraged within the university. A front porch can be a warm point of welcome for guests, but it can just as easily feel like a distant periphery for those who have to live there. As mentioned previously, Fong placed firm financial parameters around the athletic program: there would be no additional investment from the university and a budget driver would actually reduce the institutional subsidy by a small percentage each year, even as the cost of doing business in Division I athletics continued to rise. This approach was consistent with Fong’s role as a stabilizing president in the wake of Bannister’s accelerant behaviors. According to John Hargrove, who joined the board of trustees the same year Fong arrived at Butler, the first order of business was “to deal with some of the fallout of those risks” taken during the previous administration. Fong The Cinderella Strategy 97
inherited a budget that was “way out of whack” and an endowment stuffed with IOUs after Bannister-era borrowing. Hargrove, who almost immediately devoted himself to addressing the endowment issue, recalled how quickly the new president plugged the leaks. In terms of the annual budget, Fong “imposed his own sentence. He said, ‘I’m going to get this thing done in three years.’ He had it balanced in one year,” kicking off eight straight years of budget surpluses. Hargrove, a lawyer by trade, helped see the university through the process of structuring repayments to the endowment, and on the strength of the ButlerRising capital campaign that netted the university $154 million by its close in 2009, Fong replenished the endowment in around half of the appointed term for doing so. When his tenure at Butler concluded, the endowment had grown from $93 million to $143 million.13 Thus by the time Butler launched the “Dare to Make a Difference” strategic plan in 2009, the university could claim with confidence that its “fiscal position never has been stronger.”14 Concurrently, Fong tended to the university’s academic profile. During his presidency Butler’s retention and graduation rates jumped from 81 percent and 68 percent when Fong took office to highs of 89 percent and 74 percent respectively toward the end of his tenure.15 Much of the money raised during the ButlerRising campaign targeted academic and residential projects, including a 40,000-square-foot addition to the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences facility.16 Fong also pushed Butler’s application for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter, a recognition for which the university had applied and been turned down back in 1912.17 Phi Beta Kappa, the most prestigious academic honor society in American higher education, is highly selective and notorious for requiring institutions to reapply before gaining approval. It appears that after 1912, Butler took ninety-four years off before resuming its application. John Hargrove recalled that for a long time the general stance toward renewing Butler’s pursuit of a chapter was apathy, especially given the university’s commitment to combining strong professional programs with its liberal arts offerings. But Fong embraced the challenge: “Bobby was Phi Beta Kappa in Harvard. He said to me, ‘John, let’s get going on this. Let’s kick some butt, and let’s see what we can do.’ So we did, and we got it. That was Bobby. That was the academic side of things. That was the kind of risk he was willing to take. 98 The Cinderella Strategy
And if athletics happens to be the front porch that everyone wants to look at, fine. But let’s really enhance the fiscal responsibility here to an art form, and enhance the recognition of our academics by a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. They did it in a short period of time, but everybody else said, ‘It’s not worth trying.’” Of particular note, Butler only needed one application cycle to receive approval, a remarkable accomplishment that Butler Magazine picked up on in a one-page article highlighting the installation ceremony from February 2010: “Applying for Phi Beta Kappa is a three-year process…Normally, the delegation will recommend needed improvements, requiring a second three-year cycle of application. Butler beat those odds, initiating its application process in 2006 and receiving approval in October 2009.” 18 Landing a Phi Beta Kappa chapter was a coup for the university—Butler’s current provost Dr. Kate Morris recalled her dad, an academic himself, crying when he heard the news—but the story was overshadowed by Butler having beaten even longer odds later that same year: the men’s basketball team had made its first Final Four. This success sent shockwaves through the university’s decision-making apparatus. In a belt-tightening context, it is easy to see how, as Hargrove recalled, “athletics was not a priority” for Fong and any strategic risks aimed instead at bolstering Butler’s academic profile. In this regard, the president and the trustees had differing visions for what Butler ought to be, and the first Final Four run thrust those differences into stark relief. Butler had lightning in a bottle, and it seemed that every twist in their Cinderella story cranked the voltage higher. Who could blame Bobby Fong for holding that kind of energy in hand, looking across time and place at all the universities burnt by big-time athletics, recognizing the special quality of his own university, weighing all the risks, sensing danger, and wanting to tuck the bottle in Butler’s back pocket? And who could blame the trustees for holding that kind of energy in hand, looking across time and place at all the universities sparked by big-time athletics, recognizing the special quality of their own university, weighing all the risks, sensing opportunity, and wanting to squeeze the bottle for every last bit of value? On the day of the national championship game, Bobby Fong and Duke’s president Richard Brodhead met in Fong’s office: both Ivy Leaguers, both The Cinderella Strategy 99
English scholars and teachers, both college presidents, and both avid baseball fans. Together, they put the remarkable accomplishments of their basketball teams within the larger context of their universities, connecting the work of student-athletes to that of dancers, musicians, and scientists on their campuses. The meeting, the similarities between the two presidents, and—by inference— the similarities between the two universities were the subject of a piece in The New York Times the next day.19 Later that summer, Butler and Duke rubbed shoulders again, this time without any media coverage and with Fong a more peripheral participant. A friend of the university who was also a Duke alum arranged for a small contingent from Butler to visit Duke’s campus in Durham. Fong was there, as were Barry Collier, then-board chair John Hargrove, and previous board chair John Dunn, among a few others. Though the universities differed in a number of ways, their athletic programs shared one key feature: a flagship program in men’s basketball that was housed in a revered arena and had just earned significant exposure through the Final Four. Kevin White, vice president and director of athletics at Duke, hosted the group for a day of touring facilities and talking shop. For Collier, the trip confirmed that Butler was moving in the right direction: “I wouldn’t say it lit a fire or anything, but it was good information and an affirmation of what we were doing. Certainly some ideas that we took away that we could build on.” For Dunn, “it was huge to see what they do behind the scenes for fundraising.” For Hargrove, the idea of the visit centered on leveraging the basketball program and its recent success: “We were hoping that we could fine-tune our model at Butler based upon the Duke model, because we are first and foremost an academic school but we have this very, very visible marketing component called basketball. We wanted to know how we could meld that into a one plus one equals three type of equation.” In the end, Hargrove found the visit to be “a heck of a pep rally” that energized as much as it informed, but one practical takeaway was clear. In the course of conversation, Hargrove learned that Kevin White had made it a condition of his coming to Duke that he hold the title of vice president, and that idea “planted the seed” for Hargrove that Barry Collier needed to be elevated to the same stature at Butler. For Hargrove, this adjustment was essential if the university 100 The Cinderella Strategy
was to find that elusive synergy between academics and big-time athletics over the long-term: “The significant takeaway from Duke is to make sure that if you’re going to position athletics as a complement to academics—again, I’ll use that hacky term one plus one makes three—you want to make sure that there’s credibility within athletics, that they’re not always going to be riding in a sidecar. So, I set out to do that after the meeting.” This structural change as well as the rising salary for the head coach of the men’s basketball team was a sticking point for Fong, indicative of the trustees leaning too heavily into Butler’s flagship athletic program. Sharpening this divergence in vision was an uncommon unity in the board’s thinking. Their desire to push basketball was as resolute as Fong’s desire to check its expansion, and both saw their strategy as being in the university’s best interests. The friction mounted, until in the fall of 2010 Fong announced that he would assume the presidency at Ursinus College at the end of the academic year. The search for his successor would heat up just as Butler was, improbably, bottling lightning once more.
STR ATEGY POIN T
Align key job titles with vision Barry Collier’s title wasn’t the only one changed to signal the importance of a strategic direction on campus. In 2017, Jim Danko announced the creation of the university’s first Vice President for Strategy and Innovation, naming Melissa Beckwith to the post. The new VP position, formerly tagged as the VP of Marketing and Communications, was established to better align the role with Butler’s drive for innovation, a central pillar of the Danko administration. Beckwith has played a critical role in Butler being recognized as the No. 1 Most Innovative School in the Midwest by US News & World Report for six consecutive years. As business strategist and Forbes columnist Terina Allen advised, “the title should not be about the person in the position; it should be about the relative value the position generates for the organization.”20 Over the
The Cinderella Strategy 101
past decade, athletics and innovation have helped power Butler’s forward momentum, not in the least because of the enhanced standing of their on-campus leaders.
The Danko Presidency Butler’s second consecutive Final Four run served as a backdrop to the search for the university’s twenty-first president. During the Sweet 16, the presidential search committee was stuck in the Hilton at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago; Butler had drawn an 8-seed in the tournament, meaning a second-round game against a 1-seed, and the committee had not expected the team to advance out of the opening weekend. While the Butler basketball contingent headed south to New Orleans, members of the search committee were left in Chicago, kicking themselves for the scheduling mishap and scrambling to bars after interviews to catch the games. Jim Danko remembered interviewing during the madness, and ideas for how to leverage the basketball team’s unprecedented success were a significant topic of conversation. John Dunn, still serving as a trustee at the time, confirmed this memory: The trustees felt the university had not taken full advantage of the opportunity, so “that was one of the big questions for any candidate.” In fact, along with fundraising capacity and a vision for Butler’s growth, the ability to leverage basketball stood as one of the three main qualities that members of the search committee hoped to see in the new president. Jim Danko, 2020. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY 102 The Cinderella Strategy
In this regard, Danko had an advantage. At the time he was Dean of the School of Business at Villanova University, a position he had assumed in 2005, twenty years after Villanova’s basketball team won a national championship by playing what Sports Illustrated journalist Tim Layden called “the perfect game” to upset Georgetown. In 2004, Layden wrote a retrospective on the game that opened with the line “This game never lets go,” a reality that Danko too had experienced during his time at Villanova.21 More than twenty-five years later, the buzz from that single game still permeated the campus, giving Danko some historical familiarity with the phenomenon then occurring at Butler: “It was still very important at Villanova. When I met with the board with this run going on, I was able to reference how Villanova went through this in 1985. So my point to the Butler trustees was that you’ve got to move aggressively at this point; you’ve got to grab that lightning-in-a-bottle moment, and the way you leverage that is going to be really critical.” Danko posited that the difference lay in the time period: in 1985, universities were not as cognizant of “the name recognition, branding, and admissions play” presented by high-profile athletic success. This strategy constituted a new way of thinking for modern universities operating in a more market-driven and corporate-minded climate. In this regard, a final point of context merits discussion. In assessing the differences between Villanova in 1985 and Butler in 2011, Danko recognized the convergence of three historical trends during the 1980s that, on the surface, might appear unrelated to one another. First, rankings systems began to proliferate higher education. Second, in part to play the rankings game, certain schools began to really develop the marketing and branding arms of their operations. Third, the NCAA Tournament expanded from thirty-two teams in 1975 to sixty-four teams in 1985 just as ESPN roared to life and rewrote the market for televised college sporting events. Together, these three developments created the conditions in which a Cinderella story in men’s basketball could find nationwide visibility and provide universities with an unprecedented marketing opportunity. Danko acquired years of direct experience with the first two trends as he held posts at business schools around the country, from the University of Michigan The Cinderella Strategy 103
to the University of Washington to Dartmouth College. The movement began with BusinessWeek’s inaugural set of rankings and spread from there: “I think business schools started to pave the way around marketing and branding because they were really starting to manage business school rankings that started by BusinessWeek in 1988.” Fast-forward, and higher education institutions of all shapes and sizes have become marketing powerhouses adopting a number of the practices that first appeared on the business school landscape years ago. In addition, all institutions now have the advantage of social media. When a Cinderella waltzes across the stage today, or even when a more recognizable program like Villanova wins a national championship, as it did in 2016 and 2018, large marketing and communications teams back on campus are “cranked up and pushing that information out there, and able to leverage it more effectively.” In this way, there is indeed a new language and methodology to capitalizing upon athletic success. At bottom though, it all chases the same goal that institutions have long envisioned when investing in big-time athletics: building and retaining communities of support around the university. At Butler, Bobby Fong’s careful solidification of the economic base and nourishment of the academic program served as fuel for another period of acceleration under Jim Danko. When Danko assumed the presidency in 2011, with a fresh bottle of lightning in the university’s stores after the second Final Four run, he knew it was time to move aggressively. “My feeling was,” reflected Danko, “you’ve got to go big or go home.”
104 The Cinderella Strategy
5
CHAPTER
How Butler Rewrote Final Four History
I
f Butler did indeed have lightning in a bottle as Jim Danko assumed the presidency, just how powerful was the wattage? One way of measuring is to go back to the idea of the “good story phenomenon,” Toma and Cross’s theory that the halo effect varies in intensity depending on the quality of the narrative at its core. So, the question might be better put this way: Just how compelling was Butler’s Cinderella story? Let’s start with the statisticians. Ken Pomeroy, a former meteorologist himself who has become one of college basketball’s foremost analytics experts, pegged Butler’s chances of advancing to the national championship game in 2010 at 1.5 percent. When Butler turned around and reached the national The Cinderella Strategy 105
Brad Stevens (standing) and Mike Krzyzewski (seated) on the sidelines during the 2010 national championship game. C OURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
championship the following year, too, Nate Silver, a statistician sharp enough to have made Time’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people two years prior, tackled the question of how unlikely the Bulldogs’ second consecutive run to the final was. Using Pomeroy’s figure from the previous year and his own website’s figure of 0.9 percent for the second year, Silver calculated that Butler’s chances of making two national championship games in a row was 0.0135 percent. In Vegas parlance, that’s about 7,500-to-1 odds. As a historical reference point, Silver compared this data point to Duke’s chances of making five consecutive Final Four runs from 1988 to 1992. That feat, the stats guru suggested, had far better odds—a mere 1,600-to-1—than Butler’s.1 Bringing Duke into the conversation raises a second dimension to the potency of Butler’s Cinderella story: its literary quality. Mike Krzyzewski had taken over as head coach of men’s basketball at Duke in 1980, and by the time he stood on the opposing sideline in the 2010 national championship game, he had secured three national titles and eleven Final Four appearances for the program. Duke was a giant, and David-versus-Goliath references filled the 106 The Cinderella Strategy
sports pages and airwaves in advance of their clash with Butler, the smallest school in the history of the modern tournament to reach the final. Yet, the mystic element of Butler’s first run flowed much deeper than its opponent, all the way back to 1954 and the Milan Miracle, when tiny Milan High School outlasted 751 other teams in the IHSAA state tournament and beat perennial powerhouse Muncie Central on Bobby Plump’s last-second jump shot.
Milan High School, 1954 IHSAA state champions. C OURTESY MILAN ’54 HOOSIERS MUSEUM
Plump, of course, hit that shot in Butler Fieldhouse, where he would go on to star for Butler. Milan’s coach, Marvin Wood, also played for Tony Hinkle at Butler and coached Hinkle’s system all the way to that 1954 impossible-dream championship. In 1986, Hoosiers memorialized the Milan Miracle, introducing generations of sports fans to fictionalized versions of Bobby Plump and Marvin Wood by way of Jimmy Chitwood and Normal Dale. The filmmakers took liberties in the name of narrative, but no such elaborations were necessary for the setting or the last shot. They filmed in Hinkle Fieldhouse, conveying the The Cinderella Strategy 107
building’s aura with a simple but classic scene, and Chitwood’s jumper echoed Plump’s over the crescendo of an Oscar-nominated score. Such were the spiritual undercurrents summoned when Butler stormed through the bracket in 2010. The on-court drama only amplified the narrative. Shipped to San Jose for the first round as a 5-seed, Butler stared down a historic opponent in the University of Texas at El Paso, formerly Texas Western, whose 1966 team became the first with an all-African American starting five to win the national championship by stunning the Duke of its time, Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats, in the final game. Next, Butler faced another mid-major opponent in Murray State, invoking one of the tournament’s classic storylines when two potential Cinderellas meet in the second round and one is guaranteed a berth in the Sweet 16. Ronald Nored’s tie-breaking three-point play with 26 seconds left secured that berth through a narrow 54-52 victory. Sweet 16 play started for the Bulldogs in Salt Lake City with a matchup against 1-seed Syracuse. Hall of Fame coach Jim Boeheim’s fabled zone defense had all the edges on paper, but zone, tournament experience, 30-4 record and all, it was the Orange who opened the game stymied, down 12-1 before they got their first shot to fall. They recovered to lead 54-50 in the last four minutes when, in 72 seconds, Matt Howard came up with a steal, a blocked shot, and a layup that edged the Bulldogs to an impressive 63-59 upset and the school’s first Elite Eight appearance. With a Final Four trip in view, Butler faced the West Region’s 2-seed in Kansas State. The Bulldogs controlled the game until late, when a three-pointer put K-State up 52-51 with under five minutes left. Now, capping a 22-point tournament break-out, it was Gordon Hayward’s turn: two free throws reclaimed the lead, then two late baskets broke a 54-54 tie and propelled Butler to a 63-56 victory. The Bulldogs were Final Four bound, but of nearly equal significance to the magnetism of their Cinderella story was the destination. Indianapolis. Lucas Oil Stadium. Six miles from campus. Home. Here, Butler’s passionate fan base rallied around their team, and the rest of the country learned what the fans had known all season: that this Butler team was the best in the program’s 123-year history. These Bulldogs entered the season ranked 11th in the country. They returned to Indy with a 32-4 record, having won twenty-five straight games after going 18-0 in the Horizon 108 The Cinderella Strategy
League. They counted three of the best players in program history among their ranks: Gordon Hayward and Shelvin Mack—both of whom would go on to the NBA—as well as Matt Howard, who had been the Horizon League Player of the Year the previous season. The city buzzed. It started on campus the night of the win over Kansas State; current Butler radio play-by-play announcer Mark Minner, then a student, called it “absolute pandemonium. Campus broke loose. It was like the Hoover Dam just broke.”2 As the week sizzled toward the Final Four games on Saturday, pep rallies in downtown Indianapolis drew thousands, Butler alumni descended upon Indy, and comparisons to Hoosiers seemed to play on loop. Blue II, Butler’s live bulldog mascot, made more than thirty-five appearances. The team’s open practice at Lucas Oil Stadium the day before its semifinal game drew an astonishing crowd of well over 20,000 spectators for an event that is sparsely attended during typical Final Fours. It was not, in other words, a typical Final Four. As Zak Keefer wrote in The Indianapolis Star, “Butler had gone from an afterthought to America’s team.”3 The electricity, and the bandwagon, surged when the Bulldogs upset Tom Izzo and the Michigan State Spartans 52-50 in a slugfest. On CBS Jim Nantz evoked Hoosiers and the Milan Miracle when he proclaimed that “Butler will take the hopes of all small schools to Monday night.” As former Butler staffer and current play-by-play announcer of the Indiana Pacers Chris Denari suggested, that singular moment Butler celebrates winning the 2010 would represent the culmination West Regional Final in Salt Lake City. of a two-decade-long turnaround COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS The Cinderella Strategy 109
for Butler basketball: “When I decided to become Butler University’s first-ever Sports Marketing Director in 1989, people thought I was crazy. There was a lack of fans, little to no sponsors, and very little interest. But to help build something was special. And to sit in Lucas Oil Stadium watching the Bulldogs play Duke for the 2010 NCAA National Championship was surreal. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined a night like that.” Duke awaited, and so too did 70,000 mostly pro-Butler fans who would pack the stadium in just two days. Yet, for the purposes of assessing the power of Butler’s Cinderella story, those two days and that particular opponent were vital. In the week-long buildup to the Final Four, its location in Indianapolis had already proven unimaginably fortuitous for the university. Even so, perhaps the most significant benefits were realized over the weekend. Butler was mentioned over and over again in the same breath with Duke, a university loaded with academic prestige, culminating in the aforementioned New York Times article focusing on the meeting between their two like-minded presidents, Bobby Fong and Richard Brodhead. Most mentions were trailed by a popular talking point: that Butler, not Duke, would be the team with two Academic All-Americans on the floor Monday night. Likewise, the game’s hometown location cleared room for homespun narratives. Gordon Hayward, for instance, went to church the day before the championship game. His father described the scene: “We walked in, took our seats and he’s shaking hands with people the whole time. The pastor sidetracked the whole sermon. His first words were, ‘God wouldn’t mind if we took a moment to talk about the game.’ Then we got a round of applause. Gordon was autographing copies of the church bulletin on our way out.”4 What quainter, more affecting way to demonstrate that, in Indiana, basketball is indeed religion. Amid all the frenzy, though, the biggest narrative coup for the university happened Monday morning, when numerous eyewitness reports confirmed what couldn’t possibly have been true anywhere else: Butler players attended class on the day of the national championship game. According to beat writer David Woods, as many as eight Bulldogs showed up for their morning classes, including Hayward.5 The legacy of that story persists on campus at Butler today, and is shorthand for the university’s and the athletic program’s long-standing commitment to upholding both pieces of the student-athlete 110 The Cinderella Strategy
identity. In an era when “student” had become an almost laughable part of the major-college “student-athlete” label, Butler was in the Final Four as a breath of fresh air for purists.
STR ATEGY POIN T
Staying committed in the big moments requires practice in the small moments Looking back on the morning of the big game by Matt Howard April 5, 2010, was a unique morning. Not just because our team would be playing in the school’s first ever national championship game, but we had to be the first team in the modern era of the tournament to attend classes, in-person, on the day of the game. I didn’t have a class that morning, but many of my teammates did. After speaking with a few of them and also a couple professors, I’ve found that there is a barbell of opinions, so to speak. On one hand the setting was less than ideal for any real education and meaningful work to be accomplished. The campus was euphoric, and the energy level was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. Early April is also a slower time of the semester, with finals still over a month away. A couple of my teammates signed autographs and took pictures. In some classes a decent portion of the time was devoted to talking about the game that evening. One teammate said his class ended with the professor putting up a picture of him in his jersey and wishing him luck. Fun...for sure. Productive...not so much. A couple professors I spoke with said they thought it was crazy we were actually on campus that morning and our presence was distracting. I can assure you that our team initially thought it was crazy as well, and classes did NOT make significant progress through the syllabus on that day. However, there is unanimity in what this meant to the university. Many of my teammates have proceeded into careers in coaching and athletic
The Cinderella Strategy 111
administration. Academia and athletics can often have a strained relationship about where priorities, energies, and budgets are focused. It’s not lost on our team and coaches that Butler prides itself as a premiere academic institution, and from the moment we were being recruited, this dynamic was clearly articulated. Having a team GPA over 3.0 was not a goal: it was a minimum expectation. We practiced at 6:00 a.m. not because it was convenient for us, but because it meant we wouldn’t miss classes. As one teammate pointed out, if we were playing in Indianapolis at any other time, we would have attended class the day of that game, too. This was the standard. It was who we were. On a day when basketball was the sole focus, a light was shined on the excellence and value of a Butler education. The most important game in the program’s history was that evening, but that wasn’t going to change our approach or the fact that we, as players, signed on to be students first. The “Butler Way” required it.
Come that evening, the game held up its end of the bargain as well. A nip and tuck affair the whole way, it featured fifteen lead changes and six ties. Duke led 60-55 with two minutes to play until Butler closed to 60-59 with less than 20 seconds remaining and possession of the ball. Hayward went one on one, drifted to the baseline, and launched a step back jump shot. The shot missed. Duke’s Brian Zoubek rebounded the ball, got fouled, and went to the free-throw line to shoot with just 3.6 seconds remaining. With Duke up 61-59, Coach K decided to have Zoubek intentionally miss his second free throw, reasoning that it would be tougher for Butler to advance the ball off a miss than from out of bounds after a make. Hayward grabbed the rebound, and with help from a bruising Matt Howard screen, dribbled just past half court and launched a heave. It looked promising. Sports Illustrated’s Tim Layden wrote of the fling, “If it went in, it would be the most famous shot in college basketball history: the first desperation toss to win a national title and the last step in the ascent of a tiny mid-major school to the top of the sport. If it did not go in, it would be among the most famous misses, elevating the game simply through the delicious possibility that it might have 112 The Cinderella Strategy
dropped. Either way, the heave became historic as soon as it left Hayward’s fingertips.”6 As Layden revealed, Brad Stevens thought it was in; on Duke’s bench, associate head coach Chris Collins thought it was in; referee Tom Eades, positioned right behind Hayward with his hand held high to signal three potential, game-winning points floating through the air in Lucas Oil Stadium, thought it had a chance.7 Instead, Hayward’s shot hit the square on the backboard, bounced onto the rim, and fell off. ESPN’s Sport Science calculated that if Hayward’s shot was just three inches to the left, the ball would have hit glass and fallen through the net.8 CBS analyst Clark Kellogg, who called the championship game, said, “When you think about the best stories in college basketball history, if that shot goes in, clearly, Butler goes straight to the top.”9 In Madness: The Ten Most Memorable NCAA Basketball Finals, Mark Mehler and Charles Paikert echoed this idea: “A Butler win would have been considered by many the greatest upset in NCAA finals history and would have closed the perfect loop on a vintage, pre-packaged Cinderella story line. For this is Indiana, where basketball fables have a way of bypassing fiction and going straight to historical fact.”10 Had Butler’s Cinderella story stopped with Hayward’s shot, it would still have a claim to the most powerful of its kind in the sport. Yet, the narrative continued. Gordon Hayward, a once-in-a-generation player for Butler, departed for the NBA. Butler struggled mightily in the first half of the 2010–11 season. A loss to Youngstown State in early February gave them a three-game losing streak in the Horizon League and dropped their overall record to 14-9, which put them in danger of missing the tournament altogether. Then, they rediscovered their magic, going on a nine-game winning streak to win the Horizon League’s bid and earn an 8-seed in the NCAA Tournament. Once more, the on-court theatrics bolstered Butler’s Cinderella story. After beating Old Dominion on a last-second layup in their first game, the Bulldogs defeated 1-seed Pittsburgh in one of the wildest finishes in recent tourney history. Back in the Sweet 16 again, they hurdled Big Ten power Wisconsin before finally dethroning old tournament nemesis Florida in overtime. Butler—Butler—was back in the Final Four. Butler became the first team ever from basketball-crazed Indiana to make consecutive Final Four trips—not Purdue, not Notre Dame, not five-time The Cinderella Strategy 113
NCAA champion Indiana University. Once there, they faced a team with nearly as much if not more Cinderella buzz in 11-seed VCU, defeating them 70-62 to advance to Monday’s final. In the process, they became only the third 8-seed to reach the national championship game in tournament history and the first unranked team to do so since Kansas in 1988. Once more, the match-up worked in favor of Butler’s narrative, juxtaposing a university whose players had attended class the day of the national championship game one year earlier with a UConn program in the midst of an NCAA investigation. Indianapolis Star columnist Bob Kravitz summed up the stakes, asserting that “the Bulldogs represent the unquestionably clean, unsullied side of college athletes.”11 Before the Final Four, Barry Collier made a similar appeal: “In our mind, there’s only one way to do it, and that’s the right way…I hope people root for us because they admire our kids who are playing hard, doing well in school, helping other people, and are led by a coach who is a great communicator and leader.”12 Butler fell to UConn in one of the ugliest national championship games in recent memory, shooting a miserable 18 percent from the field. The final margin of 63-51 meant that no Butler player had a chance to recreate Gordon Hayward’s half-court heave and hope, this time, for a Bobby Plump–like result. The Bulldogs, after all, were in Houston, far from the magic of Hinkle Fieldhouse and Indianapolis. When they returned home, though, the university would be forever changed. By tacking a second Final Four run onto the previous year’s near-apotheosis of the Cinderella story, Butler’s men’s basketball team had offered its university a resource unknown to any other American college or university. The story was much more than good, and now the question would become one of what the university could do with it.
STR ATEGY POIN T
Sharing your story does not mean sacrificing humility When Professor of Chemistry Joe Kirsch attended Butler in the early
114 The Cinderella Strategy
1960s, “the story was that you’d say, ‘I’m going to Butler,’ and people would say, ‘Oh yes, that’s in Indianapolis, isn’t it? That’s a really good school.’ Then their minds would go someplace else. They’d forget it and move on.” Such was the dynamic driving Geoff Bannister’s assertion in strategic planning documents from 1994 that “We must not only be very good, we must be known to be very good.” The Final Fours not only provided the university with an unparalleled opportunity to make this move, but also lit the first steps with the types of stories that the national media spotlighted. When Jim Danko assumed the presidency and the glow of those Cinderella stories began to dim, however, the challenge lay in convincing a community built on humility that it could chart a middle ground: Butler could tell its story far and wide without denting its character. The external environment—from the ascendance of social media to the stiff competition for students and resources in higher education—demanded marketing on a larger scale, while the internal environment demanded it be done the right way. Danko listened, and in the end it was the first part of the equation from those old strategic plans that was the key: Butler’s longstanding effort to simply be very good enabled it to be known genuinely as very good whenever and wherever the story was broadcast.
The Cinderella Strategy 115
116  The Cinderella Strategy
SECTION TWO
Banner announcing Butler’s move to the Big East Conference adorns Hinkle Fieldhouse in 2013. COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
Net Gains The Cinderella Strategy 117
6
CHAPTER
Unlocking New Markets
V
irtually any Butler fan can recall where they were on July 3, 2013. There were no leaks, no rumors, nothing to soften the blow that would come from the formal news release—in a move that broke the hearts of many in the Butler community, Brad Stevens announced that he was leaving to become the 17th head coach of the Boston Celtics. It was another Cinderella story—just thirteen years earlier, Stevens had been a day from waiting tables at Applebee’s before Butler moved him into a paid position—that again seemed to leave the university on the losing end of the equation. In the years since the Final Four, Stevens had become the most coveted coach in college basketball, turning down multiple offers from other big-time 118 The Cinderella Strategy
programs. After passing on the head coach opening at UCLA, a post as tradition-laden as any in the sports, Stevens seemed primed to remain in Indianapolis and become the heir to Mike Krzyzewski’s legacy in the college game. Stevens had once told his players that he could never leave Butler for another college, but the NBA was a different story. “We have done everything we can to keep Brad Trip in Times Square. C OURTESY MICHAEL KALTENMARK here at Butler,” Jim Danko said in a press release. “However, the Celtics team has offered Brad and his family a unique opportunity with which no university can compete.” Stevens’s announcement was an emotional bombshell, as Zak Keefer detailed in an article for The Indianapolis Star entitled “The day that rocked Butler University.” Keefer traced the shockwaves around the Butler community, with stories like that of guard Alex Barlow, who thought the worst upon hearing Stevens informing the team that he was not returning. “Honestly, it was the first thing that entered my mind,” Barlow stated. “Was he sick? Was someone in his family sick?”1 The Butler fanbase was disconsolate, and the decision weighed equally on Stevens. “I was probably incoherent in that locker room,” Stevens told Keefer of the moment when he broke the news to the team. “But that’s probably a sign of how much we appreciated our thirteen years there. To work with so many great people, to make so many great friends, to go on the rise we went on…I’ve probably cried three times in my life. I cried three times that day.”2 Keefer himself nailed Stevens’s legacy and his link to the Butler fans when he concluded the piece by saying that “Stevens had become one of them, authoring from the sidelines a most improbable narrative: Butler, the Cinderella team that just kept winning, March after March after March. The heart-stopping victories. The Final Fours. The moments the players, coaches, and fans will never forget. None were quite ready for it to end.”3 The Cinderella Strategy 119
STR ATEGY POIN T
Follow your purpose Upon graduating from DePauw University, Brad Stevens accepted a good-paying job at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly in Indianapolis. But Stevens missed basketball. He coached summer camps at Butler while working for Lilly, then accepted an offer to become a volunteer assistant for the men’s basketball team in 2000. The job paid nothing and his parents weren’t thrilled with the decision. Stevens took a job at Applebee’s to make money while volunteering. The day before he was to start at Applebee’s, he was promoted to Director of Basketball Operations at Butler. The position paid only $18,000 a year, despite its 14-hour-plus days. Stevens called it, “as enjoyable a year as I ever had.”4 Seven years later, Stevens was named the head coach at Butler and then in 2013 accepted the head coaching position of the Boston Celtics. Stevens’s career trajectory demonstrates an idea that recent research has borne out: passion is developed far more often than it is discovered. We do not find our passions so much as we actively grow them, often amid challenges and across long periods of time. Critical to this distinction, according to Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Jon M. Jachimowicz, is a sense of purpose. “Focus on what you care about, not what is fun,” wrote Jachimowicz, “focusing on what you love associates passion with what you enjoy and what makes you happy, whereas focusing on what you care about aligns passion with your values and the impact you want to have.”5
Stevens won more games in his first six years as a head coach than any other coach in NCAA history, posting a 166-49 record, including a 12-5 mark in NCAA Tournament play. Adding to the difficulty of his departure was the timing: Butler was due to join the Big East that season, a massive leap in terms of athletic competition. Before the opportunity with the Celtics arose, Jim Danko recalled that Stevens had told him the men’s basketball team “wasn’t quite ready to compete at that level.” Reading the tea leaves, many on 120 The Cinderella Strategy
Danny Ainge (left) and Brad Stevens at Stevens’s introductory press conference with the Boston Celtics. COURTESY GETTY IMAGES
a national level predicted the demise of Butler basketball. On the day of the announcement, ESPN’s Eamonn Brennan wrote, “It’s impossible to overstate how devastating this is for Butler. It really is that bad…Now Butler is just another team with an adorable mascot. Instead of a triumphal beginning to a new era of ‘major conference’ basketball, the Bulldogs will enter the new Big East scrambling to replace the most sought-after young coach in America… The short term is going to be a massive challenge. The long-term future already looks less bright.”6 This view, of course, was entirely basketball-focused. From a university perspective, regardless of who was coaching the school’s flagship athletic team, the long-term future for Butler looked much brighter precisely because of the Big East. This move, in fact, was the single most important development in the university’s effort to parlay the Final Four runs into something much bigger, and much more lasting. Borshoff’s Billion After the first Final Four, the athletic department commissioned two media groups to assess the value of the publicity earned through print, television, and online coverage of the tournament run. According to a press release from The Cinderella Strategy 121
April 2011 on the athletic department’s website, the total value was north of $639 million, with more than $450 million coming through online publicity and $100 million from CBS’s broadcast of the national championship game against Duke. A formal update on the university’s progress toward its strategic plan goals from around the same time lists slightly different numbers, pegging the overall value at $447 million based on a valuation of online coverage at $337 million for over 51,000 articles. Likewise, the two documents couch website traffic in different terms, with the press release reporting 68,192 hits and the strategic plan update citing an increase of 291 percent in visits to the Butler website.7 As these reports were released, the athletic department again contracted with Borshoff Media to provide a follow-up study assessing the effects of the second Final Four run. When the dust settled, the final valuation for back-toback Cinderella stories was somewhere north of $1 billion. Again, the number varied depending on the source: a Washington Post article pegged it around $1 billion, as did David Woods in his book, while a column on ESPN.com cited $1.2 billion.8 Barry Collier put the number in the middle, at $1.1 billion, and acknowledged that the calculation represented the best estimate of a value that is inherently difficult to measure. “Those are soft numbers somewhat,” he said, “but it was a big deal.” If ever there was a summation of the halo effect, that’s it: whatever the numbers, however tricky the measurements, everything still looks big. Undoubtedly, between television, social media, and online coverage, the first benefit that accrues to any university at the heart of a Cinderella story, whether they do anything or not, is name recognition. When Butler began the 2010 tournament in San Jose, California, fans who traveled with the team routinely faced questions in their hotel lobby about where the university was located. Two and a half weeks later, however, the voice of the President of the United States echoed off the walls of Hinkle Fieldhouse: Barack Obama was on the speakerphone in Brad Stevens’s office, the team huddled around to receive his congratulations despite finishing as the tournament’s runner-up.9 In a flash, Butler had become a household name across the nation. Pick a Butler die-hard who lived through the Cinderella runs, and chances are they will 122 The Cinderella Strategy
have a story about how some token of Butler identification—a shirt, a logo, a passing reference in conversation—that formerly went unnoticed suddenly began drawing attention. Marc Allan, Butler’s former news manager, recalled a telling example. “The day after we lost to Duke, we had two of our chemistry professors get the first patent in the university’s history. That got almost no attention. Tiny, little story. I don’t think any television network mentioned it or anything like that. But, nobody is trading baseball cards for chemistry professors. Basketball is our ticket, and that’s the ultimate benefit to our university. People who’ve never heard of Butler now start looking at this school and, hopefully, we have the goods to show them we’ve got some other things here.” The halo effect brings visibility, and with visibility comes opportunity. Yet, it is fleeting. Those who have studied the halo effect suggest that it can last anywhere from one to four years, but at a certain point, new seasons and new narratives push it aside.10 By March 28, 2013, Butler had bowed out of the NCAA Tournament and the Sweet 16 featured a new crop of media darlings, with 9-seed Wichita State taking on 13-seed La Salle for a spot in the Elite Eight. Butler, however, had something more durable on which to hang their hat. Eight days earlier they had officially announced their move to the Big East. Landing in the East It’s easy to suggest that the stars aligned for Butler to transition into the Big East with their Final Four runs and Stevens’s ascension developing just as the conference began to split along its football/non-football fault line. Yet, that view ignores the many hands at work on the ground. Jim Danko in particular deserves a great deal of credit for navigating the move. In the interim between his acceptance of the Butler presidency and his departure from Villanova’s School of Business, Danko had an exchange with Villanova’s athletic director Vince Nicastro and men’s basketball head coach Jay Wright. The fissure between football schools and basketball schools in the Big East was widening, and while at that point a full-blown collapse seemed unlikely, the three discussed the possibility of “a fantasy basketball conference of like-type schools.” Danko pegged the chances of the Big East breaking up and pursuing Butler The Cinderella Strategy 123
at about 20 percent at the time. Still, he stayed in touch with his contacts at Villanova. When Butler leapt to the Atlantic 10 in 2012, he also went so far as to disclose to them that Butler was willing to exit their new conference if the Big East ever did splinter.11 When that very thing happened the following year and the Big East went looking for additional teams, Danko strengthened Butler’s negotiating position by banding together with its on-court rival, Xavier University. Danko reached out to his presidential counterpart at Xavier and suggested that they “form an alliance and stay aligned in their negotiating efforts.” Butler and Xavier became a package deal, and the strategy proved fruitful as the Big East added Butler, Xavier, and Creighton to the original “Catholic Seven,” rounding out conference membership at ten schools.
Kamar Baldwin and Butler welcome Villanova to Hinkle. C OURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
Unequivocally, basketball and in particular the Final Fours opened the door. Providence Athletic Director Robert Driscoll said of Butler’s invitation, “I would be disingenuous if I didn’t say that two Final Four appearances and 124 The Cinderella Strategy
what they were able to do with probably less resources than they have now being in the Big East tells you about their commitment to basketball and the tradition.”12 To be sure, there was a certain amount of financial and competitive risk tied to the move. Butler’s resources were paltry in comparison with most of its new peers, entering the league with an endowment that ranked ninth out of the league’s ten members. “We realize our budget relative to some of the other schools is not at the same level,” Danko said at the time of the move.13 Of perhaps greater concern was Butler’s identity, a long-standing point of pride for members of the community. “I worry that it’s a dance with the devil,” said Margaret Brabant, a political science professor who served as chairperson of the Butler Faculty Senate at the time. “It’s multimillions of dollars, and money changes people. And if we don’t remain vigilant and ask questions, we will go the way of other institutions.”14 Yet, by another perspective, it was precisely Butler’s soul that allowed the university to walk through that open door with confidence. Butler was the only non-Catholic school in the new Big East and with a touch of humor, Danko was presented with a collar at the announcement. The image was one of the university entering a network of like-minded peers: serious academic institutions with missions rooted in social justice and visions in the present day of a national footprint. At the announcement commemorating Butler’s membership, Danko said, “Joining the Big East is an unprecedented opportunity for Butler and represents an ideal fit for us—academically, athletically, and geographically.”15 Reflecting years later on the move, Danko linked the basketball move to the university’s ambitions: “We’re playing on a bigger court. We want the university to play on that same court. So being in the Big East now has us in the same conversation with those types of schools, and that’s really been the strategy.” In the intervening years, Danko has continued to solidify Butler’s membership in the conference, serving as chair of the Big East Board of Directors. (He has also served on the NCAA Division I Presidential Advisory Group and is currently chair of the Pioneer Football League President’s Council.) Counterintuitively, the rapid-fire succession of moving from the Horizon League to the Atlantic 10 to the Big East in a three-year period aimed at stability all along. Speaking about Butler Athletics, Barry Collier could have The Cinderella Strategy 125
easily been describing the outlook for the university as a whole. “I think of this as more of a fifty-year decision,” he said, again hammering home the long-view approach of Butler’s leadership. “It is unimaginable that there is a better league out there than what we’re in. When we were in the other leagues, we didn’t have the options that we do now.”18 Brad Stevens echoed this idea, noting in 2013 how Butler’s ability to navigate an inevitable shift in the college basketball landscape left the school well-positioned for the future: “It’s really a great move for Butler, big-picture. One of the things I don’t like doing is bouncing around league-to-league because certainly you want stability. It makes your job more manageable. But at the same time, there’s no question that as these leagues have split and all this realignment has occurred, we knew this was coming down the pike with the basketball-centric schools. I’m really excited we’re in this league.”19
STR ATEGY POIN T
The compound interest of saying “no” Butler’s decision to reject scholarship football and form the Pioneer League in 1991 has yielded continuing returns over the ensuing years. The move to a premier athletic conference lay more than two decades away, but Butler’s hard stance on big-time football aligned the university with its future Big East peers way back when the Bulldogs were still just trying to scale the Horizon League standings. “We don’t have football distractions,” commissioner Val Ackerman said upon the formation of the new Big East. She did, however, also note that this can be a double-edged sword. “We don’t have football revenue either, and that does set us apart from the leagues that we’re competing against for coaches and for facilities development and ultimately for student-athletes.”16 Yet, with the onset of COVID-19 and the massive loss of revenue that many football-dependent athletic departments are facing, Butler finds itself on the right side of that sword again. Speaking in October 2020, Barry Collier
126 The Cinderella Strategy
made clear that while Butler Athletics is “not out of the woods” and still needs to cover a significant shortfall, the “magnitude of scale” is smaller. “We don’t have the impact that football is having on those [schools] from a financial standpoint.”17
In little time, the sum has proved greater than its parts. In 2020, Jay Wright expressed pleasant surprise at how far the new Big East had come in just six years (Figure 2). “I just feared it could never be the same,” he admitted. “And it’s not the same. It’s not. It’s totally different. But I never thought it would be this successful. I’m really amazed. It’s bigger and better than I ever imagined.”20 For its part athletically, Butler has risen to the challenge. The men’s basketball team remains every bit the flagship program, and their peer athletes have enjoyed equal and in some cases more success. Women’s soccer claimed the school’s first Big East championship in the fall of 2015, followed by softball in the spring of 2016. Men’s soccer won a conference tournament on Butler’s campus, and men’s tennis won the school’s fourth Big East title in the spring of 2017. Cross-country and indoor track have registered third-place Figure 2: Men’s Basketball Wins Among New Big East Programs, 2010–2020 300 269 231
200
227
220
207
196
191
188 168
118
100
0
va no
lla
Vi
n to
gh ei Cr
r
vie Xa
r
te et qu ar
tle
Bu
M
ce
en
id ov Pr
l
n to Se
l Ha
n
w to ge or e G
. St
’s hn
Jo
l
u Pa
De
The Cinderella Strategy 127
finishes, and even programs that struggled in the first few years of the transition have improved. Women’s basketball finished no better than eighth from 2015 to 2017, but in the last two years, the program has finished in the top four. Off the playing surface, Butler Athletics has realized other benefits as well. Sharon Clark has been the Butler women’s volleyball coach for more than two decades. Clark said she used to have to educate recruits on the Horizon League and its members, but the move to the Big East changed the conversation. “When I go to Texas to recruit,” she said, “people know Butler.”21 The geographical realignment held academic advantages as well. “We are in class more because we are flying to conference games rather than busing,” head softball coach Scott Hall said. “Now we are getting on flights on Friday evening and flying back Sunday.”22 Competition—the right kind of competition—can make everyone better. Butler’s transition into the Big East signaled a willingness to embrace the challenge of competing on a higher level across all segments of the university. The risk of such competition is a cycle of public failure that can become demoralizing over time, but the payoffs are in the company you keep. To that end, the greatest and most lasting victory of the Big East for Butler has been off the court, in the new networks and markets the move has unlocked. Crossing Over to Academics Professor of Finance Steven Dolvin joined the university in 2004, on the heels of Butler’s breakthrough into the Sweet 16 one year earlier. He attributed his initial awareness of the institution to its basketball team and found himself in the stands at Lucas Oil Stadium years later with an agonizingly good view of Gordon Hayward’s half-court heave. Given Dolvin’s expertise, the athletic department asked if he would analyze the incremental changes in a variety of measures after the Final Four runs, including enrollment, ticket sales, sponsorships, and giving. After plenty of number-crunching, he concluded that the Big East was a “more significant move” for the university than the Final Fours, and for a reason much more difficult to quantify. “You then get attached to other universities and so you get co-reputational effects that cross over,” he said. “It’s not viewed as a fluke necessarily anymore, and so you’re considered 128 The Cinderella Strategy
in a higher tier and that has more than just athletic effects. It has academic effects as well.” Kate Morris, Butler’s provost, concurred with Dolvin’s conclusion about both the Big East being the ultimate resource, with co-reputational effects the dividends: “I would say probably the biggest direct academic impact would be that the Final Fours allowed us to get ourselves into the Big East, where the academic quality of our cohort in the conference is just so much higher than what we were in before. Moving to the A-10 was a good step in the right direction, and then moving to the Big East even more so.” Numerous others confirmed that the move to the Big East, while ambitious, generated widespread enthusiasm because of the academic implications. Word trickled across campus to Hinkle Fieldhouse, where Associate Athletic Director Mike Freeman issued what has become a common refrain: “The move to the Big East has been great for the university, academically being in with those other private schools in major metropolitan areas with similar characteristics. To be in the same league with the Georgetowns and Villanovas of the world is really good for our university because Butler is a great place, too.”23 Academically speaking, Georgetown is the heavyweight, with an endowment north of $1.8 billion as of 2019, more than $200 million in annual expenditures on research and development, and a ranking of 23rd in the 2021 edition of the US News & World Report (USNWR) list of national universities, the most prestigious collection of universities among the publications many ranking sets. Villanova is no slouch either, coming in at 53rd on the same list with UConn—having re-joined the Big East in 2020—trailing just behind at 63rd and also ranking 23rd on the USNWR list of top public universities. Butler holds its own in this regard with a collection of rankings that reflect its academic excellence. In the most recent set of USNWR “Best Colleges Rankings,” the university was recognized: • No. 1 Regional University in the Midwest for the third straight year; • No. 1 Most Innovative School for the sixth straight year; • No. 3 for Undergraduate Teaching in the Midwest; • And, within the top-30 nationally for first-year experience, senior capstone, and study abroad opportunities. The Cinderella Strategy 129
In changing its peer network, Butler has had to strike a difficult balance between using the competitive pressures to make improvements while not comparing themselves directly to their counterparts, many of whom had a significant head start in terms of scale and available resources. To that end, they have proceeded by bolstering the work that began before the conference realignment. Gains in faculty compensation, a factor in the USNWR ranking formula, provide a good example. Amid the Final Fours and the move to the Big East, the university conducted a review of faculty compensation that identified a need to increase pay in order to recruit and retain top faculty. “We began studying faculty salaries when Dr. Fong was still President,” said Ena Shelley, Dean Emerita of the College of Education. We used CUPA [College and University Professional Association] data which made it possible for us to compare salaries to institutions similar to us. We determined which level (full professor, associate professor, assistant professor) had the greatest disparity and began steps to move that group up the scale. (It was the full professors who had gone many years with 0-1 percent raises, and they were hired in at low salaries many years ago.) The work continued when we joined the Big East but we didn’t necessarily compare our salaries to the Big East schools. The university has continued to make good strides in making faculty salaries more equitable and competitive. Provost Morris and President Danko have done a remarkable job of making faculty compensation a priority over the last decade.” Butler’s rise to national prominence on the basketball scene also aided in the recruitment of high-quality teachers and scholars. Hessam Sarooghi came to the university in 2016 as an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Lacy School of Business. Saroogi is originally from Iran. When asked if Butler’s basketball program played any role in his knowledge and decision to come to the university, he responded, “Definitely. I first learned about Butler through their basketball team.” Shelley noted a similar finding when recruiting faculty candidates to the College of Education. “Many applicants knew of Butler through men’s basketball,” she confirmed, before adding, “so thank you, Barry Collier!”
130 The Cinderella Strategy
The Power of New Markets Alongside the boost in academic network, the Big East opened new markets in the East Coast’s most prominent cities, a vital component of Butler’s push for national standing. With its athletic teams flying east, Butler’s name found a foothold in the Washington, DC (Georgetown), Philadelphia (Villanova), New York City (St. John’s), and Boston (Providence) areas. (It also bears mentioning that Brad Stevens’s move to the Celtics has provided an additional and high-profile reference point for Butler in the Boston market, where professional sports far outweigh college sports in terms of cultural relevancy.) The university has reinforced this position by engaging alumni, donors, employers, corporate partners, and prospective students in and around these key markets. The Big East’s television deal with Fox Sports and its insistence on keeping the men’s basketball conference tournament rooted in its traditional location at Madison Square Garden keep Butler’s East Coast presence simmering. By the 2016–17 season, viewership for men’s basketball games on FS1 and FS2 had increased 84 percent from the conference’s inaugural season with FOX Sports in 2013-14, tallying an average of 192,000 viewers per game.24 Following suit, the 2018 Big East tournament scored as the network’s most-watched conference tournament ever with an average of 379,000 viewers over nine games, including just under 1.5 million who tuned in to watch Villanova defeat Providence in overtime to win the conference championship. The Villanova/Providence tilt registered the fourth highest viewership ever for a college basketball game on FOX.25 On site at Madison Square Garden, the tournament’s five sessions drew an average of 18,790 fans in 2018, the highest mark for any conference tournament that year. “I am impressed and surprised and thrilled about where we are,” Jay Wright said, adding that the atmosphere for Villanova’s win over Providence “was like the old days.”26 In 2018, the conference brokered a twoyear extension to its deal with Madison Square Garden, locking the tournament into the historic arena through 2028.27 Ted Lowrie summed up the effect of Butler’s new East Coast presence for an alumnus used to being geographically removed from his alma mater. “Living on the East Coast as I do, prior to 2010 when I was asked where I went to college I had to explain that Butler was a small school located in Indianapolis. Most people The Cinderella Strategy 131
out here had either never heard of Butler or made a vague reference to it being a basketball school. The national recognition that Butler now enjoys, thanks to the two runs at the national championship and since joining the Big East, has put Butler on the map. I find that when mentioning Butler, it is acknowledged by others that Butler is a great basketball school, but it has also been ‘discovered’ as a leading school academically. Since joining the Big East a wonderful benefit for me and other East Coasters is most games are now televised. We can feel a part of Butler Pride—even though we are hundreds of miles from Hinkle.” Indeed, the transition to the Big East has sparked an increase in alumni activity along the East Coast. Pregame receptions for the Butler-Georgetown basketball game in Washington, DC, draw crowds of more than 100 alumni, and with every conference game nationally televised, alumni chapters gather consistently in DC and New York to cheer on the Bulldogs. In 2019, an alumni chapter was launched in Boston. New trustees hailing from Boston, New York, and Washington DC, have since been added to the board, giving the trustees a more geographically diverse makeup that mirrors Butler’s expanding identity. The fruits of this more nationwide appeal have fallen directly into student hands as well. Steven Dolvin mentioned how he had heard from quite a few employers that Butler’s name recognition was now keeping alumni’s résumés from being tossed without a second glance during job applications. He referenced one former student who had recently landed a position at Google and speculated that, ten years ago, the student’s résumé might not have received the attention it did in the present day. Jon Loftin, the COO and President of MJ Insurance, an insurance firm that is a major recruiter of Butler students, elaborated on this dynamic from the perspective of his own industry. Loftin noted that “Butler’s overall brand awareness was definitely enhanced by the rise of the basketball program, most notably the Final Fours. I have a broad network of industry professionals around the country and there was a definite shift from ‘Where is Butler?’ prior to the Final Fours to being very aware of where Butler is and an elevated level of respect. So, it’s without question that the Final Fours and move to the Big East provided a spotlight to bring awareness to what the school was already doing before the Final Fours.” New York City in particular has been a locus for these combined effects. 132 The Cinderella Strategy
Butler students make the ”Wall Street Trek” in 2019. COURTESY GRAHAM HONAKER
Fundraising staff now have natural reason to visit New York annually for the conference tournament. East Coast donors not previously on the radar made major gifts in the years that followed the move to the Big East. A parent of two Butler students from New York made a $1 million gift to support the new building for the Lacy School of Business. In 2014, a Butler alumnus created a “Wall Street Trek” program, funding ten business students to visit New York over fall break. In 2019, another Butler trustee from the city permanently endowed the program. The Wall Street Trek fostered significant university partnerships with major corporate players. Companies like JP Morgan and Johnson & Johnson host students on the trek and have begun recruiting alumni more aggressively. In addition, the Big East affiliation has allowed Butler students to annually attend the conference’s career fair in New York. Even when it’s not necessarily the Butler name that helps open the door for students, it helps in other often unseen ways. Ari Gerstein, a 2019 graduate, was hired as a Leveraged Finance and Corporate Client Banking Analyst straight out of Butler by JP Morgan in New York City. Gerstein explained how his own job-hunting efforts merged with Butler’s forward momentum. “Butler’s increased brand awareness through joining the Big East Conference definitely helped me at points in the interview process,” he reflected. “Most The Cinderella Strategy 133
banks in NYC hire from East Coast schools, and while many employees come from Ivy League schools, some come from St. John’s, Villanova, Georgetown, and other well-known schools also in the Big East. Although Butler’s name might not have gotten me in the door for interviews (this might have been my networking and other résumé points), it did carry lots of conversations about basketball when interviewing with those who went to Big East schools, which ultimately helps a lot in interviews. At my current role, I have almost ten colleagues who went to Georgetown, which has a huge draw on Wall Street, so going to Butler was definitely helpful in getting my job.” The enthusiasm for and recognition of Butler has even spread underground, where Dan Cooreman, a 1976 graduate who has lived in New York City for thirty years, can often be found sporting his Bulldog gear. “To me, the fast-growing awareness of Butler in NYC can be measured by ‘the cap test.’ Since moving to the city, I have often worn a Butler baseball cap when I’m riding on the subway. In the early 2000s, my cap was almost never noticed. Of course, that’s hardly unusual in a city where few things faze anyone. But over the last decade, my cap often sparks grins of recognition—not to mention some shouts of ‘Go Dawgs!’—from total strangers.” There is of course no way to measure the full impact of these small, everyday moments: how they spark connections between strangers, grease the wheels of important conversations, turn the drudgery of the morning commute into a simple shared smile. But, when a university name moves from unknown to known to shorthand in a global metropolis, that is a sure sign of mounting prestige. The move to the Big East stands as the singular inflection point in the university’s effort to leverage the opportunities made available by the Final Fours. Whereas the halo effect naturally fades over time, Butler extended its magic, not just temporally but geographically as well. In short, the Big East enabled Butler to reverse the clock on the halo; now, instead of ticking down to a final buzzer, it simply ticks on. Each of the next three chapters focuses on a critical function of a small, private university’s existence—enrollment, marketing, and fundraising. In each case, it becomes clear how Butler personnel have used these continued and expanded opportunities to transform the institution’s core operations.
134 The Cinderella Strategy
7
CHAPTER
Boosting Enrollment and Shaping the Student Body
T
wenty-six years before Gordon Hayward’s shot arced through the air toward an uncertain target, another ball followed the same path, carrying the Cinderella story in its parabola. In this case, it was a football, flung through the Miami sky from the right hand of a diminutive quarterback, wearing the jersey of a university with mostly regional renown. Somehow, the ball found its mark, giving Boston College a shocking victory over Miami University and cementing Doug Flutie’s status as a college football legend. Albeit with different stakes, a different ball, and a different ending, the moment was a spiritual forebear to Hayward’s near-miracle. CBS again played an essential role, as sportswriter Joe Posnanski relayed in reflecting upon the The Cinderella Strategy 135
Butler’s 2017 incoming class. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY
legacy of the play decades later: “CBS had worked hard to give America this game. Boston College and Miami were supposed to play earlier in the season, but CBS saw ratings gold. Here you had the undersized quarterback savant Doug Flutie leading a scrappy Boston College team that constantly punched above its weight. There you had Miami, the bruising and preposterously talented defending national champions, led by their tall, gawky and utterly precise quarterback Bernie Kosar. Every great sports story has at least a little bit of David and a little bit of Goliath, and CBS paid $80,000 to buy Miami out of its scheduled game with Rutgers so that they could present this BC-Miami version to a national audience on the day we now call Black Friday. The biggest college football audience of the year tuned in.”1 The story goes that Boston College received a flood of applications from prospective students in the wake of Flutie’s Hail Mary, in no small part because of how many eyeballs witnessed the event on television screens across the country. Over a decade later, scholars began digging into the idea that high-profile athletic success can trigger abnormal surges in admissions applications. They christened the phenomenon the “Flutie Effect” and disagreed about whether it was real or not. These days, the general consensus is that an increase in applications does indeed follow a successful season in either football or men’s basketball, but that such an upswing lasts for several years at most.2 Yet, even if the theory has legs, there’s a problem: that’s not what actually happened at Boston College. Michael Malec is Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Boston 136 The Cinderella Strategy
College, where he began teaching in 1968. He is also a basketball junkie and used to be a regular participant in BC’s quietly legendary “noonball” pickup games, where professional athletes—including Flutie—would occasionally trade passes and elbows with the regular crowd of administrators, faculty, and staff, and where Malec once tore a meniscus getting trucked by a Jesuit priest.3 Malec lived through Boston College’s transformation from a little-known commuter school to a prestigious, nationally ranked university. The Flutie Effect didn’t match his experience, so he began investigating on the side. His conclusion mirrors what most BC insiders acknowledge: that Flutie’s pass only solidified enrollment gains after a decade’s worth of other successful maneuvers, including the move to a fully co-ed student body, an aggressive dormitory construction plan, and prudent financial and strategic planning under a strong leadership team. For insiders then, the Flutie Effect is less about a sudden admissions boom, and more about an amplification of enrollment trends already at play. It was this type of Flutie Effect that landed in Indianapolis with Gordon Hayward’s heave. To realize its full power, however, Butler first had to take the lid off its student body. Mission-Minded Growth Like most small colleges and universities, Butler has a long history of tuition dependency. Yet, attempting to boost enrollment can come with trade-offs, and for this reason Bobby Fong placed a hard ceiling on the growth of the undergraduate student body for most of his tenure. From the time Fong arrived in 2001, the admissions target for the entering class was 915 students each year, allowing the university to maintain a full-time undergraduate FTE of around 3,800 since 2003. At the time of the “Dare to Make a Difference” strategic plan in 2009, Butler remained committed to this strategy, even as tuition and student fees accounted for 76 percent of the university’s annual budget the preceding fiscal year. Demographic changes—largely the declining number of high school graduates nationwide and particularly in the Midwest—led decision-makers to conclude that “it would be sound policy to seek to sustain our present student body size, which will take increased effort, particularly in attracting a larger applicant pool.”4 The Cinderella Strategy 137
In addition to the demographic influence, the reason behind the enrollment cap appears to have been mission-related. One year later, when the stance shifted in part due to a national economic recession, the decision to begin recruiting larger classes was framed in terms of Butler’s academic program in a quarterly update to the strategic plan: “There is a gathering consensus that we can sustain our mission of personalized liberal and professional education even if the full-time undergraduate student enrollment were to rise to 4,200.”5 To kick-start this change, the university budgeted an additional $325,000 for admissions work in 2010–11 and banked upon the additional resource of the first Final Four to “help us in enlarging the applicant pool.”6 When the search began for Fong’s successor, the trustees wanted someone “who could take Butler to the next level,” which in large part meant increasing enrollment, visibility, and fundraising. Jim Danko fit this bill, in part because of his belief that surviving the gloomy forecast for smaller institutions in the present day demanded pushing on the enrollment lever. “We could have made a conservative, cost-containment play but I don’t know that we would have been better off,” Danko said, reflecting on Butler’s position at the time. “I’d seen a lot of smaller universities with situations that were getting worse and worse, so in my mind, there really was only one play to achieve what Butler wanted: we needed to grow the applicant pool.” Danko insisted the university could sustain its mission and educational product beyond the 4,200-student threshold set at the end of the Fong era. He and the trustees reasoned that a cap of 5,000 undergraduates would enable the institution to grow without jeopardizing the sense of intimate community that had become a hallmark. Accordingly, the “Butler 2020” strategic plan called for the growth of undergraduate enrollment to 4,700 students by the 2020–21 academic year. While being careful not to overbuild, the university contracted with American Campus Communities for the construction and maintenance of two new dorms, speeding the addition of nearly 1,300 beds to the campus in the span of only a few years. By the fall of 2018, Butler had already met its goal. As Table 2 shows, the big picture for Butler admissions is one of sustained growth in applications, first-year class size, and total undergraduate enrollment over many years. 138 The Cinderella Strategy
Table 2: Butler Undergraduate Enrollment Trends. S OURCE: BUTLER UNIVERSITY FACT BOOK
First-year applications
First-year fulltime enrollment
Undergraduate full-time enrollment
Fall 2007
5,625
987
3,845
Fall 2008
5,923
934
3,825
Fall 2009
6,246
945
3,897
Fall 2010
6,670
1,049
4,051
Fall 2011
9,518
926
4,034
Fall 2012
9,682
1,101
4,173
Fall 2013
9,357
1,014
4,296
Fall 2014
10,103
969
4,229
Fall 2015
9,948
1,024
4,211
Fall 2016
12,937
1,255
4,458
Fall 2017
14,635
1,054
4,426
Fall 2018
16,418
1,326
4,726
Fall 2019
14,891
1,116
4,713
Fall 2020
14,592
1,102
4,571
As with Flutie and Boston College, the Final Fours accelerated trends that began to surface at Butler in the final years of Bobby Fong’s presidency. Associate Director of Admission Chris Potts, who graduated from Butler in 2003 and has worked in admissions there since then, suggested that enrollment was already “on an upswing for sure,” perhaps owing in part to Sweet 16 appearances in 2003 and 2007. As he continued, however, “I don’t know if we would have ever gotten to where we are now, or at least in the time frame that we did, without those two back-to-back Final Four runs.” The increase The Cinderella Strategy 139
in applications certainly jumps off the page. Potts suggested that given the timing of the admissions cycle, one would expect to see evidence of the Flutie Effect at least one year out from the event in question. Butler’s trend line fits this notion, with a 42 percent increase in first-year applications one admissions cycle removed from the first Final Four. The surge took root, with periodic jolts in subsequent years that peaked again with a record-high 16,418 applications during the fall 2018 cycle. In terms of acceptances, Butler matriculated the largest first-year class in its history in the fall of 2010, before the first Final Four run could exert any substantive influence on the numbers; at that point applications were up nearly 40 percent from 2004 after a fairly steady increase over the preceding six years. Subsequent to the Final Fours, however, Butler brought in three more record-breaking classes in the fall of 2012, 2016, and 2018 as applications continued to climb. It is essential to note that even with the increasing numbers, Butler’s academic profile improved along several key measures. The academic credentials of the incoming class held steady for the better part of two decades before ticking up in the most recent years. From 2001–02 to 2016–17, ACT scores in the 75th percentile ranged from 28 to 30, SAT math scores at the 75th percentile from 630 to 650, and SAT reading scores at the 75th percentile from 620 to 630. By the fall of 2019, ACT scores sat at 30, while SAT math had risen to 670 and SAT reading to 660.7 Average GPAs for the incoming class followed the same path, moving from 3.74 in the fall of 2009, to 3.8 in the fall of fall of 2016, to 3.92 in the fall of 2020. Meanwhile, even as more students filled the classrooms and labs across campus, per-student spending on instruction, research, and related educational experiences jumped from $24,329 in 2009 to $31,417 in 2019. Amid the push to expand the student body, the Admissions Office has continued to recruit with institutional fit in mind, similar to their counterparts in the Athletics Department. To hear Chris Potts talk of the university’s recruitment strategy in the present day calls to mind the approach of generations of Butler basketball coaches in fielding their teams, from Tony Hinkle on down: “We want everybody, from the time that they start looking at Butler 140 The Cinderella Strategy
The Dawg Pound welcomes ESPN’s College Gameday to Hinkle for the first time in January 2013. COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
to the time they graduate from here, and even as alums, we want everyone to know, ‘This is who we are. We’re not trying to put on a false front. We’re not trying to sell you something.’ That’s worked well for us over the years. It does us no good to bring somebody here, or to really sell somebody on Butler, and then they get here and say, ‘Well, this is not what you said it was going to be.’ That’s just not good for anybody. So we are very passionate overall about living by our values and helping people find the right fit.” Provost Kate Morris elaborated on the similarities, noting how the student body, much like Butler’s basketball players, has become the keeper of this culture as much as any employee of the university. “When you come to visit our campus, you get the sense that the students really are all in in a special way. If you like that as a prospective student, then you come here; if you don’t, then you don’t come here.” Philosophical similarities aside, in the present day Butler athletics also remains an important enrollment tool in ways that reflect the university’s “big school feel with an ideal size,” according to Lori Greene, Butler’s Vice President for Enrollment Management. In the former sense, athletics and particularly a big-time basketball program continue to serve as a front porch The Cinderella Strategy 141
for prospective students. In the latter sense, Butler’s small size and tuition-dependence are reflected in the fact that football remains an essential lever for attracting a significant portion of male students to the institution each year. Yet, Professor of Chemistry Joe Kirsch senses that Butler has now forged “a pathway independent and outside of athletics to grow the university.” With regard to enrollment, “the university has its own agenda,” Kirsch suggested, “and if athletics can help, that’s fine.” Perhaps nowhere is this dynamic more evident than back at Hinkle Fieldhouse. The Office of Admission often hosts groups of college counselors, and Greene recalled a contingent from Michigan that was on campus a few years back. Per the usual practice, the admissions staff reserved Hinkle for a few minutes to let the counselors hoist a few shots in the historic gymnasium. “It was a huge hit,” Greene reported, “they loved it, so that was a connection for us.” It seems logical then to assume that campus tours for prospective students would also leverage the building’s mystique. In a wistful tone, Chris Potts revealed that this is no longer the case. “We’d love to hit Hinkle, but everyone would want to stop and take pictures. The footprint of campus is getting so big that we don’t have time any more really.” Diversifying the Student Body As it grew, the student body also changed shape. After studying the effects of the Final Four runs across the university, Steven Dolvin suggested that the incremental value of the increase in applications hit a ceiling pretty quickly given that the university could only accommodate small increases to the size of the student body in the years immediately afterward. From his perspective, the greater effect came in the composition of the student body. Butler began to draw students from a broader region, and in the fall of 2011 the university enrolled the first incoming class with an out-of-state majority in its history. This trend has persisted into the present day, with 57 percent of the fall 2020 cohort hailing from outside of Indiana. Dolvin further speculated that different colleges likely received more of the enrollment windfall than others, if only because athletic success might have a greater appeal to students inclined toward certain majors. He spoke from his experience in the Lacy School of Business, 142 The Cinderella Strategy
where the “perfect storm” arose: the school’s steady climb in national rankings systems dovetailed with the increased visibility from the Final Four to nearly double the number of students in the business school in less than a decade. Meanwhile, Butler has made significant gains in the racial and ethnic diversity of its undergraduate student body. From the fall of 2009 to the fall of 2019, multicultural student enrollment rose from 10.1 percent to 17.3 percent of all students. In seven of those eleven admissions cycles, the percentage of multicultural students in the incoming class was higher than the previous year, peaking in the fall of 2019 with 18.5 percent of all first-year students.8 It is difficult to parse how much the Final Four runs contributed to these compositional shifts in student enrollment. On the one hand, after joining Butler in 2016 to oversee admissions, Lori Greene had only encountered “a handful” of prospective students in her first couple of years on the job with any substantive awareness of the Final Four teams; most incoming students, she pointed out, were around ten years old at the time and had little memory of the Cinderella story. On the other hand, Greene has played an outsized role in growing and shaping Butler’s undergraduate student population over the past five years as the Vice President for Enrollment Management, and April 5, 2010, was the precise moment when her future employer appeared on her radar. “Even though I’m a basketball fan,” she recalled, “the first time I knew of Butler’s presence was when they were playing Duke in the final. I remember where I was sitting in my home on my couch, staying up, and thinking, ‘Okay, can they pull this off ?’ I didn’t have much of a reference prior to that.”
STR ATEGY POIN T
Recruitment and retention go hand in hand “That game changed my life,” Jimmy Lafakis said of Butler’s dramatic win over Florida in the 2011 Elite Eight. Lafakis was in eighth grade and on his way back from watching the Bulldogs in the previous round of the tournament when his family stopped at Butler’s campus to watch the Florida game in Atherton Union. The win—and the ensuing pandemonium
The Cinderella Strategy 143
on campus—cemented Lafakis’s decision to attend Butler, where he would become a fixture on the sidelines, camera in hand, as a reporter for the Butler Collegian before graduating in 2019. The Flutie Effect places attention on the recruitment aspect of a high-profile athletic team, but little is made of the related role that such an asset can play in retention. At Butler, men’s basketball not only draws people into the community, but it can also make them feel at home there. Lori Greene’s husband Greg was, by her report, “not a huge basketball fan” when they arrived at Butler. “He is now a huge basketball fan,” she said. “He gets to the point where he can’t watch the game” because of the excitement. Butler’s Provost Kate Morris prefers the university’s ballet performances to its basketball games, but she expressed a similar sentiment: “I’m not a big sports person. However, I have always held excitement about Butler basketball, and it’s really, really fun to go. It’s hard not to catch that fever.” Despite the program’s success, the team still unites rather than divides the campus, and men’s basketball has retained the capacity to regularly get the community “centered around one thing in that moment.”
To be sure, the Cinderella story still echoes in some students’ decisions. In 2017, development officers from the university took ten students to New York City and shuttled them through meetings with major Wall Street corporations. At JP Morgan, an executive asked why each one of them attended Butler, and six of the students referenced the Final Fours and basketball. Though traces of its direct influence remain, whether in parents’ memories or in the occasional student who learned of Butler through the tournament runs, the halo effect can fade almost as quickly as it arrives for those working in admissions. Once again the move to Big East—enabled by the Final Fours—now holds more promise as a lasting point of leverage, and bears a more pronounced fingerprint on the compositional shifts in the student body. Early in the spring semester of 2017, Greene pulled some specific admissions numbers to share with the Board of Trustees. It was March, and basketball was on the brain. “I wanted to share with them what I was seeing,” 144 The Cinderella Strategy
she recalled. First, she detailed some of the recent jumps in overall applications for the trustees. Then she drilled down further. “When we look at just firstyear applications since joining the Big East, from fall ’14 to fall ’16, we had a 38 percent increase. Because of the Big East, we were seeing a huge increase in some of those states: Wisconsin, New York, all of those areas. So, to talk about that Big East hit, I pulled all of those states in those markets, and that’s where we had a 32 percent increase.” Riley Johnson, a current junior at Butler who hails from Connecticut, is just one such example. “As a student who grew up in Illinois but moved to the Northeast (Connecticut), I knew that I would be returning home to the Midwest to obtain my college degree,” Johnson explained. “I had heard of Butler growing up outside of Chicago, but it was not until Butler made a run in the tournament with Gordon Hayward where I thought it could be a place for me. Years later when I went to apply to colleges, I decided to target small, private schools in the Midwest, as I knew I would get a fantastic education in a friendly and hospitable environment. Two years later, Butler is still the home for me, but without their inclusion and exposure in the Big East conference, I do not think I would have even heard about the fantastic programs they offer.” As Johnson’s comment demonstrates, the conference change opened vital new markets for recruitment, particularly along the East Coast. Conference affiliation has long played a role in student recruitment. For years the university employed a regional representative in the Chicago area, often working the markets associated with the Horizon League, but as Chris Potts explained, Butler had “tapped out everything that we could as far as exposure and interest” in the region by the time of the Final Four runs. When Butler moved into the Atlantic 10 and then the Big East, the university hired another regional position based in the Washington, DC, area. Potts reported that the addition of a permanent staff member on the East Coast has been a “big boon” for Butler’s recruitment efforts in and around the nation’s capital. Yet, as Admissions and numerous other offices on campus soon learned, human resources could only harvest a portion of the region’s potential; bumper crops awaited once the university’s rainmaker waddled into the fertile ground of the Big East.
The Cinderella Strategy 145
8
CHAPTER
Breeding a Marketing Machine
T
he latest twist in the brief but colorful history of Butler’s live mascot program runs right through a kidney. Michael Kaltenmark’s kidney to be exact, which, in December 2018, was failing. Doctors encouraged Kaltenmark to share his situation on social media in hopes of enlarging the donor pool, so in late April 2019, he did just that. “I need a kidney,” he tweeted. “Could be yours, someone you know, or even a complete stranger. I just need a kidney donation.” He shared a link to the Indiana University health system transplant website. The link must have worked: IU Health subsequently received so many applications from potential donors that its system crashed. The story was covered on ESPN.com, where Kaltenmark explained the flood of support 146 The Cinderella Strategy
Michael Kaltenmark, Blue II, and Hink at the 2011 Final Four in Houston. COURTESY MICHAEL KALTENMARK
by saying, “It didn’t have anything to do with me. It was my association with Butler and those dogs.”1 “Those dogs” referred to Butler’s live bulldog mascots, for whom Kaltenmark served as the caretaker from 2004 to 2020. The dogs go by the name Butler Blue, followed by a Roman numeral to indicate their spot in an increasingly prestigious lineage. Since the creation of the live mascot program in 2000, there have been four Blues, and while they may not quite have earned the title of “life-saver”—Kaltenmark’s new kidney eventually came from his older brother Doug—the dogs have filled pretty much every other role at the university: admissions rep, merchandise mover, alumni engager, public face, social media influencer, and of course, die-hard basketball fan. More than anything else though, Blue is a marketing machine. The story of how Kaltenmark and other Butler staff members built the university’s live mascot program from scratch over the past two decades is a crash course in how to leverage the Cinderella story. In the age of social media, trending topics open doors in the public conscience; when Butler basketball The Cinderella Strategy 147
turned the key in 2010, Blue II romped in and made himself at home. He and his successors haven’t left since. A Handshake and a Vision Similar to Hinkle Fieldhouse, Butler’s live English bulldog mascot went dormant somewhere in the 1970s after a long period of “unofficial-official” versions living in fraternity houses or with parents of student-athletes. The official program began in 2000, with a naming contest on campus that resulted in the mascot being dubbed Butler Blue. Kelli Walker, a staff member in the alumni office, championed the idea, and interim president Gwen Fountain gave it the green light, viewing the program as “a natural extension of what Geoffrey Bannister started here.”2 Kaltenmark, now the Director of Community and Government Relations at Butler, was a student then; but by 2004, when Walker moved west with Blue I in tow, he was working at the university and sensed an opportunity. In a staff meeting, Kaltenmark pushed to find the dog’s successor and volunteered to take care of it. His offer, which became a pot-of-gold journey, began that day with, he recalled, “a handshake agreement and a pat on the back. We didn’t even have a memorandum of understanding of how I would take care of the dog.” Still, Kaltenmark had a vision in mind, citing the University of Georgia’s Uga and Yale’s Handsome Dan as benchmarks. “I wanted to get to that level, but we didn’t play major football and we weren’t in the Ivy League, so I had to figure out what it was going to be,” he said. Like Bannister before him, he settled on the one big thing that Butler already had in its back pocket. “I thought it would be basketball. I just needed them to win some games and I could do the rest.” While the men’s basketball team made steady gains on the court, Kaltenmark worked hard to establish Blue II’s presence in the immediate community. The dog’s predecessor had only come to campus on Fridays or for major events. Kaltenmark desired more: “I decided I’m bringing this dog to campus every day unless somebody tells me not to. My wife was in grad school. We didn’t have any kids. So, if there was a student event—or any event—and I thought the dog could go, I took the dog. I really worked hard to build up his visibility, 148 The Cinderella Strategy
his presence, his profile, his persona, the whole deal, so that if the basketball team ever went to a Final Four, we’d be ready.” When the first Final Four hit, Kaltenmark leaped at every opportunity “to leverage the dog’s personality and presence and everything about him to put attention onto Butler.” He and Blue II would rise with the sun to make appearances on the morning news and would not be back to bed until deep in the night, only to wake up the next morning and repeat the same schedule. In particular, the dog took off on social media, with Kaltenmark running the Blue II Twitter account. His followers doubled during the first Final Four run, from 900 to 1,800; at the end of the second Final Four run, the total had risen to more than 6,000, with 1,400 additions in the nine days between the time the team reached the semifinal and played in the national championship game. By that point Klout, one of the first companies to attempt to measure social media influence, had recognized Blue II’s Twitter feed as one of the country’s top ten accounts representing a higher education institution.3 When Blue II passed away in September 2013 and his Twitter account was retired, he had amassed 12,600 followers and issued 32,000 tweets.
STR ATEGY POIN T
A logo plants a seed Name recognition is the instant benefit of the Cinderella story, reinforced by the stunning volume of school merchandise moved around the globe. David Woods’s depiction of the Butler bookstore from the moment the Bulldogs earned their first Final Four berth on Saturday, March 27, to the following Monday, April 5, when they played Duke bears repeating here, for the sheer scale of the numbers involved: “The workforce [increased] from eight to fifty, with reinforcements coming from Illinois, Ohio, and Kentucky [including employees from future Cinderella Loyola Chicago]. Employees worked 14 to 19 hours a day to keep up with the demand for T-shirts and hats. The store welcomed a shipment of 700 Nike hats on Monday, and sold all 700 that day. Online sales were so brisk—including requests from
The Cinderella Strategy 149
Canada, Europe, and US military bases worldwide—that the bookstore’s website temporarily shut down when orders hit 2,000 a day. So many items went online that sellouts occurred before they could be shipped to stores. T-shirts were wheeled in on utility racks carrying about 400 per rack, still warm off the press. The store went through three to five racks a day…Over nine days, the bookstore sold 40,961 more items than in the same time period the year before, representing an astounding increase of 5,364 percent and more than $1 million in sales.”4 How do you measure the effects of a landscape suddenly flooded with the Butler name and its bulldog logo? One fun way is to simply ask Butler people for the conversations and relationships harvested from the university’s brand recognition. “I hear stories about this all the time,” said John Hargrove, the board chairman during both Final Fours. “Case in point, my wife is the treasurer of her antique club in Palm Beach County, Florida. And she received a dues check from a lady and it had a return sticker on it. She brought the envelope to me. She said, ‘Is this a Butler bulldog, or is this a Georgia bulldog?’ I said, ‘That is a Butler bulldog.’ So she looked the lady up, and the lady had a daughter that was going to Butler. She said, ‘My husband used to be chairman of the Board of Trustees there’ and struck up a friendship in South Florida over this little bulldog.” Even newcomers to the community reap the benefits. Jane Siegler joined the faculty in Butler’s Lacy School of Business in 2018. “Funny story,” she recalled, “I was at the airport in Paris last summer wearing one of my Butler shirts. I had been at Butler for less than a year by then. A person came to me and asked how our basketball team was doing that season.” What comes of these conversations depends on those involved; that they come at all can often be traced back to March 2010.
Each Final Four proved critical in elevating the mascot to the focal point of Butler’s marketing efforts, though for different reasons. The first Final Four in Blue II’s own backyard established his celebrity and solidified Butler’s live mascot strategy as a point of distinction. “We’re not unique in the sense that we 150 The Cinderella Strategy
have a live mascot—other schools do,” noted Kaltenmark, “but we are unique in the way that we activate our live mascot program. We don’t hold much back. We go for it. I mean, this dog has its own tuxedo.” Here, Kaltenmark referred not just to a willingness to entertain any idea for the use of the dog’s time, but also an ability to sniff out opportunities where most would not. If Blue is the lead actor, then Kaltenmark is the producer-director in what has become a pattern of imaginative spontaneity that has turned every twist of fate, even seeming disasters, into another marketing bonanza.
The life cycle of Butler’s logo. C OURTESY GRAHAM HONAKER
The pattern took root during the team’s run to the second Final Four. NCAA rules prohibit live mascots from entering the arena for any game prior to the Final Four round. Despite Blue II’s well-behaved celebrity turn the previous year, the NCAA held firm to this policy, a tidbit that David Woods included in an Indianapolis Star column prior to Butler’s first-round game in Washington, DC, Kaltenmark saw a plot line, and a good-natured way to cast a villain opposite Blue. “I sent an email down to the NCAA because I know those guys, one of them I grew up with,” he recalled. “I said ‘Hey, Woodsy reported on this. I didn’t realize you had this rule but I’m going to run with it. You guys do you. You’ve got a tournament to run. I’m not going to throw you under the bus, but I’m going to run with this.’ So, I did everything I could not to cast a bad light on the NCAA, but I was going to milk that ‘Let’s get to the Final Four so the dog can go’ storyline as much as I could.” The hashtag #FreeButlerBlue2 caught fire and, as if Butler needed another underdog element to its persona, Blue’s quest to join his team on the arena The Cinderella Strategy 151
floor gained momentum throughout the tournament’s opening rounds. When the team broke through to the Final Four in Houston, Blue II was the talk of the town, hopping a charter flight, appearing on CBS’s Early Show, and even having a martini named in his honor at the city’s Intercontinental Hotel.5 Amid the publicity, the second Final Four offered a crucial benefit. Kaltenmark recognized it right away: traveling to Houston provided invaluable “perspective about just what the mascot program was capable of outside of our home market in Indianapolis.” The live mascot program had legs. Short, stubby legs that were ready to cover much more ground. Painting the East Blue When Butler moved to the Atlantic-10 conference in 2012, Jim Danko approached the marketing and communications team to see how they might leverage the opportunity in new markets on the Eastern seaboard. By this point Blue II was mentoring his successor Blue III, popularly known as Trip, so Kaltenmark suggested that the dogs could hit the road. Danko liked the idea, and the first “Big Dawgs Tour” was born. Over eighteen days, the dogs covered 5,487 miles; visited eleven cities, including major markets like New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC; and appeared in more than 400 photos on Flickr, frequently in front of well-known landmarks. Local media often picked up the story, and the university found another source of earned media, touting a return on investment of more than $82,000.6 When Butler transitioned into the Big East the following year, the dogs were back at it, this time looping St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston into the route. In addition to the dogs’ appearances on national television and in print media, the trip’s hashtag #BigDawgsTour landed in one million Twitter timelines. The tour has continued every year since, and Kaltenmark continued to seize every opportunity the dogs presented, no matter how off-kilter. When Trip got overexcited and vomited on the floor of Madison Square Garden before a Big East tournament game in 2015, Kaltenmark grabbed a Gatorade towel to clean the mess and then his phone to make something of it. He fired off a tweet; tagged the Garden, the Big East, and Gatorade; and, before the final buzzer sounded, had acquired almost 500 new followers to Trip’s Twitter 152 The Cinderella Strategy
account. With media coverage of the incident from outlets like CBS Sports and USA Today, the number of new followers had doubled within twenty-four hours of the incident and tripled by the time Kaltenmark and Trip left New York City a couple of days later.7 The next year, Trip and Georgetown Jack, Georgetown University’s mascot, appeared in their own campaign advertisement for the “Canine Party”—a promotion tied to the Butler-Georgetown game in DC that year. The advertisement showed the bulldogs bidding for a spot in the Oval Office by traversing around monuments in the nation’s capital. All told, on a shoestring budget the Canine Party garnered 300,000 impressions on social media and generated over $500,000 in earned media.8 Through quick-thinking and clever campaigning, Butler has ridden the social media wave on the back of their mascot. Mainstream media have noticed, providing additional coverage in key outlets like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, ESPN, ABC News, Forbes, and the BBC. And, come most every March, the NCAA tournament swings the social media spotlight back in Butler Blue’s direction once more; the 2017 tournament alone, for instance, resulted in 814 million impressions on Trip’s account.9 Though the early Big Dawgs tours focused on using the live mascot for marketing purposes, soon Trip’s energies were redirected toward enrollment and recruitment. In the spring of 2015, the bulldog delivered acceptance letters to thirty-seven homes in seven different Big East states, kicking off an annual recruitment tradition. The following year Trip cranked up his activity even further, surprising eighty-six accepted students in six states with their letters. When a knee injury kept Trip off the road in the spring of 2017, the university employed his “great A “Canine Party” campaign ad. nieces and nephews” to deliver admissions COURTESY MICHAEL KALTENMARK The Cinderella Strategy 153
communications to more than forty prospective students in Indiana, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.10 As Kaltenmark explained, with the tour focused more on recruitment than marketing, “the markets stay new now because you have a new crop of admitted students there that you want to go see.” More importantly, as it turns out Trip knows how to seal the deal. During the 2015–16 enrollment cycle, Butler staged an experiment with a portion of its admissions pool by pitting an outside enrollment management firm against its own Marketing and Communications staff. Each team was given 12,500 prospects to try and move through the admissions funnel, from recruitment to application to admittance to deposit. The third-party firm used standard materials and communication methods; the Marketing and Communications staff, on the other hand, used Trip. Prospective students in the Marketing and Communications pool—referred to as “Very Important Bulldogs” (VIB)—received recruitment materials infused with Blue’s image, personality, and voice. The outside firm took an early lead in the process, turning their prospect base into 1,928 applicants compared to 1,598 VIBs. (A larger pool of additional, at-large applicants brought the application total for the year to a then-record 12,937.) Once students were in the pipeline, however, Trip made his move, outperforming the third party in completed applications, admittances, and deposits. The real difference, though, came on the ground, where Blue III was able to work his paw-delivered acceptance letter magic. The yield rate—the number of students who choose to enroll at an institution over the number accepted—at Butler during the 2015–16 admissions cycle was 13.8 percent. When Trip made his signature move, however, the yield rate jumped to 36 percent, as thirty-one of his eighty-six visits resulted in a new member of the fall 2016 first-year class. Alongside the yield rate influence, Kaltenmark also leveraged the visits on Blue’s home turf: social media. Tweets with photos of the visits could net as many as 4,800 impressions and 370 total engagements apiece. Meanwhile each social media post pushed the #ButlerBound hashtag, which on the strength of more than 2,000 tweets from more than 1,000 accounts landed in more than nine million Twitter user timelines.11 By October 2017, the full strategy was front page news in The Indianapolis Star, under the headline “Butler’s admission process goes to the dog.” 154 The Cinderella Strategy
Settling in at Home Back home, the bulldog glues the campus together. Visitors can follow painted blue paw prints over crosswalks on their way to Robertson Hall, which houses the Office of Admission and the Office of Marketing and Communications. Inside, Blue is everywhere: on signs and banners in the entryway, in framed images and a squat statue in the reception area, on a large poster stretched across the second floor hallway that reads “Bulldogs aren’t born. They’re made.” Visitors who take the elevator, painted with the bulldog logo covering the entirety of both doors, are swallowed whole when the door closes behind them. Since the successful detour of the Big Dawgs tour into admissions, Butler’s enrollment team has integrated Blue even further into their Trip on the recruiting trail. C OURTESY MICHAEL KALTENMARK strategy. In a 2017 analysis of communication flows, they discovered that every email sent from the bulldog’s point of view had a higher open rate. “That’s it, scrap the rest of them,’” Vice President for Enrollment Management Lori Greene recalled saying, referring to all non-mascot missives. Now, the admissions staff works to figure out which prospective students have pets; those pets receive personal letters from Blue, affirming that their owners will be well cared for during their time at Butler. Across the way in Robertson Hall, visitors to the Marketing and Communications wing are likely to find the genuine article snoozing or drooling or mauling plastic water bottles, waiting for his next engagement. If Kaltenmark is around, he is likely to hand visitors a plastic bag stuffed full of Blue II and III paraphernalia: a coloring book, stickers, a fundraising calendar, decals, patches, posters, and so on. The swag only confirms what Kaltenmark has often said: The Cinderella Strategy 155
“The dog’s a marketing machine—that’s sort of inherently what he’s about.” In Butler Blue, the university has found a symbol that matches its spirit. Its brand message map espouses a communication tone built on traits like ambition, tenacity, and dependability, all of which Kaltenmark locates in a familiar figure. “It’s that guy,” he said, pointing to Trip. “He’s a living embodiment of it. Both physically, as a bulldog and with his character traits, but then also in how we’ve crafted his voice on social media.” This synergy leaks out in all sorts of colorful expressions. In 2014 Kaltenmark wrote a children’s book entitled Good Boy, Blue! that moved thousands of copies and for two months was Follette Bookstore’s top-seller. Two years later, sales of the more than 130 available products branded with Butler Blue’s likeness grew by 650 percent in Butler Athletics’ online store. Don Hinds Ford in Fishers, Indiana, donated the “Blue Mobile” to ferry Trip around campus and to events.12 Until COVID-19 disrupted Butler’s Homecoming plans for 2020, the Bulldog Beauty Contest had run for nearly two decades, with more than 100 bulldogs annually vying for the titles of “Most Beautiful” and “Best Mean Mug”; the event has been a consistent sell-out, attracting crowds of more than 2,000 spectators.13 The diversity of social engagements in Blue’s planner for any given period of time reveals backs up Kaltenmark’s assertion: “We’re doing things with this mascot program no one else is,” he said. “We see data there that the dog breaks through. It gets you away from a stuffy, institutional persona. This was something that other schools weren’t doing, and it really separated us and made us stand out.” Alongside its ingenuity, what has really separated Butler’s live mascot program is the breakneck pace of its development. John Graves, who handled the University of Colorado’s live buffalo mascot Ralphie for fourteen years until stepping away in 2020, raised this point of distinction in a 2017 Indianapolis Business Journal article about his counterparts at Butler, saying “What Butler has done in a relatively short amount of time with Blue is incredible. They’re doing everything right, and it’s working for them.”14 The fuel, as Kaltenmark is quick to point out, is still manufactured in Hinkle Fieldhouse. The key to Butler Blue’s effectiveness has been the basketball program’s sustained success. Without wins, the dog’s value becomes limited, and Kaltenmark imagines the whole live mascot program would become more 156 The Cinderella Strategy
“folksy—a quaint thing we do” if attached to a losing team. To that end, the NCAA Tournament remains the promised land. “I tell people all the time,” he said, with Trip at his side. “First, make it to the tournament. Then, if you make it to the second weekend and you’re one of sixteen teams being talked, we’ve got the magic bullet laying on the floor right there.” Kaltenmark’s energy, creativity, and marketing expertise have made an indelible impact on Butler’s branding and exposure. If a dinner were ever convened to recognize the university’s most significant influencers, Kaltenmark, along with his four-legged companion, would be seated at the head table. Perhaps now they’d have time for such a dinner, too. Both Kaltenmark and Trip retired from their live mascot program duties in 2020, paving the way for Butler Blue IV and his new handler Evan Krauss, who hit the ground running: as of October 2020 the pair already boasted 10,500 Twitter followers, 12,000 Facebook followers, and 24,000 Instagram followers. Meanwhile, the transition received the usual media coverage that seems to follow Blue whenever he’s on the move. It was the end of an era, but not just in Indianapolis—on March 16, 2020, an image of Krauss lifting Blue IV skyward Simba-style in front of a capacity Hinkle crowd led an article written by Alan Blinder that appeared, of course, in The New York Times.15
The Cinderella Strategy 157
9
Transforming Philanthropy and Infrastructure
O
n the day of the 2010 national championship game, Jim Nantz made the short drive to Butler’s campus and simply walked around, soaking in the energy. At one point, he recalled, “I strode over to Hinkle Fieldhouse to tap into the spirit of that historic gym.” Inside, Nantz let the building’s memories wash over him. “I could feel the presence of all those seemingly mystical games—including the ultimate Cinderella story—that of Milan High School.” Only eight hours later, Nantz’s voice would be the one to relate the final chapter in Butler’s Cinderella story to nearly 24 million people across the country; the game would mark the 20th straight national championship that Nantz had called for CBS. Yet, Nantz was not alone in 158 The Cinderella Strategy
following his sense for narrative right to the Fieldhouse. Butler’s run and the Final Four’s fortuitous landing in Indianapolis magnetized Hinkle. “The camera-toting pilgrims to campus, both tourists and members of the media, seemed awestruck,” Professor Susan Neville wrote at the time. “Some of the visitors—most of them, in fact—were almost worshipful of the place,” so much so that tour guides occasionally found it difficult to coax them out of the building and onto other parts of campus.1 The construction of Andre Lacy speaking at the formal the Fieldhouse in 1928 anointed announcement of the Lacy School of Business. Butler as the spiritual and phys- COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT ical center in a web of basketball facilities that still stretch across the state. “It was always to be the ur-building that represented for the state what all the high school fieldhouses represented to their towns,” said Neville, a native Hoosier. The Final Four set that nest of wires ablaze, signaling an obvious starting point for the university’s efforts to bolster fundraising: Butler quickly launched the quiet phase of the Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse. Having committed to the campaign, the university next needed to solve a couple problems. For one, they had to find someone to run it. Then, they needed to find actual donors. Crowdsourcing Philanthropy Betsy Weatherly worked in annual giving at Butler from 2005 to 2007 and then returned to the university in 2011 to manage the Campaign for Hinkle. She recognized that Butler had moved with unusual speed to capitalize on the enthusiasm that trailed the first Final Four run. The campaign had been The Cinderella Strategy 159
announced before her position was even put into place, and the university did not follow the conventional fundraising practice of securing 60 percent of the project’s goal before going public. Without the major gifts typically nailed down during the quiet phase of a campaign, Butler “did not have the pipeline to support the idea that we were going to raise all of the money for the project,” she recalled. Complicating matters, Hinkle needed a lot of work. Initial plans called for wider concourses, 5,000 new chair-back seats, additional accessible seating, handrails, a video board in the arena, and new bathrooms. Locker rooms for the men’s and women’s basketball team were to be upgraded and new video rooms built. In the bowels of the building—which still had the same look, feel, and worst of all, smell of 1928—locker rooms for the football, soccer, volleyball, and cross-country teams needed renovation as well. Hinkle’s barren walls were slated to be enhanced with graphics and visuals illustrating its eight-decade rich history. Outside, the Fieldhouse’s iconic look would remain unchanged, though every brick needed to be “tucked” by coordinating the color of the mortar to match the brick, and its vintage windows needed to be restored by replacing some 9,734 window panes. The $36-million price tag was a massive figure for the university. Early in the process, a fundraising consultant predicted that
Butler Fieldhouse, circa 1928–1932.
Butler hosts Indiana State in the newly
COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES
renovated Hinkle Fieldhouse in 2015. COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY
Butler would be lucky to raise $12 million for the project. When the university announced the public phase of the campaign in November 2012, however, the advancement team had already raised around $12 160 The Cinderella Strategy
million and set its goal at $16 million. They ended up netting $23 million. By the time the men’s basketball team opened the new Hinkle on November 1, 2014, against—appropriately—Tony Hinkle’s alma mater the University of Chicago, the campaign had proven a stunning success. When asked what his old coach Tony Hinkle would have thought about the building’s facelift, Bobby Plump quipped that “he would have said Butler spent too much money!”
STR ATEGY POIN T
When undertaking massive change, tend to your roots Bill Dugan graduated from Butler in 1951, meaning he’s seen the campus change more than most. In fact, he could count on one hand the number of buildings that were on campus when he was a student. Yet, when he approaches campus these days down East 49th and Hinkle is the first building that comes into view, the university feels the same as it did back in his day. “Once you get past Hinkle,” he said, “you start to see all the ways Butler has grown.” The Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse was built on the mantra to “Keep Hinkle, Hinkle.” As Barry Collier said of the renovations, “Everyone who’s ever been in the Fieldhouse has a feel for it or knows it has a feel. It has some character-defining features that you should not touch. We talked about over our dead bodies would you want to change the feel.”2 In the entire transformation of Butler, one of the most underrated accomplishments is the major renovation of a campus treasure that seemingly left every constituent group happy. Collier’s driving commitment to not only preserve the past, but to enhance it along the way brought the Fieldhouse into the modern era for student-athletes and fans, while simultaneously brandishing the building’s historic charm and even restoring much of the interior to its original 1928 feel. Upon further thought, Dugan recalled one small faction who came out on the losing end in the renovations. A few people wanted want to keep
The Cinderella Strategy 161
just one of the old troughs around in the men’s bathroom, Dugan recalled, as yet one more reminder of Hinkle’s age. But, as Dugan said with a grin, “you can’t hold onto everything.”
The degree to which Butler shattered expectations for the campaign is a testament to the momentum generated by the Final Fours, the emotional sway of Hinkle Fieldhouse on the community, and the possibility of patchwork philanthropy. It was a grassroots effort, with features on the history and heart of Hinkle littering six straight editions of Butler Magazine, development officers pounding pavements, and the largest individual gift topping out at $1 million. In all, the campaign amassed 3,687 donors, including the entire athletic department: 374 student-athletes from nineteen teams alongside sixty-eight coaches and staff members. Luminaries joined the cause, with Hoosiers screenwriter Angelo Pizzo, former IU great Quinn Buckner, and CBS broadcaster Clark Kellogg serving as honorary dignitaries on the campaign committee. Critically, the fundraising effort leveraged both past and present. By capitalizing on the building’s status as a National Historic Landmark, the university made up an additional $4 million through tax credits and grant money, such as a $700,000 Save America’s Treasures grant to cover the tuck-pointing and replacement window panes. The legend of the Milan Miracle served as another rallying point; a group of donors named the southwest corridor ramp in honor of Bobby Plump, with the majority of funding coming from a Milan native. Even trash proved treasure. In the spring of 2014, the athletic department ripped the old slatted folding seats out of the fieldhouse to make room for padded seating. The seats were then put up for sale, with the proceeds going in part to fund the Hinkle renovations and, through a partnership with People for Urban Progress, in part to fund their installation at bus stops and other spots around the city of Indianapolis. About 150 of the seats were available exclusively to season ticket holders on a Friday; a line formed more than two hours before the sale opened and the seats were gone within an hour, leaving only around fifty seats available for the general public to purchase the following morning.3 In similar fashion, one donor purchased the old Wildman Room bar to transport 162 The Cinderella Strategy
to his basement, while another requested and successfully sequestered a urinal from one of the old bathrooms—only in Indiana. Present-day developments also bolstered the cause. On January 19, 2013, 13-ranked Butler hosted 8-ranked Gonzaga at Hinkle Fieldhouse in a clash of Cinderellas that drew ESPN’s College Gameday crew to campus for the first time in Butler’s history before the network aired the game that evening. In a wild finish, Butler was down by one with less than five seconds to go when Roosevelt Jones stole an inbounds pass and hit a buzzer-beating jump shot to give Butler a one-point victory. The game was on a Saturday night. On Monday morning, the Development Office received a call from someone who wanted to donate to the campaign. Usually such calls out of the blue yield gifts of $50 or $100. This one came with $25,000, from a 1984 alumnus who up until that point had no real track record of giving. Along the way, signature gifts kept the momentum going. Gordon Hayward, who had moved on to the NBA after leading Butler to the 2010 Final Four, made a six-figure donation to name the new video room for the men’s basketball team. Bill Dugan, who had graduated from Butler in 1951, made another six-figure gift to name the North Dawg Pound seating in honor of his wife Joanne, who had passed away during the campaign. Dr. Dennis (’71) and Nancy Lawton had not been involved at Butler since Dennis’s graduation. The Lawtons, who lived in Muncie, Indiana, before moving to Indianapolis, previously directed the bulk of their philanthropy to Ball State. According to Nancy, “The Final Fours motivated us to get involved.” The Lawtons contributed to the Campaign for Hinkle and have since created an endowed fund to support men’s basketball; funded a 2017 international trip to Spain, where on a beach in Valencia three Bulldogs players by chance ran into San Antonio Spurs legend Manu Ginobili, who recognized their Butler gear; and made a major gift to the second set of Hinkle renovations in 2019 to name the strength and conditioning room. In addition, Nancy takes the coaches’ wives on a road trip every year to cheer on the Bulldogs, and Dennis once helped nurse a food-poisoned Butler fan back to health during a 2014 tournament in the Bahamas. Although the Campaign for Hinkle relied primarily on gifts from Butler alumni, trustees, and donors, a small subset of donors consisted of those from The Cinderella Strategy 163
outside the community who had fond memories of going to games during their youth. Knowing this, development officers combed the internet for stories of well-known figures who might have an interest in supporting the campaign, eventually discovering quotes from San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich expressing his deep appreciation for Hinkle. Popovich, a native of East Chicago, Indiana, had played ball at Merrillville High School before moving on to the Air Force Academy, where he played four seasons and was the team’s captain and leading scorer his senior year. Popovich was elected to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 2009. Taking a shot in the dark, the development officers drafted a letter to Popovich articulating the goals of the campaign and making a “soft sell” to support the renovation. They dropped the letter in the mailbox with faint hopes it might even reach its intended destination. Two weeks later, an envelope arrived in the Development Office with a return address from San Antonio, Texas. Inside was a generous donation from Coach Popovich and his wife Erin. As tends to be the case with Butler, the relationship did not stop there. In a follow-up letter, the development officers thanked the Popoviches for their support and offered the Spurs use of the Hinkle court when they next came to town to play the Pacers. Months later, the Spurs called to take up the Hinkle offer and agreed to a request from Butler’s end to bring some of their major donors to watch the team practice. The night before the Spurs were to come to campus, the plan changed: with the team in the middle of a 19-game winning streak, Coach Popovich was superstitious and wanted to stick to the regular routine, staying close to the team hotel. The Spurs would practice at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, but the offer to bring Butler donors to practice still stood. At practice the next morning, Coach Popovich came over to greet the group and ended up spending twenty minutes answering questions. He spoke at length about how much he admired Butler, Brad Stevens, and the basketball program. He also shared his childhood memories of attending high school state tournament games at Hinkle and his love for basketball in his home state. “I’m an Indiana boy,” he said, “and Hinkle is one of the true cathedrals of basketball. If you’re from Indiana, you have to love Hinkle Fieldhouse. I was 164 The Cinderella Strategy
STR ATEGY POIN T
Find your hidden constituents Text of the letter sent to Coach Popovich August 13, 2013 Dear Coach Popovich, Congratulations on another outstanding season. Once again, the San Antonio Spurs were the class of the NBA and the Spurs organization continues to set the bar high for professionalism, teamwork, and toughness. We are writing with information about the Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse. One of our chief priorities at Butler University is a significant renovation of Hinkle over the next two years. As you are well aware, Hinkle Fieldhouse is one of basketball’s most iconic structures and holds a special place in Indiana basketball history. Yet, time and weather have taken their toll on Hinkle as it now moves into its ninth decade of service. In an effort to preserve Hinkle’s heritage and improve its efficiency, we are seeking to raise the funding necessary for a $34 million renovation. Funding is critically needed to make necessary repairs and upgrades so that we can prepare Hinkle for the next generation of basketball fans. The renovation will add new chairback seats, a new scoreboard, wider concourses, a new student-academic center, expanded strength and conditioning spaces, and improved hospitality areas. Given your Hoosier roots, appreciation of Indiana basketball history, and prior experience at Hinkle, we wanted to inform you about the project and would welcome any interest you might have in making a personal commitment to the Hinkle Campaign. We would welcome the opportunity to provide you with a tour and overview of the renovation when the Spurs visit Indianapolis in March 2014 or to speak with you in more detail over the phone. We sincerely appreciate your consideration of the Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse and wish you and the Spurs organization continued success. Please take it easy on Brad Stevens and the Celtics this year!
The Cinderella Strategy 165
never good enough to play there, but I definitely remember watching.” Coach Pop got a Butler polo out of the deal, but the university got even more: the Indianapolis Star picked up the story of the Popoviches’ support for Hinkle, giving the campaign yet another shot of publicity. Even after the campaign’s successful conclusion, Hinkle continues to inspire surprising turns of philanthropy. One Saturday morning in the middle of winter, a development officer dropped off some tickets at will call for the Georgetown game later that evening. Turning to get back into his car, he saw three men sprinting across the parking lot toward him. They were die- Gregg Popovich. C OURTESY SAN ANTONIO SPURS hard basketball fans who had driven from New Jersey to attend the game that night. It was their first time in Indiana and they were hoping for a glimpse of Hinkle, but the doors were locked. “Is there any way we could get in?” they asked. The development officer looked between his young daughter, who was hungry and eager to get home, and the three men. He compromised, offering a quick fifteen-minute spin through the Fieldhouse. Back outside, one of the men asked what the development officer did at Butler. Hearing “fundraising,” he pulled out his checkbook and wrote a $1,000 check to the university on the spot. A Groundbreaking Gift Launched from the heart, the Campaign for Hinkle emboldened Butler’s sense of possibility, yet provided little in the way of a blueprint that could be replicated for other ambitious projects across the university. Without the Fieldhouse in play, how could the university hope to raise funds again on such 166 The Cinderella Strategy
a large scale? In fact, what if there were no building at all around which to marshal a vision? Prior to the Final Fours, Butler’s College of Business (COB) had been making a leap of its own. In 2016, Bloomberg ranked Butler’s COB No. 1 in the country for internships. US News and World Report gave it an “A” ranking for teaching and post-graduate placement, but a “C” for the quality of its facility. The program had grown from about 600 students in 2009 to more than 1,000 by 2015, and could grow no more in its at-capacity-and-then-some home in the Holcomb Building. Already more than half of the COB’s students took their business classes outside of Holcomb, a real deterrent to collaborative work. Although the high rankings were recruitment pluses, in order to land and retain top students and faculty and to stay on the rise as a school, a new COB facility was essential. In fact, a new COB building was the first domino that needed to fall in order to trigger a chain reaction of academic improvements; facilities in the Sciences were in desperate need of renovation and expansion as well, and COB move would allow the Sciences to expand into Holcomb from the neighboring Gallahue Hall. Accordingly, in the summer of 2015, President Danko and the Butler trustees made new and expanded facilities for the COB a top priority. The project started with an estimated $57-million price tag, staggering for a school with Butler’s resource profile. Ultimately, the figure was shaved to $50 million, but that $50 million had to be found. The university’s underwhelming fundraising history up to that point didn’t inspire confidence, and while the Hinkle renovation stood as a glistening achievement, the COB drive would need to be built more traditionally, around a landmark gift. Plans from the start keyed on finding a lead donor, one willing and able to make a $15-million gift to name the building. Enter Andre and Julia Lacy. If there’s a philanthropic analogy to Butler’s Final Four runs, it is the $25 million gift—the largest in school history—that the Lacys offered to the College of Business in early 2016. There was no prior history suggesting the university could land a gift of this size from a single family. Furthermore, the Lacys didn’t fit the typical profile of a principal gift ($5M+) donor. In his book The Principal Gift Checklist, Ben Porter, now the The Cinderella Strategy 167
Associate Dean of Alumni Relations and Development at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, suggested that “approximately 80 percent of the number of principal gifts will come from alumni, 8 to 10 percent from non-alumni individuals, and 0 percent to 2 percent from corporations.”4 The Lacys fit into the middle of Porter’s categories. Andre held a BA in Economics, but that had come from Denison University in Ohio, not Butler. Pundits might have given only slightly better odds to Butler landing a principal gift from the Lacys than to its basketball team reaching the NCAA championship game. Still, there was an outside shot. Andre was a deeply respected leader in the Indianapolis business community. At the time, he was Chief Executive Officer at Lacy Distribution, Inc., a highly successful family-owned-and-operated business. The Lacys were also active in the Indianapolis community. Andre served on numerous civic and corporate boards, including as chair of the Indianapolis School Board and the United Way of Central Indiana. He also served on several corporate boards, including the community giant: Indianapolis Motor Speedway Corporation. Julia Lacy was equally dedicated to the Indianapolis community. She served as chair of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and as a board member of the Methodist Hospital Foundation and The Indianapolis Zoo and Day Nursery, in addition to her service to many other nonprofits through the years. And, the Lacys did have some ties to Butler. They had established a scholarship in the COB, and Andre had served on the Butler Business Accelerator board. In that context, Lacy and Danko began a series of informal conversations in the early fall of 2015. They met at the Starbucks on campus, where Lacy was regularly surrounded by the Butler students whose vitality he came to appreciate deeply. “Jim and I really hit it off quite well, right out of the box,” Lacy said. “Jim is different. He has a business background.” Foregoing any formal solicitation process, Lacy and Danko discussed giving options directly over the next several months. (It should be noted that while Julia Lacy did not participate directly in these conversations, she remained very active in the couple’s philanthropic decision-making.) In December 2015, Danko invited Lacy downtown to the Crossroads Classic, 168 The Cinderella Strategy
the annual four-team basketball event featuring Butler, IU, Purdue, and Notre Dame. This latter-day recreation of the Hinkle Era “Hoosier Classic” offers a Final Four atmosphere and an appealing space to convene with donors. With Butler set to take on a top-10 Purdue team that year, the underdog spirit was already in the air. Lacy showed up at the pregame reception with a Butler hat on his head and a smile on his face. The prevailing thought among Butler staff was, “If only Mr. Lacy can walk out of the arena after watching Butler knock off a top-10 team...” A few hours later, the Bulldogs did just that, handing Purdue its first loss of the season in a tight, 74-68 game. From the periphery, basketball again helped catalyze major success off the court. The next month, Andre and Julia made a decision that would benefit Butler students and the Indianapolis business community for generations to come: they wanted to name the business school. In April 2016, the Lacy family and Butler formally announced the transformative $25-million gift to name the Andre B. Lacy School of Business. In addition, Andre Lacy agreed to serve as a senior adviser in the school. During the ceremony marking the occasion, Lacy offered a glimpse into the thinking behind the gift: “Leading up to today, I’ve had some questions put to me about why this investment, why Butler, what do I hope to get from it. All of these are legitimate questions. Why Butler? I answer that with my own question. Why anywhere else but Butler?” In a different venue, he further unpacked this sentiment, noting that “Butler has long been an excellent school and an anchor to the Indianapolis and Central Indiana community. But in the last five years, under President Danko’s leadership, I have seen Butler grow into a national player, especially when it comes to the University’s focus on innovation, experiential learning, and outcomes.” Over the next year and a half, Lacy’s personal presence in the school, providing leadership advice and counsel, was a tremendous gift in itself. As time went on and his office hours were consistently full, it became clear that in addition to students, faculty and staff were eager to spend time with him and seek his advice as well. Tragically, Julia passed away on New Year’s Eve 2016, and Andre passed away only eleven months later. Andre’s memorial service was held at Butler. At Commencement exercises in May 2018, Andre and Julia Lacy were posthumously awarded honorary degrees. Danko presented The Cinderella Strategy 169
the degrees to Andre and Julia’s son Peter and his daughter Meghan, a current student in Butler’s College of Education, on the stage in Hinkle Fieldhouse.
STR ATEGY POIN T
Ask Just as the unexpected Final Four runs forever altered the course of Butler’s history, so too did the Lacy gift that by all appearances seemed a long shot at the outset. In the months following the gift announcement, Lacy was questioned many times as to why he had made the gift to a school he did not attend. His reply was consistent: “They asked me.”
Resourcing Advancement The Campaign for Hinkle and the Lacy gift represent two different paths to philanthropic success in the aftermath of the Final Fours, and indeed the differences signal a major shift in the advancement function at Butler. Figure 3 captures annual fundraising data for the current decade, with a few additional years tacked on at the front to show pre-Final Four activity. As the graph demonstrates, the momentum from the Final Fours did not immediately extend to the school’s advancement arm, at least not institution-wide. Butler Athletics made gains, even beyond the Campaign for Hinkle. Tom and Deborah Slaton live in Lexington, Kentucky, and had virtually no contact with Butler since Tom’s graduation in 1970. Following the second Final Four trip, Tom called Bill Lynch, Associate Athletic Director for Development, and requested a meeting. During their conversation the Slatons, who do not have children, informed Lynch that they wished to leave the bulk of their seven-figure estate to the Butler men’s basketball program. “That meeting never would have occurred without those Final Fours,” said Tom. Yet, the great challenge for universities operating in the glow of the halo effect is to channel giving beyond athletics; in this regard, Butler initially lacked the fundraising infrastructure necessary to do so. Like many universities that rode the post-World War II enrollment boom, Butler had not focused due attention and resources on fundraising. One 170 The Cinderella Strategy
Figure 3: Annual Fundraising at Butler University. SOURCE: BUTLER UNIVERSITY ADVANCEMENT
50
Fundraising (Millions)
40
30
20
10
19 20
18 20
17 20
16 20
15 20
14
13
20
20
12 20
11 20
10 20
09
08
20
20
20
07
0
Fiscal Year
Butler executive went so far as to actively discourage fundraising in order to diminish alumni influence on policymaking. Myopia had other costs as well. The endowment stayed low. Butler had neither a law school nor a medical school, traditionally fertile ground for producing future major donors; the university had first-class programs in dance, music, education, and pharmacy that annually produced successful graduates, but not necessarily wealthy ones. Furthermore, strong relationships that might have been built with non-alumni in Indianapolis weren’t even pursued, and advancement efforts focused on a very loyal but small donor base. The Lilly Foundation was exceptionally generous but relatively alone, with the university making precious few overtures either to others in the corporate community or to community foundations. When the Final Fours hit in 2010 and 2011, Butler did not have the advancement structure, practices, or staffing in place to leverage the opportunity fully. Industry-wide pressures exacerbated the problem. The 2008 recession, The Cinderella Strategy 171
declining state appropriations, shifting demographics in many regions across the country, and the student loan crisis combined to push nearly all of the nation’s 4,000-plus colleges and universities toward philanthropic activity and solutions. Dr. Roy Chan, an administrator at Lee University with expertise in philanthropic activity, said at the time: “Every public and private institution is grappling with a philanthropic agenda in the twenty-first century. As financial aid support declines and tuition rates continue to rise, colleges and universities have grown much more dependent on the increased philanthropic involvements of the wealthy to fund academic and professional programs, to raise college participation and completion rates, and to build state-of-the-art facilities for high quality teaching and research in higher education.”5 Scholarship funding represented another dire challenge for Butler. At one point, tuition produced 96 percent of Butler’s scholarship funding—dangerous territory. Even in 2018–19, only $3.2 million of Butler’s $78 million in scholarships to students was funded by endowment or other philanthropic support. Those at Butler understood: the university needed to step up its philanthropic game, just for survival. But simple survival wasn’t the goal. A dramatic uptick in fundraising represented the most viable pathway to improving facilities, bolstering financial aid, and boosting the school’s endowment. Key to the turnaround was building infrastructure in the advancement office, primarily in terms of its human resources. “I don’t think we were properly staffed,” Vice Chair of the Trustees Tracy Stevens said of the years immediately following the Final Four runs, “but we’re trying to make up for it now. We’ve significantly increased our advancement staff, but we’re also trying to retain people and to help them build relationships.” After a short-staffed year and a transition at the vice president level in 2014–15, the Lacy gift kicked off a surge in philanthropy. Fundraising hit an all-time high in 2016 with over $45 million, followed by the university’s third best-ever year in 2017 and second-best in 2019. Thus, after a relatively modest return on the Cinderella story from 2010 to 2015, the real fundraising explosion came from 2015 to 2020—from an annual average of $18.9 million the first part of the decade to an annual average of $34.7 million over its back half. The growth becomes even more impressive 172 The Cinderella Strategy
when considering that, much like the revolving door with the men’s basketball head coaching position, Butler’s development operations have thrived despite having five different Vice Presidents of Advancement over the ten-year period. Even those outside the institution have noticed the surge. Noel Shepherd, the Director of Development and Legacy Giving at Wake Forest, asserted that, “Butler’s is one of the more impressive and feel-good stories in higher education fundraising over the last few decades. Butler seized the moment and smartly utilized it to take its fundraising to a new level. It’s an amazing accomplishment and perfect example of how college athletics, done the right way, can positively boost fundraising performance.” Fundraising over the past decade spurred facility development and academic initiatives. Scholarship funding increased significantly, and innovative programs found ready backers. Philanthropy also launched new and innovative ideas. Michael Bill, a Syracuse alum, and his company MJ Insurance made a $250,000 gift to Butler to establish a student-run captive insurance program, the first of its kind in the country. Another donor sought to honor his parents, both Holocaust survivors, by endowing a holocaust education and travel fund. Large, singular gifts, like a $5-million donation from Indiana-based Old National Bank to launch a new center to support private and closely held businesses, were accompanied by smaller, more sustained growth in the donor pool. Butler inaugurated an annual Day of Giving in 2016, raising more than $129,000 from 710 gifts; by 2019, the Day of Giving had grown to 1,173 gifts totaling $311,183. Alumni rallied as well. The university’s alumni giving percentage was 20 percent in 2019 and 21 percent in 2020, exceeding the national average for alumni giving of 11 percent, according to USNWR. By the end of fiscal year 2019, Butler had raised $41.4 million from 15,823 donors. A once-major deficiency had become a strength. Additional resources put into fundraising reaped financial rewards from previously unexplored pockets of the country like New York, San Francisco, and Phoenix. And, the university did indeed make up for lost time after the Final Fours by spreading the philanthropy across campus. From 2000 to 2010, Butler received gifts or pledges of $1 million or more from just three families (corporations, foundation, and estates not included); over the next decade, the university The Cinderella Strategy 173
received twenty-two gifts of $1 million or more from families or individuals. The majority of those twenty-two donors had previously given to Butler Athletics, but sixteen of these gifts supported the academic side of the house. Of those twenty-two gifts, five came from donors who did not attend Butler. Kurt Mahrdt is one of those donors. Mahrdt is 86 years old and a Butler basketball season ticket holder. He attended DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, the alma mater of Brad and Tracy Stevens. Mahrdt’s father also attended DePauw and was a trustee. Mahrdt has become such a Butler basketball fanatic that he flies back and forth from Naples, Florida, in the dead of winter to watch games in Hinkle Fieldhouse. Following Andre and Julia Lacy’s $25-million pledge, Kurt and his wife Linda (also not a Butler alum) were so inspired that they handed a Butler development officer a $1 million check in the parking lot of Hinkle in 2016. Mahrdt counts Butler as “his school” and says attending Butler games and getting to know the Butler people represents “one of the highlights of my life.” The Mahrdts and Lacys represent a curious segment of Butler’s booster community that Betsy Weatherly refers to as “adopted Bulldogs.” “I feel like we’re Indianapolis’s school,” she said, “and regardless of the many individuals that live around campus and in Indianapolis that went to IU or Purdue or Notre Dame, they still all love Butler. So, they’ve adopted us.” In some ways, the first Final Four run portended this development when sporting goods stores in Bloomington and Lafayette, home to Indiana and Purdue respectively, could not keep up with the demand for Butler merchandise.6 The phenomenon is counterintuitive since the brand loyalty inspired by university sports teams often leaves little room for secondary affinities, especially, it is reasonable to assume, with in-state rivals.7 Yet, whether because of its underdog persona or its sterling basketball program or its esteemed academic programs, Butler draws locals into the community, and then does not let them go. Firm Foundations With its advancement office humming, Butler embarked on the most ambitious fundraising campaign in school history. Butler Beyond sought to meet a $250-million goal by 2022 “to deliver transformative change to the university, 174 The Cinderella Strategy
region, and the world.”8 The launch event for the public phase of the campaign on October 5, 2019, drew more than 1,200 attendees to Clowes Hall. Demia Butler Hicks VII, a direct descendant of Ovid Butler, kicked things off, followed by President Danko, then-Board Chair Jay Sandhu, and former Bulldog basketball player Matt Howard. Butler dance students, chorale members, and an orchestra performed, before the Butler Band wrapped the event with a fiery rendition of the school’s War Song. At launch, more than 27,000 donors had already contributed $171 million to the effort. The university was well on its way, and despite the many difficulties brought on by COVID-19 in 2020, started the new decade on firm financial ground. Perhaps most striking, the university’s endowment had grown by more than $100 million over the previous decade, peaking at just under $250 million at the close of the 2020 fiscal year (Figure 4). Figure 4: Endowment Market Value as of May 31, 2020. S OURCE: BUTLER UNIVERSITY
$250,000,000
$200,000,000
$150,000,000
$100,000,000
$50,000,000
$0 10
20
11
20
12
20
13
20
14
20
15
20
16
20
17
20
18
20
19
20
20
20
The most visible changes over the decade, however, surely came on Butler’s campus through transformational facility growth. From 2010 to 2020, Butler built two new residence halls, a new building for the Lacy School of Business, The Cinderella Strategy 175
Table 3: Square Footage of New Facility Space, 2010–2020 Building
Square Footage
Parking Garage
418,913
Fairview House Residence Hall
210,273
Irvington House Residence Hall
182,680
South Campus - Main Building
154,586
Lacy School of Business Building
110,000
Sciences Project
75,000
Schrott Center for the Arts
40,000
South Campus - Apartments
38,400
South Campus - Counseling Center
12,000
South Campus - Hospitality House
7,745
Efroymson Creative Writing Center
2,986
Total
1,252,583
and a new arts and music center. Renovations were completed at Hinkle Fieldhouse and Clowes Hall. The university acquired property from the neighboring Christian Theological Seminary, enabling it to relocate its College of Education. Through a generous gift, Butler assumed ownership of a house for its Creative Writing program. A parking garage, no small factor in unlocking the ability to build on other sites, was erected and included retail space for restaurants, while a streetscape project, funded primarily through the city of Indianapolis, added medians, greenery, and bike lanes. A new women’s lacrosse field was also completed. Off-campus, two new Lab Schools (a collaboration between the College of Education and Indianapolis Public Schools) enhanced educational offerings in the city and further heightened Butler’s reputation of positively affecting its surrounding neighborhoods. In 2019, a major renovation 176 The Cinderella Strategy
The Lacy School of Business building opened in August 2019. C OURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY
to the C-Club resulted in a fresh, versatile new dining option. That same year, Hinkle got air conditioning, part of the second round of renovations to the iconic building that overhauled the Efroymson Family Gym—a practice gym parallel to and just yards away from the main court—and updated the men’s soccer locker room. In all, the decade saw 1,252,583 square feet of new facility space added to Butler’s campus. It would, of course, be irresponsible to suggest that a basketball team, or two, was behind the millions of dollars acquired to add more than a million square feet of infrastructure to the Butler campus. Such an idea undermines the work of many individuals and groups over the past decade. Even so, it is a common sentiment among longtime members of the Butler community to look at the campus that has sprouted up around them and contend that it would not have happened without the Final Four runs. The momentum, enthusiasm, and confidence generated during that period in the very least accelerated the process, if not fit it with something deeper, a spirit that is hard to quantify but lives in the oral tradition of a place. When the new building for the Lacy School of Business opened in July 2019, a development officer led an alumni tour of the facility, which happened to include former men’s basketball standout Matt Howard. The officer began the tour by thanking Howard and plainly declaring The Cinderella Strategy 177
that without his teams, construction of the very building in which they were standing would not have been possible. And, the growth was far from finished once the Lacy School opened the doors to its new home. In October 2019, the university broke ground on another, even more ambitious project: a $100-million renovation and expansion of its science complex, the largest capital project in its history.9 As cranes and trucks continue to churn the campus into something new, many members of the Butler community view the transformation as symbolic of the good work that has long occurred behind the scenes, well before the Final Four runs. “You definitely feel a sense of pride in all of it,” said Tracy Stevens. “Butler was always a great school with really great people with really great work happening in the classrooms. None of that’s changed. It’s just that now we have the buildings that we should have.”
178 The Cinderella Strategy
10
CHAPTER
Branding Culture, the Butler Way
D
uring his time at Villanova, Jim Danko established a close relationship with their men’s basketball coach Jay Wright. In Villanova’s previous trips to Indianapolis to play to Butler, Wright had on occasion asked Danko to speak to his team. In January 2017, with Wright fresh off a national championship and bringing a 14-0, No. 1-ranked team to Hinkle Fieldhouse, Danko turned the tables and asked Wright to speak to a small number of donors. The “small” number was supposed to be five, but when Wright arrived at Hinkle the morning of the game, twelve guests awaited him, all invited by the ever-zealous fundraiser whom Danko had tasked with fielding the group. Wright could not have been more gracious. Dressed in sweats rather than The Cinderella Strategy 179
his usual Armani, he addressed the donors as if they were top benefactors for Villanova. Wright spoke for twenty minutes, applauding Danko’s leadership, discussing the new Big East and his enthusiasm that Butler was a member, and reiterating how well-positioned the conference was with ten strong academic schools where basketball was the primary sport. Then, he brought up the Butler Way. Wright told the group of his first trip to Hinkle Street sign on Butler’s campus. Fieldhouse in 2013 and how he had COURTESY GRAHAM HONAKER paused outside of the Butler basketball offices to take a photo of a wall that is adorned with the Butler Way motto. When his current Villanova squad had been compared to Butler, Wright said, “I take that as a compliment if we are compared to Butler’s style, Butler’s ethos. We have great respect for the Butler Way.” It was an honor, he concluded, for Villanova to come to Hinkle Fieldhouse every year to play the Bulldogs. Wright allowed the Butler donors to watch his team’s shootaround and when it ended, a number of Villanova’s players came over to extend greetings. “Jay was absolutely everything I thought he would be,” said 1990 graduate Greg Stanley, remembering the gathering. “While clearly competitive, he was completely classy, humble, and highly complimentary of Butler’s program, coaching staff, and Hinkle Fieldhouse. He barely spoke of himself, but rather the success of Butler’s past teams and the great admiration he had for them, and what a great opportunity it was for his team to compete in a building with such historic significance.” Stanley had more than a passing interest in Villanova; his son Payton had just been accepted to the university. Wright graciously signed the acceptance letter afterward, and then went a step further. “He also offered to talk to Payton about the possibility of becoming a team manager if he chose to attend Villanova,” Stanley said, “and asked that he reach out to him if he ended up on campus.” 180 The Cinderella Strategy
Jay Wright addresses Butler donors in Hinkle. C OURTESY GRAHAM HONAKER
Wright was not as gentle once he traded his sweats for his suit—he received a rare technical foul during the first half of that night’s game. Butler went on to defeat Villanova for the first time in school history, 66-58. The Big East fined Butler $5,000 after fans rushed the court when the final buzzer sounded, but no one cared; an elated donor wrote a check following the game to cover the costs.
STR ATEGY POIN T
Win respect from your toughest competitors Jay Wright’s conversation with Butler donors is but one of many examples in which Butler has benefitted from a healthy view of competition. In its highest form, competition makes each side better than they would be without the other, engendering a mutual respect. This attitude is most often visible in how Butler’s athletes perform and its coaches carry themselves. Yet it colors so many other stories in Butler’s growth. It’s there in the trip that trustees and administrators took to Durham, North Carolina, to learn from Duke just months after losing to them in
The Cinderella Strategy 181
the 2010 national championship; in the “Canine Party” advertisement with Butler Blue and Georgetown Jack; in the sold-out merchandise in Bloomington and Lafayette when Butler made its first Final Four run; in the partnership between Butler and Xavier to enter the new Big East together; in the priest’s collar Jim Danko donned when Butler joined the Big East; and, in the fact that, when approached about offering a testimonial for this book, Gonzaga Athletic Director Mike Roth went out of his way to praise Barry Collier and suggest that, apart from the testimonial, Collier should receive just due for the work he has done as Butler’s Athletic Director. In this way, Butler has made a lasting impression on its competitors. A decade after the epic Duke-Butler showdown, Jon Jackson, Deputy Director of Athletics/Men’s Basketball and External Affairs at Duke, said, “I know Coach K has the ultimate respect for the Butler program.”
Taking the Butler Way Beyond the Fieldhouse Wright might stop short of calling himself an “adopted Bulldog,” but his pregame address to Butler donors pointed to the potency of another asset that the university had developed well before the Final Fours: the Butler Way. As mentioned previously, the roots of the Butler Way run all the way back to Tony Hinkle, who drilled his players in an unselfish, team-oriented style of play. Honed over the ensuing century, the Butler Way strikes a rare balance in the present day: it is an expression of both an internal culture and external brand, a marketing concept with resonance for insiders and outsiders alike. As with Butler Blue and the live mascot program, the Butler Way has endeared the university to competitors and interested outsiders alike. Sports Illustrated, USA Today, Forbes, CBS Sports, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post have covered the brand over the last decade. In particular, Adam Grant has been one of Butler’s strongest external proponents. An organizational psychologist at the Wharton School with four New York Times bestselling books, Grant launched a podcast series with TED in 2018 called WorkLife, which topped the Apple Podcasts charts for two weeks upon its release. Intermixed with episodes on NASA and the Daily Show is the third 182 The Cinderella Strategy
episode in season one, entitled “The problem with all-stars,” with Brad Stevens and the Butler Bulldogs as the focal point. By 2019, the episode had been downloaded more than 500,000 times. Speaking with Butler’s Vice President for Strategy and Innovation Melissa Beckwith for a conversation covered in the fall 2019 edition of Butler Magazine, Grant highlighted the university’s culture as one of its most valuable resources: “Then there is the culture. When I think of the Butler Way, I think of the humility. There is a norm at Butler that gets set on the basketball court, but pervades the university. Everyone is excited to figure out what they don’t know and keep learning. I think that is kind of the wellspring of innovation. And then also, the generosity. Butler is a school of givers. You have a group of people who are drawn to the school because they are excited to try and figure out how they can help others and contribute to a meaningful mission.”1 Keen observers of American higher education, however, understand that the dynamic Grant referenced—a norm set in an athletic arena that also pervades the larger institution—is not easily struck. Indeed, forging broad, internal consistency for the Butler Way was a necessary prerequisite if the brand was to work on a national platform, and this effort took time and negotiation. When Jim Danko assumed the presidency in the summer after the second Final Four run, marketing and branding rocketed to the top of Butler’s institutional priorities. As former Board of Trustees Chair Jay Sandhu recalled, “The two Final Four championships catapulted forward Butler’s aspirations as a university. We thought the attention that we got as a university was a unique moment for Butler. It energized our alumni base, potential students, and friends of the university in a way they had never been before. It allowed us to really think about what we needed to do as a university going forward with momentum.” In little time, the university began to build a strategy around the narrative substance that had long existed on campus. Butler hired a vice president for marketing and elevated the position into a direct report to the president, centralizing the work of the office in the process. Simultaneously, Danko pushed for a unified marketing and branding strategy across the entire university. The Butler Way had already emerged as a viable centerpiece for this push The Cinderella Strategy 183
during Bobby Fong’s administration. The university’s “Dare to Make a Difference” strategic plan for 2009–2014 noted that “the ‘Butler Way’ has gained currency with the external news media which, in contexts increasingly beyond athletics, uses it to convey a sense of programmatic excellence and institutional integrity. In this respect, the ‘Butler Way’ has become an organic part of the University’s identity and values. We now have an opportunity to shape its connotations.”2 Internally, however, the adoption of the Butler Way as a university-wide mantra met resistance from the faculty, signaling age-old academics-athletics tension not at all particular to Butler. Opposition was stiff enough that when the concept began to take root outside of athletics, the university’s Faculty Senate voted against the use of the term in any academic context. Kate Morris, who joined the psychology faculty at Butler in 1996 and became provost in 2012, suggested that any language of “family” or “team” can complicate matters with the faculty, given that those words do not adequately describe their work. However, she confirmed that faculty opposition to the Butler Way “was largely due to the fact that it had come out of athletics and we are an academic institution and there is always going to be that tension.” There are two explanations for how the Butler Way eventually began to filter into every nook and cranny on campus. For one, Jim Danko took a sound approach. In his recent book Ten Years to Midnight: Four Urgent Global Crises and Their Strategic Solutions, Blair Sheppard, Dean Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, pinpointed the aspect of Danko’s leadership that made a difference in this regard, noting that he had “the brassy courage to demand that a somewhat sleepy Midwestern university change and modernize quickly and yet relied on deep currents of quiet humility to gain consensus at the school.”3 Second, and even more important, was authenticity: stories were the substance at the heart of the Butler Way, and those stories were absolutely, unequivocally true. Turning Culture to Brand When Butler and the Final Four swept into Indianapolis in 2010, communications staff within the athletic department could not keep up with all of the media requests, so others from the university level were pulled into help. Former 184 The Cinderella Strategy
News Manager Marc Allan highlighted how staff members at Butler never imagined that sort of attention. “When Brad Stevens was hired in 2007,” he recalled, “I introduced myself. I said, ‘I work in media relations. The only time that you’ll ever see me is if something really bad happens.’ He said, ‘Let’s hope we never see each other.’ In 2010, we’re in the Final Four and I have to go over to Hinkle and there’s a lot of media there. I reminded Brad of how we met. I said, ‘I told you, you’d never see me unless things go wrong. I didn’t know they could go this right.’” Given the volume of inquiries, Allan recalled that staff members were “just fulfilling requests” rather than trying to push any kind of narrative about the university. There was no time to coordinate efforts, drive particular stories, or issue talking points. Though the demand tapered some when the Bulldogs again made the Final Four the following year, this time in Houston, the communications team still did not have a playbook. “Those years we didn’t have any plan in place,” Allan said, “Who knew?” The stories told during the first Final Four, when decision-makers at Butler had little time or capacity to manage the publicity, formed an authentic narrative base for the university’s public image that resonated both inside and outside the campus boundaries. In this regard, Bobby Fong served as a model spokesperson for the university. His humility matched Butler’s profile, leading former Board chair John Hargrove to marvel at how Fong was “so smart and so articulate” in always bending the attention back toward the university’s academic mission and quality. Across multiple platforms Fong stressed that Butler was and would continue to be “a university with a basketball team, rather than the other way around.”4 The best illustration of this idea, and the story from that time period that still elicits the most pride from the Butler community, was that of the players attending class the morning of the national championship game. Another popular story started with Stevens walking into the locker room to the sound of an argument and ended with him discovering two players scribbling on the whiteboard, debating a problem from that morning’s physics exam. When these accounts appeared in the media, they resonated with campus insiders because of their authenticity. “The stories were true. That was the thing. This was not made up. It wasn’t hype,” recalled Allan. “I saw Gordon Hayward leaving his math class and getting in a car and going downtown. I The Cinderella Strategy 185
Bobby Fong celebrates the 2010 Final Four berth with the student body. COURTESY THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR
think it was 10:50 in the morning the day of the national championship game.” Likewise, John Hargrove remembered the locker room physics session: “It was not apocryphal,” he stressed. “I was in the area and Bobby Fong told me about it minutes after he had observed it.” Susan Neville’s book Butler’s Big Dance is littered with similar accounts from her colleagues on the faculty: one player was offered a short extension on a paper that was due around the time of the Sweet 16, and he turned it in early from a locker room in Salt Lake City; another player was knee-deep in studying algorithms that entire spring semester. It was well-known that the team routinely practiced in the morning to avoid conflicts with classes and that players did not miss class, even in the summer.5 Key to the widespread adoption of the Butler Way across campus was how these stories mirrored the greater campus community. Seven years removed from the first Final Four, Neville still felt the emotional resonance of that season’s defining image for the university. “That morning of the championship game,” she recalled, “you would see them [the players] walking across campus going to their classes, and it almost makes me cry now thinking about it, because it 186 The Cinderella Strategy
was like ‘Oh my God. We’re all doing the same thing today. Despite this kind of weird magical energy, we’re still all doing what we’re supposed to be doing: being human and doing our jobs.’ That was beautiful.” Despite being members of the university’s flagship athletic program, Butler men’s basketball players remain an authentic reflection of the student body as a whole. The goodwill that followed the team into the national spotlight was earned over many years as coaches ensured their players meshed with the campus community. “We want the student body to support us,” former head coach Todd Lickliter would tell his teams. “They need to see you in the class, they need to see you working, they need to see you as a peer so that they can feel good about supporting you.” Brad Stevens sustained this point of emphasis when he succeeded Lickliter. “The team was really representative of the typical Butler student,” he recalled. “There was a lot of alignment between the athletic department and the faculty and the general student population, and that was important to me.” Many faculty have stories of encountering basketball players in their classes and whether before, during, or after the Final Fours, the players remained the same. “Every once in a while I’ll see a basketball player, and they don’t come in to class like, ‘You should know who I am’ or anything like that,” Neville said. “I’ll just figure it out by looking at their transcripts.” Provost Morris had similar experiences from her time on the psychology faculty. The basketball players “were kind of like everybody else,” she recalled. “The ethos among our student-athletes is the same as the ethos among all of our students: engaged in everything they’re doing.” In fact, as a psychologist Morris quickly grew fascinated with the student culture at Butler upon joining the faculty in 1996. She had spent her entire life in an academic environment, the child of two faculty members who lived in a faculty housing neighborhood. When she compared Butler to that environment, or to her undergraduate and graduate institutions, the student culture felt different. “I could never quite put my finger on what it was about these Butler students,” she recalled. “The only thing that I could say is you know they’re really engaged, and they’re all in, in everything they do. And it doesn’t matter if it’s sports or volunteer work or academic work or even decorating the The Cinderella Strategy 187
Greek houses for homecoming. They’re just so all in on everything they do.” Morris even tried to figure out the phenomenon empirically. At the time a group of psychology professors had formulated a study to try and measure the ephemeral concept of school spirit across institutions. Based on her hypothesis that Butler students were different, Morris later joined the study, tracking Butler students according to a handful of indicators, such as the number wearing Butler gear on a random day in a random class. “Every single time that I did this,” she said, “our Butler students showed statistically higher than the group as a whole.” She now tells this story at enrollment events to illustrate the idea that “there is, in fact, a special sauce here.” The special sauce is “palpable on campus,” to the point that prospective students can feel it and either decide they want to be a part of the community or choose to look elsewhere. “That,” she concluded, “is how the student culture has perpetuated itself across the twenty years that I’ve been here.”
STR ATEGY POIN T
A saga never dies In the early 1970s, scholar Burton Clark pioneered the study of organizational culture in higher education, culminating with his book The Distinctive College. Clark used the term “saga” to describe a “collective understanding of unique accomplishment in a formally established group” and posited that a saga was “the central ingredient in the making of the distinctive college.”6 Sagas are rare, especially in large, complex organizations like universities. There are simply too many stakeholders with too many conflicting goals for a unified, high-functioning culture to take root. However, one of the tip-offs for the presence of a saga is the feeling among participants that they are in on “a beautiful secret.”7 In the course of interviews for this study, Butler community members made references to a “secret sauce,” a “special sauce,” a “best kept secret,” a “special place,” and a “special culture”; comments were prefaced by “it sounds corny” or “it
188 The Cinderella Strategy
sounds perhaps hokey to some people”; there was talk of “all those Butler Way hokey sayings” and “a big kumbaya event stretching over years and years”; “I don’t know, it’s hard for me to articulate” said one person, while another confessed that “it’s a lot of the cliché stuff” before finishing “but the difference at Butler is that’s the way it’s operating.” Clark argued that sagas generate “rich personal and institutional returns,” most notably belief in and loyalty to the organization.8 Butler offers ample evidence that Clark’s theory of institutional sagas still carries weight today, not just in the words and actions of current community members but perhaps especially in those of the people who have moved on from Butler but never really left. When Ohio State ended Thad Matta’s tenure at the university, Sports Illustrated reporter Pete Thamel reached out to Matta’s old assistant Brad Stevens. According to Thamel, “Stevens revealed that he and Matta always discussed their preferred retirement plans. They’d move back to Indianapolis and buy Butler season tickets in the top level. They’d walk to a bar together before games, sit in the top level of Hinkle Fieldhouse and just be fans. ‘We’ve always laughed about that,’ Stevens said.”9 It might sound corny. But ask Butler people if it’s real or not.
Vice President of Finance and Administration Bruce Arick joined the Butler community in 1990, just as Barry Collier was reviving Tony Hinkle’s legacy and hatching the central concepts of the Butler Way, but well after the feeling it sought to convey had permeated the campus. “Butler was that,” Arick said of the ethos, “and then a phrase came along. People said ‘You know what, that’s a pretty darn good description of how we would describe our culture and the way we like to go about our business, both from a faculty/staff and student standpoint.’ We weren’t trying to take a phrase and then mold ourselves into it. It was the opposite.” In this way, the narrative core of the Butler Way passed muster internally, enabling it to be translated into a branding context with authenticity. By 2012–13, the concept featured prominently in the university’s self-study for its accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central The Cinderella Strategy 189
Association. In the report’s opening section on “Mission,” its authors noted that “the concept of The Butler Way has become so popular, indeed, that one might be tempted to regard it as the University’s de facto mission statement” before concluding that “however much it varies, the concept of the Butler Way has definitely made an important contribution to the integration of the Butler community by suggesting that all parts of the University, even if they diverge in interests and daily activities, have a common mission and constitute a single community. It is difficult to think of any other vehicle at Butler in recent years, which has more effectively promoted the institution’s shared values than the phrase the Butler Way.”10 Shortly after Jim Danko’s presidency began, Butler hired SimpsonScarborough to accelerate its brand. The firm recommended a branding strategy revolving around a single concept: “The right outcomes. The right way.” What exactly is the right way and what, for that matter, is the institution’s role in illuminating it? The answer is elaborated under the “key messaging” section of Butler’s brand map: “The University’s humble-yet-determined spirit rubs off, leading our graduates to do things the right way—the Butler Way.”11 Jason Simon, CEO and Partner at SimpsonScarborough, elaborated on the thinking behind the branding strategy that his firm helped Butler push in 2016: “We really focus on two things. One was the outcomes message and the second is the experience that you get at Butler that makes those outcomes possible. The core position idea really became ‘the right outcomes, the right way.’ It was built in part off of this whole Butler narrative that came out of the NCAA, where this story of the Butler basketball team going to classes on the day of the NCAA final was nothing new. That was just the Butler way of doing things.”12 The brand in turn became central to student recruitment efforts, with former Vice President of Marketing Matt Mindrum suggesting at the time of its launch that the ultimate goal was to convey the Butler Way to prospective students. “I am really excited about the story we have to tell,” Mindrum told the Butler Collegian “and the reason the story we have to tell is so great is because of what our students do every day.”13 When new Bulldogs, official or adopted, enter the community, the brand that often attracted them is backed up by substance on campus. It isn’t uncommon 190 The Cinderella Strategy
to see President Danko chatting with students at the campus Starbucks. Every fall, the basketball coaching staff hand-delivers tickets to faculty and staff season ticket holders. Even during the COVID-19 crisis, the Butler Way was on full display as all 4,600 undergraduates received a personal check-in call or email from a Butler staff member. Men’s basketball head coach LaVall Jordan was one of those callers. These small touches go a long way toward making newcomers, both young and old, feel welcome. Current Butler student and Butler Basketball Band member Yzabel Tio attested to this dynamic after a difficult loss for the men’s basketball team during the 2019 Big East Tournament, when the band was heckled crudely by opposing fans: “One reason I chose to attend Butler University was the feeling of warmth and care I received after visiting,” she reflected. “I was told that the Butler community is one that supports everyone unconditionally. I felt this and continue to feel it. However, I never quite understood what ‘the Butler Way’ was. If you ever step foot on Butler’s campus, you will probably hear chatter about this understood mindset of selflessness and commitment among the students, student-athletes, and professors. This concept is so abstract, though, that it almost sounds like a dream instead of a reality. I thought that there was no real way to prove that this motto has any bearing on the experience at Butler. Fortunately, I was very wrong.”14 Likewise, prior to 2008 Bobbi and Larry Canada had no affiliation with Butler. They didn’t attend the university nor did any of their family members. After attending a Horizon League men’s basketball tournament, the Canadas got hooked on the program. Since then, they have become season ticket holders and major donors. Over the past decade, they have not only attended virtually every home game but most away games as well, logging thousands of miles to cheer on the Bulldogs. Bobbi Canada explained why: “We started attending Butler games and loved the Butler Way. Everyone was so friendly, and it reminded us of attending a small-town ballgame where you knew everyone. Staff, team, and fans became our Butler family. We are not Butler alumni, but we are now loyal Butler fans.” In Madness: The Ten Most Memorable NCAA Finals, Mark Mehler and Charles Paikert wrote that “Butler’s basketball program had its own Way. The Cinderella Strategy 191
However, there was, and is, a marked distinction between ‘The Butler Way’ and the Ways of other big-time programs. Butler actually walked this Way.”15 That the term “basketball program” could be swapped out with “university” and no one—internally or externally—would bat an eye is a small miracle in the world of higher education. But, Cinderellas are in the business of such things. The Brand in Action Over time, Butler developed formal programs to further capitalize on its brand. In 2017, the Butler Way Leadership Institute debuted, offering a comprehensive leadership development program designed to educate and support the standards of teamwork and leadership for Butler student-athletes. The university also hosted a camp for high school students modeled on the principles of the Butler Way. Butler professors Craig Caldwell and Jerry Toomer wrote a book on leadership entitled The Catalyst Effect and tied it to the Butler Way. Yet, perhaps the most striking evidence of the Butler Way’s continued effectiveness is the way in which it continues to inform life on Butler’s campus. Two collective mindsets merit brief attention in this regard: acceptance of change and innovation. A core tenet of the Butler Way is the acceptance of reality. At no other time in Butler’s history was the acceptance of reality and the embrace of change more important than in the years following the Final Fours. Butler’s move into the national spotlight carried with it enormous benefits. It also presented a number of new challenges. Larger incoming classes mandated augmented teaching loads. Increased enrollment put additional strain on dining and housing facilities and required more staff. The evolving student demographic prompted admissions to think differently in deploying its officers. The building boom meant disruptions in parking and the frequent presence of cranes, construction vehicles, and the attendant noise. New financial challenges also accompanied Butler’s evolution. The Advancement division was tasked with raising massive funds for renovations and a slew of new building projects. No longer could the university measure its endowment against Horizon League schools; instead, it was competing against Georgetown’s billion-dollar war chest. Long-time donors faced a changing 192 The Cinderella Strategy
fundraising culture. Where a $500 donation once represented a significant contribution, giving thresholds for getting good basketball seats and other amenities increased considerably. The Butler community also needed to embrace a nontraditional leader. Jim Danko had not taken the traditional route to a university presidency. He didn’t have the letters “PhD” after his name. Many of the trustees and alumni welcomed his business-driven approach, but others on campus had reservations. Ena Shelley, Dean Emerita of the College of Education, served on the committee that hired Danko. “There was discussion about how Jim would be received, knowing that some of the faculty would not see him as an academician. The committee realized this would be a ‘mind shift’ for many, especially following Dr. Fong.” Collectively, these new realities signaled a need to accept and embrace a new Butler that could no longer afford to be a conventional, regional institution nestled in the quiet Butler-Tarkington neighborhood. In time, all segments of the Butler community met the challenge. Critically, Danko worked hard to earn the faculty’s trust. “The more that Jim spoke to faculty and students,” Shelley recalled, “the more the walls came down. Of course, there would always be a small group, no matter who the president is, who would not accept that he did not go the traditional academic route to leadership. But actions and words matter, and Jim has proven that.” Blair Sheppard provided additional detail in Ten Minutes to Midnight on the words and actions that mattered most as Butler faced the uncertainties of the future: “These are big, weighty questions, but Danko didn’t want to impose his answers on the university. Instead, he listened to responses from the school’s board, alumni, students, professors, and other constituents, and he would adopt good ideas he heard even when they opposed his own. In addition, he was willing to admit that he was unsure about his plan, since it was new and untried, and he promised to assess, report back, and fix the parts that were broken.”16 In turn, faculty demonstrated an unselfish spirit by assuming larger course loads and longer hours. They supported new course offerings, degree programs, and even online classes. They adapted to relocations and constant disruptions stemming from the campus construction. Associate Professor of Management The Cinderella Strategy 193
Larry Lad summarized the mindset of his colleagues, noting that “while there might be a few folks who wish for the ‘good old days,’ I believe faculty are overwhelmingly supportive of change. The growth and visibility have raised all our boats. It has added job security. It has paid for better library resources and IT infrastructure, memberships to the recreation center, and so on. Change is about learning. Faculty get that.” To be sure, the changes on campus haven’t been universally accepted. In 2020, Emeritus Faculty Margaret Brabant echoed her prior sentiment from 2013, when she worried that the move to the Big East might be a dance with the devil. “I have not been a fan of increasing enrollment because I think we have lost our focus on the liberal arts, and the growth seemingly required significant alterations to the aesthetic of our campus environment.” Even so, Brabant also reflected on several of the positives. “On the bright side,” she continued, “there are so many divisions within Butler that have adapted to change over the past decade. I think we continue to attract and retain welltrained and compassionate people to work at our institution. So no matter the new buildings, the move to the Big East, or the larger class sizes, the Butler I love persists because our institution still attracts people who profoundly care about our educational mission and know how to deliver it.” In conjunction with accepting reality, a second core tenet of the Butler Way involves seeking improvement day in, day out. From day one of his presidency, Jim Danko sought such improvement through an obsessive focus on innovation. “Innovation is a way to move beyond the complacency inherent in many organizations,” Danko said. “In higher education—where tradition is so highly valued and respected—there’s an inclination to depend upon the way things have always been done. Innovation allows people to consider possibilities, beyond past and current practices, and adapt to a shifting landscape while positioning their school for future success. Transformation is the outcome of innovation.”17 Among the many threats to higher education, a reluctance to innovate was near the top. Historian Steven Mintz cited a number of reasons for higher education’s failure to innovate: tradition, misplaced incentives, legacy infrastructure, systems of governance, and resource constraints.18 Danko understood the threats. He recognized that Butler’s main competitors were not 194 The Cinderella Strategy
just traditional universities, but digitally based outfits like Khan Academy, for-profit online education giants, and companies themselves—especially in the tech sector—that were becoming increasingly inclined to provide tailored educational experiences to their employees if universities were not agile enough to adequately prepare the workforce. In view of these challenges, Danko’s entrepreneurial background shaped his belief that forward-thinking universities could capitalize on opportunities as well. Danko wasted no time in signaling that innovation would be a major priority during his administration, announcing in his November 2011 inaugural address the creation of a $5-million Innovation Fund to stimulate creative thinking and spur new ideas, curricula, and collaboration among all members of the Butler community. Since then, the university has pursued Danko’s vision through a variety of means. Butler’s investment in its insurance program sought to capitalize on a niche market. Thousands of marketing, finance, and accounting departments existed in the business school market, yet there were only 90-plus insurance programs in the country. A growing gap between an aging insurance industry and a small prospective talent pool made the major an attractive one. The US Bureau of Labor estimated in 2015 that nearly 300,000 jobs in the insurance industry would need to be filled by 2022. In response to these opportunities, Butler established the MJ Student-Run Insurance Company in 2017, the country’s first insurance captive fully run by students. (Captive agencies are essentially a form of self-insurance where a parent organization owns the agency.) The company was designed to insure archived library books, pianos, observatory, and physical damage to university vehicles and, perhaps most importantly, Butler Blue. “The dog has replacement value and value to our brand,” said Zach Finn, Clinical Professor and Director of Butler’s Davey Risk Management and Insurance program.19 The insurance captive earned attention and was a significant reason the Davey program earned a top-ten recognition from Business Insurance Magazine in 2019. Additionally, in July 2018, Butler announced the creation of a two-year, Master of Science in Risk and Insurance (MSRI) program. The program was among the first of its kind in the nation and sought to “address the gap between the risk and insurance industry’s personnel needs and the limited talent pool The Cinderella Strategy 195
that exists in today’s job market.” The first cohort filled up quickly and earned rave reviews in the insurance sector. Victor Puleo, Davey Chair of Risk Management and Insurance, said “As one insurance executive said in our focus group, ‘This degree is an automatic $10,000 raise for any employee who acquires it.’”20
STR ATEGY POIN T
Complacency is the enemy of innovation In 1993 Jim Danko was charged with setting up action learning projects for students in the University of Michigan’s MBA programs. Two of the companies Danko approached were Kodak and Xerox, which were ranked 19th and 21st on the Fortune 500 list at the time. Although Danko successfully arranged learning projects at both sites, he ultimately took away something much more important: the lesson of a failure to innovate. The fate of both companies in the intervening years has shaped Danko’s understanding approach to innovation, and he frequently cites these cautionary tales when speaking to Butler faculty, alumni, and donors. As Daniel Burrus, a leading futurist thinker and speaker on global trends and disruptive innovation, suggests, “Complacency is often mistaken for stability, the feeling you’ve ‘made it’ and now you can sit back and revel in what you’ve built. However, that ideology carries far more pitfalls than we realize. Complacency is even more detrimental in the environment we live in today, dominated by exponential digital disruption…maintaining an anticipatory mindset—and encouraging those around you to do the same—can stop the kind of complacency that takes hold of your organization.”21
Butler also looked outside of its campus borders for innovative partnerships. Its Executive Education unit developed partnerships with Kenzie Academy for a software engineering certificate program in 2018 and with Trilogy Education for a data analytics boot camp the following year. The College of Education partnered with the Indianapolis Public School System to develop a second Laboratory School, a unique educational institution based on the Reggio Emilia philosophy. The first IPS/Butler Lab School was founded in 2010, but its success 196 The Cinderella Strategy
and increasing enrollments necessitated the opening of a second school in 2017. The public magnet elementary schools integrate everything from chicken coops to pond habitats to yoga, allowing teachers and Butler student-teachers to lead workshops based on subjects in which they are interested, supporting the principles of individualized, relationship-based learning. Along similar lines, the latest bit of good news came in October 2020, when Butler received a $2.5-million grant from the Lilly Endowment to fund creation of the Butler Beyond Transformation Lab. The Lab will help the university to partner with its constituents in the development of “future-oriented education initiatives,” and its work will encompass “exploring emerging concepts designed to create greater access to education, adapting the educational experience to those who want to continually upskill and reskill, and pivoting higher education to an increasingly digital experience.”22 Through these and other efforts, as mentioned previously Butler has earned the USNWR’s designation as the most innovative regional university in the Midwest for six years running. Yet, as it turns out, this type of work is nothing new for Butler. It’s older, even, than Tony Hinkle and the Butler Way. As Jim Danko pushed for innovation at Butler, he sought the advice of two outside experts: Blair Sheppard, Dean Emeritus of the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, and Matthew Pellish, Managing Director of Strategic Research and Education for the Education Advisory Board. Looking from the outside in at Butler, both Sheppard and Pellish saw a history of innovation at the university. “All of these elements were meant to help Butler fulfill its mission to offer accessible solutions for learners currently excluded from traditional private higher education,” wrote Sheppard. “Just like before the Civil War, Butler is continuing to focus on access for all.”23 Pellish put it even more succinctly: “Butler was founded on innovation. Unleash these smart, dedicated, innovative people on these challenges and they will find solutions.”24
The Cinderella Strategy 197
198  The Cinderella Strategy
SECTION THREE
Trip in the nation’s capital. C OURTESY MICHAEL KALTENMAR
Beyond Butler The Cinderella Strategy 199
11
CHAPTER
The Cinderella Strategy
W
hen an institution is moving forward so swiftly,” wrote Jim Danko for Butler Magazine in the fall of 2017 “it’s important to periodically step back to reaffirm and celebrate its foundational culture. Indeed, the more things change at Butler, the more our University’s traditions and core values remain the same. Butler began as our founders’ effort to champion inclusivity and equality among all people. Today, we continue to strive for these priorities. Outstanding undergraduate education has always been at the heart of our mission, and this focus continues today. Generations ago, Hinkle Fieldhouse came to life with cheering fans. Today, the electricity in Hinkle is only getting stronger. And Butler’s historical commitment to serving as a 200 The Cinderella Strategy
cultural and educational resource to Central Indiana is more robust than ever.”1 These balancing points reflect tensions familiar to decision-makers in many American universities: the weight of tradition formed centuries ago against the demands of a far more marketized present, the oddity of commercial athletics side by side with serious academic pursuits, and the persistent ivory tower perception amid obligations to serve the local community and so many other different stakehold- The fall 2019 edition of Butler Magazine. er groups. The popular gravity of COURTESY BUTLER UNIVERSITY the Cinderella story threatens each of these balances, tempting to pull universities off mission and off tradition. Yet, Butler’s case demonstrates that, harnessed, the Cinderella story is a resource of unrivaled potential for universities on the move. In positioning for and especially leveraging such high-profile athletic success, administrators at Butler hit upon the most essential characteristic of the Cinderella story as a resource: it works only as a catalyst. It can ignite whatever resources and initiatives are already in place, and accelerate whatever strategic direction the university is already angling toward, but without kindling its energy is soon spent. As noted, institutional movement began at Butler well before the first Final Four run. Joe Kirsch, who possessed the longest institutional memory of anyone we interviewed having graduated from Butler in 1964 and returned to teach in 1970, echoed this idea with the characteristic modesty that makes so many things at Butler glow for those who are finally looking: “I think there were a lot of things laying on the ground around here that looked pretty good and when we got to the Final Four all of a sudden people walking around said, ‘Boy, that’s kind of cool.’” At Butler, the Final Fours stimulated The Cinderella Strategy 201
two long-burning energies on campus: the formation of a flagship program in men’s basketball and the transformation of a regional university into a national player. Further, the convergence of these movements held particular strength in this context given that the team’s Cinderella runs echoed the university’s underdog spirit in a language familiar to so many members of the community in Indiana—basketball. Within the athletic department, the seeds for growth were planted by the time the first Final Four run hit. Men’s basketball had been elevated to the flagship level during the Bannister era, and Hinkle Fieldhouse received enough of a facelift to jump-start recruiting. Under Barry Collier and his coaching successors, the team began to turn in winning seasons again and ascend the ranks of the Horizon League. During this time, the coaches and players also resurrected and fine-tuned an organizational culture, as expressed in the idea of the Butler Way, that would prove invaluable as attention to the program mushroomed. Most importantly, they learned to recruit to this culture with an unflinching commitment, regardless of how successful the program became. When Collier returned as athletic director, he put in place a number of vital changes to the department’s resource base so that ticket sales and fundraising could maximize revenue in the wake of the first Cinderella run. The Campaign for Hinkle Fieldhouse, the move to the Big East, and the reliance upon men’s basketball to further drive revenue and bolster the student-athlete experience across all sports were natural growth points after the Final Fours. Likewise, when the Final Four runs occurred, the university as a whole was already stretching toward a national profile. Geoff Bannister’s investments in the campus proved prescient as the school leaned into its residential identity and sought to attract more and more people to campus. Bobby Fong straightened out the annual budget and ran a successful capital campaign to bolster Butler’s financial position. He began to articulate Butler’s national ambitions, tying them to the popular ranking systems of the day and tending to the university’s academic reputation as the chief means of movement up the ladder. At the very end of his term, the university began making the necessary investments to expand its recruiting markets and boost its undergraduate enrollment, as exemplified by the then largest first-year class in the university’s history in the 202 The Cinderella Strategy
fall of 2010, before the effects from the Final Four could work any real magic in admissions. Where Fong’s presidency lagged in marketing and branding efforts, despite an awareness of their importance reflected in strategic planning materials from the time, he nevertheless proved an invaluable spokesperson for the university amid the Final Fours, planting and pushing stories that authentically communicated Butler’s faithfulness to its academic mission. When Jim Danko arrived with the specific mandate to capitalize upon the Final Four resource, the university was well-positioned for another period of growth, risk-taking, and acceleration toward a bona fide national profile. Certain features of Butler’s story are nearly impossible to replicate. First, Hinkle Fieldhouse is a singular basketball facility and, as such, an asset that few schools of Butler’s size or standing could ever approximate. Second, the 2010 Cinderella run reaching its climax with the Final Four only six miles from campus was a particular stroke of good fortune. As beat writer David Woods noted, the last time a men’s basketball team competed in a Final Four in its home city was nearly forty years prior, when UCLA played in Los Angeles in 1972.2 Yet, even this instance is a poor corollary: UCLA was a powerhouse program and the twenty-five-team tournament was not yet a national phenomenon. In this regard, Butler’s experience is one-of-a-kind, a hometown underdog in a basketball-mad state with the entire country watching. Without Indianapolis hosting the 2010 tournament, Butler’s campus would not have been flooded by visitors nor could its players have attended class the morning of the game. When Butler returned to the Final Four the very next year as an 8-seed, they were the first program ever to reach consecutive Final Fours without holding a 1- or 2-seed, and they matched several other teams in being the lowest-seeded team to reach the national championship game in tournament history.3 Nevertheless, Butler’s story holds great promise for organizations seeking to build or leverage Cinderella stories of their own. The three primary “chapters” of Butler’s story—building a flagship program, finding synergy between flagship and university, and building a national profile—in turn reflect three loci of administrative action. Though Butler’s case possesses its share of distinct features, the management approaches in each of these three areas remain instructive for administrators across a variety of institutional contexts. The Cinderella Strategy 203
Building a Flagship Athletic Program The growth of the men’s basketball program at Butler can be viewed in three stages: (1) an initial bottoming out and rebuilding phase culminating with the team’s first appearance in the NCAA Tournament in thirty-five years (1989–97); (2) a period of escalating success, marked by semi-regular appearances in the tournament and peaking with the consecutive Final Fours (1997–2011); and, (3) continued efforts to sustain a national championship-caliber program (2011–present). Yet, this framework might carry with it a faulty assumption: that the decisions of the primary actors changed with each new level of success to which the program ascended. In other words, one might assume that the decisions made during a rebuilding phase differed from those made when Butler began to appear regularly in the national tournament, and in turn, that competing in two national championship games spurred choices fundamentally different from any in the preceding eras. Yet, this was not the case. Instead, Butler raised and sustained a flagship program on the national scene chiefly through its consistency over the past three decades, even as the scale of its operations and the stage on which the men’s basketball team performed changed dramatically. This consistency is most evident in the athletic department’s ability to balance patience and risk and its commitment to hire insiders. Staying Patient The story of Butler’s investment in men’s basketball and the eventual returns gleaned from this gamble is a long one, spanning more than three decades after its starting point in 1989. Barry Collier is often asked by administrators from other mid- and low-major institutions about how they might pursue the Butler model. The part of the equation that “hardly ever gets mentioned,” according to Collier, is patience: “If you’re doing the wrong thing and immediately thinking you’re going to get something to happen in three to five years, then you’re going to fire the coach and fire the AD and fire the president. You can’t do it that way. Butler’s values were always there. We’re a value-based institution, and this is a value-based department and a value-based basketball program and kind of always has been. While we’re not the same every year, we’re pretty strong and we hold tight to those values.” 204 The Cinderella Strategy
As the back half of the quote makes clear, this patience is rooted in the department’s long-standing value system. Other athletics programs have value sets, but often they bow to win-loss records. Given how quickly win totals can fluctuate, or how easy it is to justify a value compromise in the name of winning, the first gauge of whether to remain patient or make a change must come with a view toward something else. Collier spoke of patience as a reward, not earned through a long string of winning seasons but instead through a commitment to Butler’s values: “If you really believe in your core that these values that you have are why you exist, then it’s easier to speak to them. It’s easier to hold to them. We reward accordingly, whether that be with an approval or patience or whatever the case might be. It’s much more than just letting you win or lose.” Critically, this approach is long-standing. Writer Eric Angevine shared the story of how Collier met with administrators in 1990 following his first season as head coach, during which the team finished with a record of 6-22. Collier reasoned that he might lose his job, but instead he received a four-year extension.4 Years later, after Collier had taken the head coaching position at Nebraska and Butler had made its first Sweet 16, the program slumped again under Todd Lickliter. Once more, no one panicked. “To our athletic director’s credit, our president’s credit, our fans’ credit, they hung in there,” Lickliter recalled, and all were soon rewarded with another Sweet 16 appearance. Over a thirty-year span, this institution-wide patience with the flagship athletic program has positioned Butler to take advantage when fortune breaks their way and to stay the course when it does not. When success follows, the commitment to patience can often recede into the background of the narrative. Such is certainly the case with Duke, where few now remember that Mike Krzyzewski’s career got off to a rocky start. After being hired away from Army following a 9-17 season, Krzyzewski finished with records of 17-13, 10-17, and 11-17 in his first three seasons at Duke. A groundswell of dissatisfaction spread through the fanbase in 1983, with a petition for his dismissal circulating. Tom Butters, Duke’s athletic director at the time, was resolute in his support of Krzyzewski and offered him a fiveyear extension at the start of a 1983–84 season that would turn out to be the inflection point in the Duke-Krzyzewski story.5 The Blue Devils went 24-10 The Cinderella Strategy 205
Mike Krzyzewski (seated, left) and Tom Butters (standing). COURTESY DUKE ATHLETICS
that year and earned their first bid to the NCAA Tournament under Coach K. Given Duke’s wild success over the ensuing decades, it is easy to forget that their story, like Butler’s, was sown with patience. When the two programs met in the 2010 national championship game, much was made of their similarities; but patience, just like Barry Collier suggested, hardly ever got mentioned. Taking Risks Such patience, however, has not precluded risk. It was planted deep in the soil beneath Hinkle Fieldhouse when an athletic corporation of trustees and alumni swung a deal to build a massive gymnasium with money they did not have and were not likely to raise, banking instead on the popular appeal of basketball within the Hoosier state and ultimately mortgaging the university’s accreditation for a short time as a result. Geoff Bannister tapped into this same spirit when he spent out of the institution’s endowment to renovate the building and revive the men’s basketball program. One can imagine the howls of protest that such decisions would elicit today, and while we do not necessarily espouse such gambles, it is important to note how they have paid off over time. 206 The Cinderella Strategy
Interwoven with such basketball-driven risks is the resolution of “the football question”: the move to de-escalate the football program in the wake of the accreditation loss in the 1930s and the commitment to non-scholarship football with the formation of the Pioneer League in the early years of Bannister’s presidency. Of particular note, though the latter decision was unpopular at the time with certain segments of Butler’s alumni base, it looks prescient today. Pioneer League teams compete in the NCAA’s Division I Football Championship Series (FCS), and the dictates of this classification allow FCS teams to award the equivalent of up to sixty-three full scholarships to football players. Not only has Butler sidestepped this substantial financial outlay for football scholarships, but in so doing they have also avoided a corresponding expenditure for women’s athletics to ensure their continued compliance with Title IX. For this reason, membership in the twelve-member Pioneer League represents a significant competitive advantage for Butler over many of its peers in terms of cost-savings. Through his experience at Villanova, which at one point considered expanding its football program, and his conversations with other presidents, Jim Danko acknowledged that institutions casting their lots with football face even longer odds in surviving today’s arms race: “Betting on any flagship sport is high payoff, low probability. But with football, it’s extremely low probability and enormously high risk.” Taking Butler’s approach to basketball and football together, one can discern a measure of prudence in athletics-related risk-taking. The investment in the Fieldhouse and men’s basketball, rather than football, represents a direct accounting for the university’s physical location in Indiana, where basketball carries far more currency. When Bannister arrived, he combined this environmental sensitivity with a bit of common sense: in Hinkle Fieldhouse and the program established by its namesake, Butler possessed both a physical and historical justification for reinvestment in men’s basketball. These assets lay dormant, but the Fieldhouse in particular had already proven to be a competitive advantage for Butler Athletics as well as a point of distinction for the university as a whole. In this sense, Bannister’s risk now seems well-placed and perhaps can provide some insight to administrators weighing additional investments in supposedly revenue-generating sports in the present day. The Cinderella Strategy 207
Hiring Insiders The area in which this balance between patience and risk has played out to greatest effect is in Butler Athletics’ commitment to navigate major personnel changes by hiring within the community. From Collier’s hire in 1989 into the present, the head coaching position has always passed either to former Butler players (Collier), assistant coaches (Stevens and Holtmann), or both (Matta, Lickliter, Miller, and Jordan). Collier, Matta, Lickliter, Stevens, and Miller had no experience as a head coach at the collegiate level when handed the job. Holtmann had three years of head coaching experience at Gardner-Webb and a career record of 44-44, while Jordan had one year of experience at UW-Milwaukee and a career record 11-24. If at any point Butler conceived of itself as a big-time program, none of those hires matched that ambition from an outside perspective. Butler has clearly bucked the trend within big-time athletics to pursue coaches with splashy names or winning records, instead looking for proven commodities in terms of the program’s value system. The same theme holds true even when considering Collier’s hire as athletic director with no previous experience in such a position. This risky practice has proven remarkably successful, especially with regard to Collier and Stevens, both of whom were described by numerous interview subjects as singular figures in terms of their talent for the job and their character. In the essential positions of athletic director and men’s basketball head coach, Butler has established a tradition of hiring for culture above any other factor. The string of successful head coaches netted through this unconventional practice ought to garner the attention of athletic directors at mid-major institutions, particularly those whose programs have found some success and are looking to solidify their place on the national scene. Finding Synergy Between Flagship and University Butler has created an ecosystem in which the flagship program, athletic department, and university are aligned and feeding off one another as the institution continues to grow. Part of the length of the story owes to the amount of tinkering required to rebuild each sphere, wrench them into line with one another, and then tighten those bonds as each evolved. Key periods of alignment 208 The Cinderella Strategy
consisted of Geoff Bannister’s initial investment in the men’s basketball program, Todd Lickliter’s and Brad Stevens’s hard-learned lessons on recruiting players who still fit the environment at Butler amid the program’s increasing success, Barry Collier’s first order of business upon his return as athletic director to attend to the flagging satisfaction levels of student-athletes in all sports and not just the flagship, Bobby Fong’s ability to shore up cracks in the university’s financial base after Bannister’s risk-taking and then to position Butler for its pursuit of a national profile, and the hiring of a president in Jim Danko who was well-suited and eager to capitalize upon the Final Four runs. In the present day, the hardwiring of these three units turns on a wholesale commitment to the student experience, a mutual adoption of the underdog spirit, and above and between all, a shared organizational culture. Committing to the Student Experience The innermost thread of alignment between the men’s basketball program, the athletic department as whole, and the university is the student experience. Todd Lickliter recalled this emphasis existing at Butler as far back as his days as a student-athlete in the late 1970s: “People who have some character, some maturity to them, can flourish in the environment at Butler because there is a real commitment to the growth of the individual. You feel that. And I’ll tell you, it’s not like you’re nurtured and babied. It’s a demanding environment, but it’s one in which you know you have support.” When Brad Stevens arrived more than two decades later, this commitment to students persisted. “Our hearts were all in the place to make it the greatest experience we could for the student-athletes or for the students if you’re on the faculty,” he said, a sentiment reflected across interviews with Butler faculty members as well. Provost Kate Morris painted a picture of this ecosystem that recognizes men’s basketball as flagship while also acknowledging that, for faculty, support of the student body remains paramount irrespective of their sport: “There are a lot of faculty members who have season tickets. When you go to the games, there’s a lot of faculty there. So, generally speaking, the faculty like that there’s something to rally around. Now as time has gone by, I think it’s a little more than just that. Our men’s soccer team has done very well. Our cross-country The Cinderella Strategy 209
team has done very well. I was heavily involved—for whatever reason, I think just because I had a couple of volleyball players in class—but I was often at volleyball matches. And there’s a lot of faculty who go to those games as well. I think the faculty really like to support the students. And when faculty have students who are on the men’s basketball team, that is a source of pride for them.” Because of the wholesale commitment to the student experience and the relatively small size of Butler’s community, athletics remains an avenue for faculty and students to connect with rather than antagonize one another. This dynamic has persisted because, as noted earlier, coaches recruit players who reflect the wider student body in terms of their engagement on campus and their commitment to the academic mission of the university. In turn, the faculty largely recognize the value of students’ extracurricular pursuits while demanding that they meet the standards required to earn a Butler degree. “I always tell the student-athletes when they come in here that the majority of faculty members will be right behind you,” Joe Kirsch said, before adding, “This isn’t the kind of institution where when you come in and you say, ‘I’m a student-athlete,’ all of a sudden you have special things. If you’re in my class and you’re a football player, that’s great. You’ve still got to do the chemistry. If you’re in freshman English, you’ve still got to do freshman English, but I’m very supportive of you. My sense of this whole thing is that we’re a community and athletics shouldn’t trample all over academics and academics ought to allow the student-athlete to have the opportunity to live a quality academic life and live a quality athletic life, and when they leave they’re probably happy.” Tapping Into the Underdog Spirit When Butler readied itself to move into the Big East, Jim Danko asked Brad Stevens whether they were ready to compete in this new arena. As Danko recalled, Stevens responded by saying “We’re going to be like Butler always is. We’re lifting ourselves up by our bootstraps and trying to compete and playing a little bit over our head. But that’s a story that we’re used to, right?” With quotes like these, it is often difficult to parse whether the speaker intended to describe the men’s basketball program, the university, or both. This shared underdog mentality is further reflected in the university’s marketing 210 The Cinderella Strategy
Roosevelt Jones’s game-winner over Gonzaga’s Kelly Olynyk on January 19, 2013. COURTESY BUTLER ATHLETICS
and branding efforts, as signified in the current style guide, which posits that the Bulldog logo “represents a nearly twenty-five-year tradition of athletic representation, but also exemplifies the tenacious spirit infused throughout the 160-year tradition of Butler University.”6 From the perspective of both the men’s basketball program and the university, Butler runs in crowded circles. In state, schools like Indiana, Purdue, and Notre Dame occupy the upper echelon; in competing against Georgetown and Villanova, Butler faces the same dynamic in the Big East. As Vice Chair of the Trustees Tracy Stevens suggested, Butler’s standing among its peers helps to preserve a critical part of the university’s ethos: “You never want to lose that underdog spirit. That’s who we are. But I don’t worry about it. Whether we want to be an underdog or not, we are. From a financial standpoint, if you look at our endowment compared to the other schools in the Big East, it’s not the same. If you look at our funding compared to the other schools in the Big East, we’re towards the bottom half.” This shared dynamic between the flagship sport and the institution as a whole serves as a rallying point for a small university that has long believed The Cinderella Strategy 211
in its educational product and nursed high ambitions amid the challenges of a thin financial base and a history of obscurity. The underdog persona stands as one more long-standing way in which the team mirrors its university and thereby strengthens the connection between the two entities. Sharing Organizational Culture In the end, the alignment between the basketball players and the student body, as well as between the basketball program and the university, points back to a larger and abiding culture on campus. “The story,” Tracy Stevens summed it up, “is the culture.” For many in the community, the best available shorthand to describe this culture is the Butler Way, yet the term demands an unpacking. Former Chair of the Trustees John Hargrove used a Citizen Kane reference to elaborate: “The Butler Way is your Rosebud,” he said, referencing the mysterious word at the heart of the film. The task, he suggested, is to search within a small piece of language for a vast array of meanings that shift from person to person depending on their perspective. Though the larger contours of the ethos are well-defined, Table 4 shows a small sample of the different terms used to describe the Butler Way, illustrating what is perhaps one of the concept’s most appealing virtues: its elasticity. “Everybody throws their own definition at it,” Brad Stevens said. “It’s not something you can accurately or easily define in words. You can feel it. You know when you’re a part of something that is bigger than yourselves.” Part of its size, and perhaps part of the fussing over just the right terms to describe it, stems from the weight of all the history the watchword seeks to shoulder. Yet, the Butler Way is not about phrasing things right, but rather doing things right. And in terms of fostering a vibrant and inclusive organizational culture, Butler is onto something. In the end, the organic quality of the Butler Way and the elasticity of the term’s meaning has enabled many different members of the Butler community to assimilate into the organization and locate their work within a broader value set. Recall Professor Susan Neville’s words about the long arc of Butler’s story: “You can go back through everything and find a thread and pull it through.” 212 The Cinderella Strategy
Table 4. A Sample of Perspectives on the “Butler Way” Source
Definition
Athletic Department
The Butler Way demands commitment, denies selfishness, accepts reality, yet seeks improvement everyday while putting the team above self.
Coordinated Marketing and Communication Plan (2008)
That we aspire—every day—to improve ourselves and those around us.7
“Dare to Make a Difference” Strategic Plan (2009)
The Butler Way prepares a graduate not simply to make a living, but to make a life. Academic excellence through a challenging and supportive educational environment provides practical knowledge for careers or graduate school. A commitment to service, unselfishness, and a thriving intellectual and social community enables members of the Butler community to become reciprocally involved in the lives and welfare of other people. At its heart, the Butler Way requires that we aspire—every day—to improve ourselves and those around us.
Lori Greene
That’s what the Butler Way is about. It’s the hard work, it’s the day to day, everyday choices.
John Hargrove
Michael Kaltenmark
The Butler Way always puts the concept of unselfishness and team first. That’s the mantra. People who really stick to doing things by the book, doing it the right way, doing it the Butler Way, doing more with less, not making excuses.
Joe Kirsch
Basically you’re on a team and your major effort is to make the team successful and hopefully you can get some benefits as an individual, but it’s not about you as an individual.
Office of Academic Affairs
The Butler Way inspires students: • To integrate intellectual and practical skills; • To ask big questions and solve real-life problems; • To balance professional achievements and social responsibility; • To adopt values-based reflection and to be civically engaged with diverse communities, locally and globally.8
The Cinderella Strategy 213
Chris Potts
Doing things the right way, doing things with integrity, and living by example. Whatever your values are, making sure that you act in that way at all times, and showing the world, basically in this case, that what we were saying about us is actually true, that it’s not a situation where we’re saying one thing and doing another.
Brad Stevens
If you had to break it down into one phrase, it’s conviction in action.
Tracy Stevens
I think the one thing about the Butler Way is if you stay true, if you remain focused on the culture, I don’t think you lose that underdog spirit.
Betsy Weatherly
We are a small liberal arts institution that has a different culture, and I think a lot of it goes back to the Butler Way and those values: team before self and doing what’s right when no one is watching. It’s hard to say. It’s not that it’s ever spoken to students. It’s just how people act, and it’s what you do.
The thread that binds Jordan Hall to Hinkle Fieldhouse, that keeps them in sync as the campus continues to grow and as the community continues to renew itself, is cultural, and perhaps the tugs over how to name or define this culture are in the end a balancing mechanism, meant to keep each side on its toes as the world around both changes. For administrators at other institutions, the cultural fit between their flagship sport, athletic department, and institution as a whole represents a key frame of analysis in seeking to integrate big-time athletics with serious academic pursuits. Building a National Profile If the Cinderella story functions most effectively as a catalyst for existing initiatives, then the principle strategic direction energized at Butler has been the pursuit of a national profile. In a different context, administrators might leverage the Cinderella story toward a different institutional end. Regardless, Butler’s case suggests that the halo effect constitutes a legitimate opportunity generated by high-profile athletic success and that the idea of a “good story phenomenon” might indeed ramp up the intensity of the halo. For administrators, the lesson is two-fold: first, for those able to grasp a good story on 214 The Cinderella Strategy
the athletic fields or courts, the window for capitalizing upon this success is short and requires both intentional leveraging and institution-wide buy-in to maximize its benefit; and second, for those pursuing or considering pursuing this type of athletic success, despite the prospect of such wide-ranging returns, the investment in big-time athletics remains an expensive gamble. Capitalizing on the Halo Effect From a qualitative perspective, Butler’s case yields ample evidence for the validity of the halo effect. Interview respondents, whether long-term members of the community or relative newcomers, spoke with conviction about the manifold benefits of the back-to-back Final Four runs. Though these gains are often difficult to quantify, even for those who have access to all available data, Butler’s case provides reason to believe that a Cinderella story can galvanize efforts across a variety of university functions, including marketing and branding, enrollment and recruitment, civic and alumni relations, fundraising, and student life. Of particular note, the traditional understanding of the halo effect often privileges its perceived value for enrollment and recruitment. Indeed, the Flutie Effect continues to spur debate in scholarly circles and to draw popular attention in sports media.9 Yet, in the current higher education landscape the most lucrative opportunities might lie in the area of marketing and branding.10 Even so, although the halo effect offers numerous leverage points on a university-wide level, administrators must move quickly to capitalize on its energy. The selection of Jim Danko as president, the elevation of Barry Collier to the vice president level, the massive fundraising campaign for the athletic department’s principal facility in Hinkle Fieldhouse, the increased staffing capacity in marketing and fundraising, and the decision to expand the traditional size of the undergraduate student body all represent strategic initiatives launched in the immediate aftermath of the Final Fours. Yet, to really extend the effect of the Cinderella story as a resource, the move to the Big East was essential and, for many in the Butler community, constitutes a more valuable asset in the long-run. In this regard, our research confirmed the idea in the scholarly literature that the halo effect lasts for somewhere between one and The Cinderella Strategy 215
four years after the spark of athletic success. As such, the few years after the Cinderella run open a crucial window for administrators to capitalize on the story itself but also, just as importantly, to seek ways to cement its value over the long-term. Accepting Change Butler’s ability to leverage the Cinderella story was enhanced considerably by a largely unified campus front. Students, faculty, and staff embraced a “new” Butler that encompassed many changes in a short duration of time. These included the management of larger incoming classes, enhanced expectations for fundraising, an increased focus on marketing, and a building boom that brought with it constant disruptions to daily life on campus. The biggest adaptation of all, however, might have been Butler’s leap from a regional university to a national one, a move that brought great promise yet a sober reminder of the resource gap between Butler and its new peers. The jump also meant a nostalgic goodbye to a Butler that, while relatively obscure, largely avoided the cutthroat mentality and pressure of those in the national university category. To be sure, as with any university community worth its salt, there were voices of dissent and caution. Yet such differences of opinion did not check Butler’s entrance into a brave new world and certainly refined it at points as well. When it comes to strategic shifts at an institution, buy-in is a crucial yet infrequently earned resource. Up the road at Purdue University, for instance, the decision in 2017 to purchase the for-profit, online entity Kaplan University and the subsequent creation of Purdue Global stirred dissent. Faculty members stiffly opposed the move and passed a resolution calling the deal a “violation of common-sense educational practice and respect for Purdue faculty.”11 As the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette reported, “By their own account, the very people hired for their expertise—its faculty—have no say in Purdue Global operations. They also have no direct control over the curriculum they teach, delivering courses developed behind closed doors.” In October 2018, news broke that Purdue Global had operated at a loss of $38 million in its first year.12 The acceptance of a new direction at Butler was facilitated by the belief and confidence communicated by its leaders. Jim Danko drove home the benefits 216 The Cinderella Strategy
that aggressive marketing, larger class sizes, new facilities, and entrance into the Big East offered. Kate Morris reassured the faculty that additional resources would be provided to offset the increased student population. Barry Collier leaned on the underdog spirit to instill confidence that Bulldog teams could compete in the Big East Conference. Furthermore, the embrace of a new Butler was also possible due to the selflessness of the campus community. They made sacrifices and voiced little complaint in the process. In the spirit of the Butler Way, they “put the team above self.” The Cinderella story accelerated a move to national prominence, but the road would have been bumpier and the trip longer if not for Butler’s collective acceptance of change. Gambling on Big-Time Athletics In the end, the investment in a big-time college athletic program remains a significant institutional gamble, with payoffs that can be long in coming and difficult to quantify. The case at Butler does not refute the strong warning that scholars like Elka Peterson-Horner and Rick Eckstein continue to sound for prestige-seeking institutions who “take a big financial and organizational risk by investing in more visible sports programs. Certain schools may indeed benefit from such a strategy, but many more probably will not.”13 Yet, Butler may have built toward and then leveraged its Cinderella story prudently enough to have permanently altered the footing and status of the university. Director of Community and Government Relations Michael Kaltenmark drew on the gambling metaphor, and his words are as good as any to tie the threads of the story into a final bow: “The men’s basketball program is invaluable. It’s precious. Clearly, based on what we’ve done with it through the Final Fours and what not, you take that out of Butler’s history and this place looks vastly different. I don’t think you can argue with that, especially in this state of higher education we’re in now. It’s a real arms race out there with schools closing their doors. I really hate to think about where we’d be without that occurrence and what our team’s done. Now, that’s allowed the university to stand on its own even more. We know what basketball can do for your future, so obviously you want the team to keep winning. But I don’t feel like all chips are in on it anymore. Back in the day, we shoved all those The Cinderella Strategy 217
chips to the middle and just rode that hand because that’s what we had. We had some other good stuff—don’t get me wrong—but we knew that if those chips cashed in, the other good stuff was just going to get that much better and it did. Now we’re at a point where it’s like ‘Well, I’m going to take a stack of those chips and now put it over here with this and put it with this, and put it with this.’ We’ve diversified our bet.” In this way, Butler has realized to some extent the dream shaped in the past by football schools like Notre Dame and Boston College, yet they have done so in the present day and through the vehicle of men’s basketball. By 2019, the university had solidified enough gains that Jim Danko could write to fellow university presidents with an offer to share some of Butler’s strategy. The men’s basketball team did not make the tournament that year, but that did little to curb the university’s progress or tarnish the legacy of the Final Four runs in 2010 and 2011. As Danko concluded his letter, “I will certainly be reminded, as we continue to grow and thrive, even without the tournament, that March is a big reason why.” Butler’s case suggests that there is still reason to believe in the widespread payoffs from the Cinderella story, but that the true value of that resource hinges upon a network of strategic decisions made by many administrators, coaches, and players over many years, both before and after that one shining moment. The Butler Model Butler’s story raises and leaves open several important questions, particularly with regard to the variables of sport, location, and university size. The Butler model spins on Division I men’s basketball as well as the unique leverage point of the NCAA Tournament, but such institutional opportunities might be available on a smaller scale through different, more regionally popular sports like ice hockey or baseball. Likewise, for schools that have invested heavily in football alongside men’s basketball, a Cinderella run in men’s basketball might present a different set of strategic choices. For instance, on the one hand the presence of a Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football program changes the financial and cultural calculus for such schools: unlike Butler and its peers with FCS football programs, such institutions must continue to wrestle with the football question 218 The Cinderella Strategy
and the associated costs, risks, and pressures. On the other hand, the presence of an FBS football program might open the doors to membership in a Power Five athletic conference: as mentioned earlier, Butler’s move to the Big East was essential for extending the effects of its Final Four runs, but the Big East represents the only real major conference landing spot for institutions without an FBS football program. Beyond these considerations, it is also unclear how completely the Butler model might transfer to universities of a larger size, in which a unitary culture and a small college environment are nearly impossible to maintain, and to institutions in different parts of the country, where sports other than basketball have captured the allegiance of the local populace. Yet, for those looking to extrapolate the Butler model into other contexts, several elements are essential regardless of university type, location, or size. The first prerequisite and perhaps the distinguishing feature of Butler’s story is institutional patience. This posture has characterized the management style across so many administrative relationships at the university, from board of trustees to president, president to athletic director, and athletic director to coach. It also diverges from prevailing management practices, especially in big-time athletic departments where emotional investments and knee-jerk reactions run high. The effects of such patience, however, are wide-ranging. At Butler, the emphasis on decision-making for long-term sustainability over short-term success and for building programs rather than teams is evident everywhere. It seeps into the sideline demeanor of the coaching staff, perhaps best embodied by the famously unflappable Brad Stevens but echoed today in LaVall Jordan’s radiant calm. It infuses the team’s style of play: blue collar, possession by possession, with a hard-earned reputation for never being out of games. It appears even in odd places, like the team’s fan base, always hungry to win but willing to stick beside their coaches and players even through seasons of adversity. Certainly, other administrators and athletic programs might find success with more fast-twitch decision-making, but Butler makes a case for the transformative potential of patience. The second prerequisite is a source of continuity. Undoubtedly, the task of building a men’s basketball program strong enough to become a Cinderella requires time, talent, and resources, but the more difficult undertaking might The Cinderella Strategy 219
be sustaining this success in the years that follow. March Madness furnishes teams like Florida Gulf Coast and Loyola Chicago each year, and a single Sweet 16 berth carries with it ample opportunity for national attention and institutional notoriety. However, programs like Gonzaga and Butler whose Cinderella stories remain open-ended have reached another, more rarified level of achievement of a more enduring value to their institutions. Key to this effort to move from short-stay to mainstay is some source of continuity. At Butler, the path to continuity consists of a dynamic organizational culture and a singular arbiter. In an environment in which the churn of personnel is constant, by rule at the player level and by convention at the coaching level, the Butler Way is remarkable in its staying power and influence, forming a common bond over decades between these two transient populations. Yet, it is difficult to separate the Butler Way from Barry Collier, who sowed this culture during his tenure as head coach and continues to harvest it in the present day as athletic director. One person does not a culture make, but Collier has undoubtedly been an anchor point in the shape and growth of Butler Athletics. As Todd Lickliter observed, even in Collier’s absence during the six years that he coached at Nebraska before returning as athletic director, his effect on Butler’s flagship program remained significant as its two head coaches during that span—first Thad Matta and then Lickliter—had served as his assistants and resonated with his foundational philosophies. In this way, the Butler model suggests that schools can navigate the head coaching changes that seem so often to stunt programs on the rise by either fostering a potent organizational culture or retaining charismatic leaders in the anchor position of athletic director, and likely some combination of both. The third and final prerequisite is a mission-driven approach to growth, both within the athletic department and across the institution. Though Butler was not necessarily staffed or organized to take immediate advantage of the marketing and fundraising opportunities presented by the Final Four runs, over the long-term it is difficult to imagine an institution leveraging the Cinderella story more effectively. In this regard, a common understanding of the university’s identity and a fealty to its founding impulses across key leadership positions, particularly president and athletic director, shaped decisions on how 220 The Cinderella Strategy
best to use this new resource. In pursuing growth, administrators have been careful to preserve the institution’s long-standing assets, most notably its small college feel, a symbiotic relationship with the city of Indianapolis, a compelling university-wide culture, and a singular athletic facility in Hinkle Fieldhouse. In other words, decision-makers at Butler have used all of the attention and opportunity presented by the success of the men’s basketball team to amplify the university that others had established well before they arrived and well before the basketball team was known outside the state of Indiana. The Cinderella story represents a growth opportunity, but such growth—driven as it is by a polarizing force like big-time athletics—must remain in visible service to the university’s mission and traditions if it is ultimately to prove more than a flash in the pan.
The Cinderella Strategy 221
222  The Cinderella Strategy
Sign on Butler’s campus in the fall of 2020. C OURTESY GRAHAM HONAKER
Epilogue The Cinderella Strategy 223
I
n 2018, Chip Patterson ranked the twenty-five best Cinderella runs in NCAA Tournament history for CBS Sports. “The ‘Cinderella’ team or story in college basketball,” Patterson wrote, “is the most iconic fairy tale reference in all of sports. The term has sustained over time and taken on a life of its own because the rags-to-riches in a moment of magic story is not only aspirational, but in a single-elimination basketball tournament it’s possible almost every time the ball is tipped.”1 Butler’s 2011 team came in at fourth on the list—behind only 1983 NC State, 1990 Loyola Marymount, and 1985 Villanova. It is easy to quibble with the rankings. Six-seed NC State won the national championship on a wild buzzer-beating play, but the tournament field featured only fifty-two teams at the time and the Wolfpack hailed from a power conference in the ACC. As 8-seed, Villanova wove a similar tale two years later, in a full sixty-four-team field no less, becoming the lowest seed to win a title with a near-flawless performance against Georgetown, yet doing so as another power conference team, this time from the Big East. Loyola Marymount was an 11-seed, a high-scoring outfit from a mid-major conference fueled by a narrative equal parts inspiring and heartbreaking after star player Hank Gathers’s death of cardiomyopathy one week prior to the tournament’s start; their run, however, ended in the Elite Eight with a 30-point loss to a UNLV buzzsaw. Even Butler’s spot on the list is mildly controversial: many Butler fans, in fact, might slot their 2010 team ahead of the 2011 version, if only for that moment of utter possibility when Gordon Hayward’s shot hung over the court in Lucas Oil Stadium. Ranking Cinderellas is fun because it is an exercise in subjectivity, but also because it is a reminder of just how many good stories March has produced over the years. Yet, objectively speaking, only one team on CBS’s list boasts consecutive Cinderella runs all the way to the tournament’s final day. “We had to choose one,” begins the entry for Butler.2 As Butler’s own beat writer David Woods has suggested, “The difficulty in placing Butler’s back-to-back tournament runs in perspective is that there is no comparable occurrence. There has never been anything like it. Not in Indiana or in any of the other forty-nine states.”3 224 The Cinderella Strategy
Could it happen again? Stories have a way of repeating themselves, and parity in the college game is greater than ever. A number of recent factors might tilt the game in favor of the smaller schools that tend to keep their rosters stable: the transfer epidemic; the profusion of elite talent to overseas teams or the NBA’s G-League rather than even a one-and-done stay in college; the looming retirements of some of the game’s coaching giants, from Mike Kryzyzewski to Jim Boeheim to Roy Williams; and, the recent groundbreaking decision of top-ranked recruit Makur Maker to attend an HBCU (Historically Black College and University) in Howard University. Yet, when stories resurface, they still come freighted with memory. Ten years after Butler’s first Final Four run, retired USA Today lead columnist (and one-time Butler student) Mike Lopresti wrote, “To this day, when upstarts dream of a March Madness fantasy, they usually evoke the name of Butler.”4 Indeed, there does seem to be a touch deeper resonance with the Cinderella story when Butler is involved. Perhaps it’s the back-to-back Final Fours. Perhaps it’s the ties to the Milan Miracle and Hoosiers. Perhaps it’s Hayward’s desperation shot hitting glass just inches away from the sweet spot that would have toppled Duke. Perhaps it’s something to do with the Butler Way and a gutsy, selfless style of play. Perhaps it’s all just Hinkle magic. Yet, from another perspective, it might just be the university’s history, inclusive of all those basketball yarns yet weaving together so much more, moment after moment when the community stared down long odds and somehow emerged better and stronger. The secret sauce may just be that the Cinderella story is coded in the university’s DNA, and a look anywhere across campus, or across any window of time, turns up underdogs everywhere. Events seem often to conspire to thrust Butler into this familiar position, and 2020 is no different. As the 2020–21 men’s basketball season approaches, prognosticators for the Big East have slotted Butler finishing somewhere between eighth and tenth in the league. These predictions assume, of course, that there even will be a season and that, wherever the Bulldogs finish, protocols and compliance and not a small amount of luck will enable the NCAA Tournament to run once more come March. For months and months, COVID-19 has been the great unknown, and as The Cinderella Strategy 225
colleges and universities fight to resume some semblance of their operations, it is not clear how many of them will survive. Of course, Clayton Christensen, who passed away in January 2020, could not have foreseen a global pandemic when he made the habit of predicting that half of the country’s colleges and universities would face bankruptcy by the end of the 2020s. Yet, COVID-19 has now turned many, many institutions of higher education into legitimate underdogs. In some respects, Butler is no different in this regard. There have been layoffs, furloughs, financial strains, hiring freezes, quarantines, toggling between in-person and online classes, and myriad difficult decisions. When students arrived back on campus in August, Hinkle Fieldhouse had undergone yet another transformation, this time into a testing facility for the virus. In October 2020, Butler Athletics launched the Bulldog Forever Initiative to offset a potential multi-million-dollar shortfall for the academic year. When games resumed in Hinkle in November, the Fieldhouse looked like it did in the pre-Bannister days, only a quarter full. Blue IV remains a presence on campus, only it’s more often his likeness plastered on COVID-19 precaution signs all around campus rather than the real, live, slobbering thing. Yet, in other respects, Butler is different. For one thing, there are still those Final Fours. As alum Tom Slaton said, “Thank God for the Final Fours. We could be in a really tough place without them,” voicing a sentiment common to many within the Butler community. For another, signs of hope still dot the horizon. Despite unprecedented challenges for recruitment and enrollment, with freshman enrollment across the country down 13% from the previous year, the university welcomed the third-largest incoming class in its history for the fall of 2020.5 Butler Blue has continued to play the role of admissions rep, delivering acceptance letters to masked students and using video media that the parent of one prospective student described as “pure genius” to begin recruiting next year’s class. In August, the Old National Bank Center for Business Excellence, a partnership between Butler and Old National Bank, rolled out a program designed to bolster businesses owned by members of underrepresented groups across the state. By waiving an annual membership fee, the center will offer vital services 226 The Cinderella Strategy
Paw-delivered acceptance letters in the COVID era. C OURTESY MICHAEL KALTENMARK
such as business assessments, strategic planning, and networking opportunities to a variety of companies. The initiative grew out of a conversation between Butler student intern Victor Aguilar and the Center’s Executive Director Mark McFatridge in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.6 Across Atherton Mall, construction continues on the $100-million expansion of the science complex as the Butler Beyond campaign charges toward completion in 2022. Meanwhile, thoughts in Indianapolis have turned once more to basketball. It is widely speculated that the NCAA can hardly afford to forego the men’s basketball tournament for a second straight season, with none other than Mike Krzyzewski voicing as much on an ESPN Radio program in August.7 To that end, the NCAA announced in November that it was exploring the possibility of hosting the 2021 NCAA Tournament at a single site, with Indy rumored to be the leading candidate. “Who knows if anything and everything is on the table?” Mike Lopresti wrote in the Indianapolis Business Journal as details of the plan began to shape. “But if we’re in the mood to dream, here are a few suggestions.”8 Lopresti’s leading suggestion if March Madness is to fit entirely within the confines of a single city? Cram as much as possible into Hinkle Fieldhouse. The Cinderella Strategy 227
“The grand old lady deserves that. It’s unfortunate that no NCAA Tournament game has been there since 1940…Take advantage of this unique situation and allow Hinkle a national stage. Imagine the first-round games in the afternoon, with the light coming through the windows, as Hinkle should be experienced. The players would love it. The chance won’t come again.”9 Cinderella herself famously uttered, “If you keep on believing, the dream that you wish will come true.” For Butler, it did. And lives on, so it may again, with even a grander ending.
228 The Cinderella Strategy
The Final Four banners in Hinkle. C OURTESY PETER WANG
The Cinderella Strategy 229
230  The Cinderella Strategy
Acknowledgments
W
alt Disney once said, “Many hands and hearts and minds generally contribute to anyone’s notable achievements.” That is certainly true of this project. Bob Hammel has been a hero of mine since I was 15. His advice, encouragement, and mentorship were instrumental in this book coming to fruition. Trena Roudebush is not only a wonderful friend, but provided a second set of eyes and guidance during the entire process. Chris Fenison and Pediment Publishing believed in us from the start and were terrific to work with. Bobby Plump and his Milan team planted the seed early in my life that David could beat Goliath; his influence and friendship means the world to me. I’m also grateful to Shari Richey, Rachael Burt, Claudia Johnson, and Betsy Weatherly for recruiting and hiring me at Butler. I had tremendous support from the Butler community for the book and wish to acknowledge: Jim and Bethanie Danko, Barry Collier, Jay and Roop Sandhu, Brady Collier, Stephanie Judge-Cripe, Peter Wang, Bill Templeton, Lori Greene, Bruce Arick, Jonathan Purvis, Michael Lofton, Stacey Orme, Ken LaRose, Mike Freeman, Lee Dicklitch, Mark McFatridge, John Dedman, Michael Kaltenmark, Marc Allan, Carl Heck, Patti Lamb, Gina Donahue, Jennifer DeWitt, Jennifer Stringer, Ena Shelley, Janine Frainier, Evan Miller, Sally Childs-Helton, Jerry Toomer, Chris and Sally Wirthwein, Clint Bobb, Tom Paradis, Craig Caldwell, Pete Xander, Jimmy Lafakis, and Julie Schrader. Barrett Henderson from Gonzaga, Jon Jackson from Duke, and Tom James with the San Antonio Spurs were very helpful in providing us with photos. I’m fortunate to have a great foundation of mentors and friends who have backed me for many years. They include Susan Kleinman, Ed Valdettaro, Paul VanDorn, Jon Mangold, David Gardner, Dick Fetter, Lou and Myrna Lemberger, Harriet Schor, Margo Lemberger, Bill and Kay Shover, Nancy and Denny Lawton, Alex Kor, Mitch Henck, David Woods, Steve Standifird, Gordon Kaplan, Ilana Sambuco-Paul, Noel Shepherd, J Locklier, Napoleon Watkins, Hallie Bryant, Lisa Frieden, Patrick Schaecher, Charlie Moyer, The Cinderella Strategy 231
Vernon Foster, David Walker, Ted Green, John Abrams, Chris May, Lukas Dwelly, Zach Everson, Andy Greenlee, Kevin McDevitt, Tom Scott, George Andrus, Kristin Hannon, Teresa Schofield, Alex and Georgeann Brown, Tom and Deborah Slaton, Loren and Morgan Snyder, Tom Kohlmeier, Bill Dugan, Jeff Blade, John and Mary Marsh, Kelli Piechocki, Michael and Sharon Nemeroff, Alison Guiney, Jason and Wendy Albano, Cook and Julie Griffin, Tom and Verletta King, Kevin Kramer, Phyllis Sambuco, Mike Weber, JoAn Scott, Mick Sandhu, Greg Silver, and John Seal. I’ve had three professors who played a major role in developing my research and writing skills: Christy Buchanan, Mark Leary, and Pat McDunn. I’m so thankful to my family for providing unconditional love and support: Nancye Claypool, Greta Koning, Kathy Morsbach, Hans Morsbach, Mark Snyder, Daryl Snyder, John and Patricia Harman, Liz Ware, Mary Parks, Anita Jean Snyder, Belvia Honaker and Thomas G. Honaker Jr., and Thomas G. Honaker III. My grandfather passed away just before the publication of the book. Thank you to Gordon Snyder for all of the books, articles, and videos on basketball that fueled my obsession with the game. Finally, I’m most grateful to Jerry Logan. His writing and editing skills more than made up for my deficiencies in this area. I not only count him as a co-author, but a great friend. He has certainly earned his stripes as an honorary Butler Bulldog and embodies the Butler Way. —Graham Honaker
232 The Cinderella Strategy
G
raham Honaker is the reason you’re holding this book. When he called in March 2020, I had a dream and a two-year-old dissertation, but no clue how to turn either of those into a publication. Just as he did years earlier when I confided to him that I wanted to get my dad to a game at Hinkle Fieldhouse, Graham knew how to make this dream happen and insisted it would. For the past year, I’ve drafted off of his relentless optimism, interpersonal savvy, and steadfast conviction in our work. I will take immense joy in holding the finished product in hand, but the greatest joy has been in working with Graham. So many people helped with the mechanics of this book, but I’d like to draw particular attention to a few. Chris Fenison and Pediment Publishing were professional, responsive, and knowledgeable; they gave us plenty of latitude and plenty of support with this project. Tim Ferguson Sauder is a top-notch human being, so it’s no surprise that his Return Design program at Olin College is top-notch as well; we’re especially grateful to Emily Nasiff and Andrew Schnurr for their superb work on the book jacket design. Tim Deluca, Brooke Falzarano, and Mason Shine dove right into some “brand ambassador” work for us; I’m grateful for their help, and even more grateful for their friendship. Now that I’ve started at the end, let me go back to the beginning. I owe my belief that academics and athletics belong together to four coaches who lived out that philosophy every day during my high school and college years: Chad Turner, Leigh Block, Mike Schauer, and Jeremy Martin. Similarly, when I landed at Boston College for doctoral studies and couldn’t shake the athletics bug, no one balked at my ideas. Instead, I found only encouragement and helping hands at every turn. The Lynch School’s Higher Education PhD program is a gem. The faculty, students, and alums all somehow manage to balance razor-sharp intellects with sincere concern for others. I’m grateful to Ana Martínez Alemán, Karen Arnold, Erica Brown Soto, Charlie Cownie, Kevin Gin, Julianna González-McLean, Pat Keating, Jonathan Lewis, Mike Malec (from just across the way in the Sociology Department), Adam McCready, Georgiana Mihut, Jess Pesce, and Heather Rowan-Kenyon. They have made my work, and me, better than I have any business being. I had no idea what I was getting into when I chose to try and study Butler The Cinderella Strategy 233
for my dissertation, but in retrospect, it was a half-court heave that went clean through the net. I’m grateful to Brad Bates for reaching out on my behalf, Barry Collier for welcoming me, and Bob Scalise for allowing me to practice my (initially terrible) interview questions at Harvard before I ever headed west to Indy. As for the many people at Butler who graciously lent of their time and perspective whenever I asked, your names flood the pages of this book; without you, there would be no story to try and tell. After so many of the interviews I conducted or the interactions I had, I’d say to myself, or to my wife, or to no one in particular, “I think that was the nicest person I’ve ever met.” Together you’ve built a university, an athletic program, and a community worth rooting for, and I’m grateful you let me have a seat on the bandwagon. I often say I keep a tight circle, but when I think about all of the people who have been closest to me as I’ve worked on this project—pumping me full of encouragement, support, and insight—I realize that the circle around me is much larger than I ever give it credit for. Among many from the Gordon community, I’m especially grateful to Valerie Gin, Bruce Herman, Sharon Ketcham, Mark Stevick, Sandy Doneski, and all of the students in the RSW program for routinely lifting my spirits, sharpening my character, and lighting my way forward. Mark Sargent, Steve Nelson, and Greg Carmer have invested much attention in my development and well-being over the years, letting me pick their brain and tug their ears whenever I needed to. I also have the best friends in the world: shout-out to the whole Bromley Reunion crew, who have filled my heart with such joy and so many good memories over the years, and a special thanks to Keith Krass, Diego Mendes, Adam Schaefer, and Beau Woods, each of whom has supported this project as if it were their own. I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to my family: to Plaskets and Logans on every side, and especially to Ruth Plasket, Pam Plasket, and Helen Logan, and in memory of Bill Plasket and Wayne Logan, all of whom never missed a game and have never stopped cheering me on; to Josh Sturgeon, who has walked side by side through life with me for so long and still fills me to the brim with laughter, ideas, and perspective in our every interaction; to Jordan and Sarah Logan, who understand villains and heroes better than most and have so often taught me what self-sacrifice looks like; and to Patti and Jerry 234 The Cinderella Strategy
Logan, my parents, whose love I only began to fully understand once I became a parent myself. To Charlie, Brady, and Kate—it is my deepest honor to play a part in your story. You have widened my heart and my smile more than I would have ever thought possible. And, finally, to Lisa—only you know just how much this entire project, from dissertation to book publication, has meant to me. You’ve been with me every step of the way, offering constant emotional support and so much good, clean, practical advice. I trust you with my writing for many of the same reasons I trust you with everything else in life, among them your sharp eye, clear communication, and genuine care for the things that matter to me. You’ve given so much of your own time and attention to this work, often with even more enthusiasm than me. You keep me going, and going anywhere with you is a gift. —Jerry Logan
The Cinderella Strategy 235
236  The Cinderella Strategy
On Methodology and Sources
I
n October 2017, I ( Jerry) interviewed Graham over lunch at the Meridian Restaurant and Bar just up the road from Butler’s campus. I was wrapping up research for my dissertation and getting ready to write like a madman. Graham had writing on the brain, too, as I discovered just before we parted ways. In the transcript of our conversation from that day, one of the last things recorded was Graham telling a story from the fundraising frontlines and then finishing by saying, “There’s probably a lot of stories people don’t know. I’ve kept my own notes. Someday I’d love to write my own book on these stories.” I’m not sure if this is the book he imagined. It’s not the book I imagined. That one had my name only on it, and Graham’s reference to “my own book” suggests to me that he had a similar vision in mind for himself. Sometimes, though, reality exceeds our imagination, and the book that you hold in your hands is much stronger because it’s neither Graham’s nor mine alone: it is both of ours. As a joint effort, it is grounded in the rigorous methodology of doctoral-level research and told with practitioners in mind. It is the fusion of an external researcher’s perspective and an internal participant’s experience. It is member-checked formally and informally, the final package verified with members of the Butler community who have written and lived this story. And, it is current, with Graham filling in all of the data gaps and narrative developments that came after I defended my dissertation in the spring of 2018. As a result, we can tell a three-decade-long story with confidence, having merged our observations, impressions, and analysis into something better than either of us could have mustered on our own. The backbone of the study consists of twenty-two in-depth interviews conducted with eighteen key members of the Butler community in 2017. Data collected from these interviews was supplemented with document and artifact analysis, on-campus observation, and secondary sources. The information was then coded to provide the framework for what we eventually came to refer to in this book as “the Cinderella strategy.” Essential to this methodological approach were Robert Stake’s The Art of Case Study Research and Johnny Saldaña’s The Cinderella Strategy 237
The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. If you’re looking for a more thorough account of the original methodology (or for a good, fun lit review), it probably means you’re a member of a university community, which probably means you have access to ProQuest’s Dissertations and Theses repository, where you can find all of the gory details in a dissertation entitled “The ‘Cinderella Story’ as a University Resource: The Use of Intercollegiate Athletic Success for Institutional Growth.” In the intervening years, we have built upon this foundation with follow-up emails and conversations with those both inside and outside of the Butler community who have knowledge of the university’s development. Here especially Graham’s ability to move around the Butler community as an insider and obtain additional evidence bled into the initial data collection I completed for my dissertation. Interviews, email correspondence, and other direct interactions with participants are the principal source of evidence, and we include here a list of those participants: Marc Allan, Bruce Arick, Bruce Bigelow, Clint Bobb, Margaret Brabant, Tod Buerger, Bobbi Canada, Larry Canada, Sally Childs-Helton, Barry Collier, Brady Collier, Dan Cooreman, Bethanie Danko, Jim Danko, Chris Denari, Steven Dolvin, Bill Dugan, John Dunn, Mike Freeman, Ari Gerstein, Adam Grant, Lori Greene, John Hargrove, Matt Howard, Riley Johnson, Stephanie Judge-Cripe, Michael Kaltenmark, Joe Kirsch, Larry Lad, Jimmy Lafakis, Nancy Lawton, Todd Lickliter, Jon Loftin, Ted Lowrie, Kurt Mahrdt, Michael Malec, Colin Moore, Kate Morris, Jim Nantz, Susan Neville, Stacey Orme, Chris Potts, Bobby Plump, Mike Roth, Dan Saftig, Jay Sandhu, Hessam Saroogi, Ena Shelley, Noel Shepherd, Jane Siegler, Deborah Slaton, Tom Slaton, Brad Stevens, Tracy Stevens, Yzabel Tio, Jerry Toomer, Betsy Weatherly, Sally Wirthwein, and David Woods. The endnotes are intended to document additional sources of evidence beyond these interviews and interactions. Finally, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the sports journalists and beat writers who have covered Butler for years. Far too often, academia overlooks the outstanding research done and extensive networks formed by professionals in the field of journalism. Writers like Dustin Dopirak, Bob Kravitz, and David Woods have been wise to Butler and throwing off hints about 238 The Cinderella Strategy
the transformation across the larger university for some time now; accordingly, their collective work represents a rich and ongoing source of information. We frequently saw no need to retrace their steps, particularly when it came to basketball-specific reporting, but instead to provide it with a fresh platform and give credit where credit has long been due.
The Cinderella Strategy 239
240  The Cinderella Strategy
Endnotes Introduction 1. Bobby Fong, “How Butler Won the NCAA Tournament,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 15, 2010, https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Butler-Won-the-NCAA/65071, para. 4, 20. 2. Doug Lederman,“CFO Survey Reveals Doubts About Financial Sustainability,”Inside Higher Ed, July 12, 2013, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/survey/cfo-survey-reveals-doubts-about-financial-sustainability. 3. Stephen Eide, “Private Colleges in Peril,” Education Next 18, no. 4 (2018), https://www.educationnext. org/private-colleges-peril-financial-pressures-declining-enrollment-closures/, para. 2. 4. Christensen was not shy about this prediction, making it frequently. See Doug Lederman’s article “Clay Christensen, Doubling Down” on Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/ article/2017/04/28/clay-christensen-sticks-predictions-massive-college-closures. 5. Eide, “Private Colleges in Peril,” para. 20. 6. As quoted in “The Butler Way: Winning with Integrity,” Business of College Sports, November 8, 2011, https://businessofcollegesports.com/basketball/the-butler-way-winning-with-integrity/. 7. David Woods, Underdawgs: How Brad Stevens and Butler University Built the Bulldogs for March Madness, (New York, NY: Scribner, 2012), ix.
Chapter 1 1. J. Douglas Toma, Football U.: Spectator Sports in the Life of the American University, (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), 7. 2. Prestige is widely covered in the higher education literature. For an overview of the subject, see Dominic J. Brewer, Susan M. Gates, & Charles A. Goldman, In Pursuit of Prestige: Strategy and Competition in US Higher Education, (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). Toma (2003) applies the concept of institutional prestige to athletics most extensively, but other sources worth exploring include Charles Clotfelter, Big-time sports in American universities, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); John R. Thelin & Lawrence L. Wisemann, “The Old College Try: Balancing Academics and Athletics in Higher Education,” (ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 4, 1989); and, J. Douglas Toma, “Institutional Strategy: Positioning for Prestige,” in The Organization of Higher Education: Managing Colleges for a New Era, edited by Michael N. Bastedo, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 118-159. 3. John R. Thelin, Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics, (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 9; see also KerryAnn O’Meara, “Striving for What? Exploring the Pursuit of Prestige,” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Vol. 22, edited by John C. Smart, (New York, NY: Agathon Press, 2007), 121-179; Toma, Football U.; and, Toma, “Institutional Strategy.” 4. Thelin, Games Colleges Play.
The Cinderella Strategy 241
5. On football’s rise, see Clotfelter, Big-time sports in American universities; Michael Oriard, King Football: Sport and Spectacle in the Golden Age of Radio and Newsreels, Movies and Magazines, the Weekly and the Daily Press, (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1962); Ronald A. Smith, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-time College Athletics (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1988); and, John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Second Edition), (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 6. J. Douglas Toma & Michael E. Cross, “Intercollegiate Athletics and Student College Choice: Exploring the Impact of Championship Seasons on Undergraduate Applications,” Research in Higher Education 39, no. 6 (1998): 651-652. 7. Benjamin G. Rader, American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 286. 8. Seth Davis, When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball, (New York, NY: Times Books, 2009), 8. Davis deserves credit for pinpointing this confluence of events in the wonderful prologue to his book. 9. Ibid, 4. 10. Clotfelter, Big-time sports in American universities; Toma, Football U. 11. Greg Bishop, “Nothing ‘mid’ about Gonzaga,” The New York Times, March 2, 2013, http://www.nytimes. com/2013/03/03/sports/ncaabasketball/gonzaga-basketball-stays-the-course-and-reaches-the-top.html; Brewer, Gates, & Goldman, In Pursuit of Prestige. 12. Bishop, “Nothing ‘mid’ about Gonzaga”; Brewer, Gates, & Goldman, In Pursuit of Prestige; Rader, American Sports; James L. Shulman & William G. Bowen, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 13. Rader, American Sports. 14. Clotfelter, Big-time sports in American universities; Richard M. Southall, Mark S. Nagel, John M. Amis, & Crystal Southall, “A Method to March Madness? Institutional Logics and the 2006 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament,” Journal of Sport Management 22, no. 6 (2008), 677-700. 15. Richard Deitsch, “NCAA, CBS/Turner Extend NCAA Tournament Deal through 2032,” Sports Illustrated, April 12, 2016, http://www.si.com/college-basketball/2016/04/12/ncaa-tournament-marchmadness-cbs-turner-2032, para. 6. 16. Kantar Media, “March Madness TV Ads Have Generated $8.2 Billion in Revenue Since 2006,” March 14, 2016, http://www.kantarmedia.com/us/newsroom/press-releases/march-madnesstv-ads-have-generated-8-billion-in-revenue-since-2006; Chris Smith, “A Single NCAA Tournament Victory Is Worth $1.5 Million,” Forbes, March 21, 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ chrissmith/2013/03/21/a-single-ncaa-tournament-victory-is-worth-1-5-million/#1f4ab0fc717c. 17. Chris Smith, “The Money behind the NCAA Final Four,” Forbes, April 1, 2013 http://www.forbes.com/ sites/chrissmith/2013/04/01/the-money-behind-the-ncaa-final-four/#552185bb49bc.
242 The Cinderella Strategy
18. Myron Medcalf, “Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski Says NCAA Can’t Afford To Again Lose NCAA Basketball Tournament,” ESPN, August 18, 2020, https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/ id/29687865/duke-mike-krzyzewski-says-ncaa-afford-again-lose-ncaa-basketball-tournament. 19. Bishop, “Nothing ‘mid’ about Gonzaga,” para. 21. 20. Kenneth S. Anderson & Eddy Birrer, “Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Resource-based Analysis of the Gonzaga University Men’s Basketball Program, Journal of Sports Administration & Supervision 3, no. 1 (2011), 10-21; Bishop, 2013; George Dohrmann, “Beware the Sleeper,” Sports Illustrated, March 19, 2012 http://www.si.com/vault/2012/03/19/106171945/beware-the-sleeper; Reid Forgrave, “It Zagged: Gonzaga Took a Unique Path to Sustained Success,” Fox Sports, March 10, 2015, http://www.foxsports. com/college-basketball/story/gonzaga-bulldogs-mark-few-took-unique-path-to-sustained-success-031015. 21. Bishop, “Nothing ‘mid’ about Gonzaga,” para. 25. 22. Anderson & Birrer, “Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage”; Dohrmann, “Beware the Sleeper.” 23. Anderson & Birrer, “Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage.” 24. Anderson & Birrer, “Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage,” 15. 25. Ibid. 26. Forgrave, “It Zagged,” para. 6. 27. Ibid, para. 7. 28. Bishop, “Nothing ‘mid’ about Gonzaga,” para. 13; Forgrave, “It Zagged,” para. 39. 29. Anderson & Birrer, “Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage,” 16. 30. Ibid, 20. 31. Forgrave, “It Zagged,” para. 13. 32. Adam Kilgore & Dan Steinberg, “Mason Madness: Inside the Most Unlikely Run in NCAA Tournament History,” The Washington Post, March 4, 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/sports/wp/2016/03/04/ mason-madness-inside-the-most-unlikely-run-in-ncaa-tournament-history/, para. 1. 33. Robert Baker, “A Funny Thing Happened on George Mason’s Way to the Final Four,” SportsBusiness Journal, http://m.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2008/03/20080324/Opinion/Afunny-ThingHappened-On-George-Masons-Way-To-Final-Four.aspx; Kilgore & Steinberg, 2016; Peter Schmuck, “Nobody Beats George Mason as Tournament’s Media Star,” The Baltimore Sun, March 24, 2006, http:// articles.baltimoresun.com/2006-03-24/sports/0603240248_1_george-mason-madness-wichita-state; Dan Steinberg, “Overnight Success, Instant Changes at George Mason,” The Washington Post, March 21, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/20/AR2006032001889.html. 34. Kilgore & Steinberg, “Mason Madness,” para. 117. 35. Ibid, para. 148. 36. Baker, “A Funny Thing Happened…,” para. 16; Bob Cohn, “The Final Four Effect,” The Washington Times, March 6, 2009, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/06/the-final-four-effect/?page=all.
The Cinderella Strategy 243
37. Cohn, “The Final Four Effect,” para. 6; Kilgore & Stein, “Mason Madness,” para. 142. 38. George Mason University, “Mason Milestones,” (n.d.), https://www2.gmu.edu/about-mason/masonmilestones; George Mason University, “George Mason University: A History: 1996-2012: Prominence,” 2016, http://ahistoryofmason.gmu.edu/exhibits/show/presence. 39. George Mason University, “Mason Milestones.” 40. Baker, “A Funny Thing Happened… ”; Cohn, “The Final Four Effect.” 41. Baker, “A Funny Thing Happened… ”
Chapter 2 1. Gwen Sunkel, “In the Park: Fairview Park,” May 17, 2014, https://historicindianapolis.com/ in-the-park-fairview-park/. 2. George “Mac” Waller, Butler University: A Sesquicentennial History, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), 291. The vast majority of this chapter is adapted from Waller’s thorough and well-crafted “house history” on Butler University. Only direct quotes are cited here in the endnotes, but unless otherwise noted, the source for the chapter’s background information is Waller. 3. As quoted in Marc Allan, “The History and Heart of Hinkle,” Butler Magazine, winter 2011-12, 14-17. 4. Waller, Butler University, 228. 5. Ibid, 227. 6. Ibid, 165, 198. 7. Ibid, 170. 8. Ibid, 177. 9. Herbert Schwomeyer, Hoosier Hysteria: A History of Indiana High School Boys Basketball (Seventh Edition), (Greenfield, IN: Mitchell-Fleming Printing, Inc., 1990), 1. 10. Schwomeyer, Hoosier Hysteria. 11. Waller, Butler University, 177. 12. “Butler Students Gain Holiday after Athletes Picket Doors,” March 8, 1928, [Clipping from Indianapolis News], copy in Howard Caldwell/Tony Hinkle Collection, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN. 13. Eric Angevine, Hinkle Fieldhouse: Indiana’s Basketball Cathedral, (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2015). 14. Waller, Butler University, 296. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid, 314.
244 The Cinderella Strategy
18. Howard Caldwell, Tony Hinkle: Coach for All Seasons, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 75. 19. Ibid, 75, 109. 20. David Woods, The Butler Way: The Best of Butler Basketball, (Indianapolis, IN: Blue River Press, 2009). 21. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle. 22. Bob Collins, “Hinkle’s “Barn” Still Palace at Age 50,” (n.d.), [Clipping from The Indianapolis Star], copy in Howard Caldwell/Tony Hinkle Collection, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN. 23. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle; Woods, The Butler Way. 24. Angevine, Hinkle Fieldhouse. 25. Waller, Butler University, 382; Woods, The Butler Way. 26. Waller, Butler University, 423, 430. 27. Susan S. Neville, Butler’s Big Dance: The Team, the Tournament, and Basketball Fever, (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 32. 28. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle, 42. 29. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle. 30. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle; Waller, Butler University. 31. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle. 32. Angevine, Hinkle Fieldhouse. 33. Waller, Butler University, 305. 34. Caldwell, Tony Hinkle; Neville, Butler’s Big Dance; Woods, The Butler Way. 35. Neville, Butler’s Big Dance, 31. Chapter 3 1. Waller, Butler University, 454. 2. Ibid, 458. 3. Zak Keefer, “July 3, 2013: The Day That Rocked Butler University,” The Indianapolis Star, October 27, 2013, https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/butler/2014/07/03/the-day-that-rockedbutler-university-brad-stevens-boston-celtics/12127751/. 4. Bob Kravitz, “Barry Collier Has the Blueprint for Success at Butler,” The Athletic, January 22, 2020, https://theathletic.com/1551829/2020/01/22/kravitz-barry-collier-has-the-blueprint-for-success-atbutler/, para. 72. 5. As quoted in Woods, The Butler Way, 17. 6. Woods, Underdawgs.
The Cinderella Strategy 245
7. “Plan for Hinkle Fieldhouse will bring upgrade,” June 8, 1989, [Clipping from The Indianapolis Star], Copy in Howard Caldwell/Tony Hinkle Collection, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, 9. 8. Angevine, Hinkle Fieldhouse, 106. 9. Woods, Underdawgs. 10. “Bulldog Bulletin,” Butler Magazine, summer 2008, 16. 11. “ButlerRising Campaign Update,” Butler Magazine, winter 2008-09, 6. 12. “Bud and Jackie Sellick Bowl.” Butler Sports, 2017, http://butlersports.com/sports/2016/5/19/informationfacilities-butler-bowl.aspx; “Bulldog Bulletin,” Butler Magazine, summer 2010, 8-9; ButlerRising Campaign Update, 2008-09; M.E. Stephenson, “Campaign Update,” Butler Magazine, summer 2009, 12-15. 13. Woods, Underdawgs. 14. Brett McMurphy & Andy Katz, “Catholic 7 Departing June 30,” ESPN, March 10, 2013, http://www. espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/9031167/catholic-7-leaving-big-east-june-30; Richard Sandomir, “Rebooted Big East Makes a Splash in Manhattan,” The New York Times, March 20, 2013, http://www. nytimes.com/2013/03/21/sports/ncaabasketball/rebooted-big-east-has-its-coming-out-party-in-newyork.html?_r=0. 15. Smith, “The Money behind the NCAA Final Four.” 16. David Woods, “Scrappy Butler Climbing in Big East Sports Despite Small Budget,” The Indianapolis Star, August 20, 2017, https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/butler/2017/08/20/ scrappy-butler-climbing-big-east-sports-despite-small-budget/572502001/. 17. Ben Sieck, “Bulldogs Begin Big East Era,” The Butler Collegian, August 28, 2013, https://thebutlercollegian. com/2013/08/bulldogs-begin-big-east-era/, para. 14, 15. 18. Ibid, para. 17. 19. As quoted in Josh Mullenix, “Benefits of the Big East Extend to Athletics and Academics,” The Butler Collegian, September 5, 2017, https://thebutlercollegian.com/2017/09/benefits-of-the-big-east-extendto-athletics-and-academics/, para. 11. 20. Bob Woods, “NCAA Tourney Run Can Bring Billions (with a ‘B’),” CNBC, March 10, 2015, https:// www.cnbc.com/2015/03/10/ncaa-basketball-tournament-the-march-madness-bump-translates-intoreal-dollars.html. 21. Chris Holtmann (ChrisHoltmann), “Picture of thank you note to Butler University community upon decision to leave,”Twitter, June 9, 2017, https://twitter.com/ChrisHoltmann/status/873196765964644356. 22. Woods, Underdawgs. 23. William Gildea, “A Shot That Resounds in Hoosier Hearts,” The Washington Post, January 19, 1995, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/sports/1995/01/19/a-shot-that-resounds-in-hoosier-hearts/ feecb16e-de45-4b94-a514-d20b026df784/, para. 13 24. Neville, Butler’s Big Dance, 34-35. 25. Woods, Underdawgs, 174.
246 The Cinderella Strategy
Chapter 4 1. Thelin, Games Colleges Play. 2. Planning Committee for the Strategic Planning Process, The Idea of Butler University, 1993, Copy in Strategic Plan 2005 Folder, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, 18-19. 3. Waller, Butler University, 469-470. 4. Ibid, 477. 5. Geoffrey Bannister, “Letter to the Butler Community,” October 24, 1994, Copy in Strategic Plan 2005 Folder, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, 1. 6. Justin L. Mack & Stephanie Wang, “Former Butler University President Bobby Fong Dead at 64,” The Indianapolis Star, September 8, 2014, https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2014/09/08/ former-butler-university-president-bobby-fong-dead/15277171/; “The Butler Community Comes Together to Honor the University’s 20th President,” Butler Magazine, winter 2014-15; Waller, Butler University. 7. Dan McFeely, “B-ball Really Means Baseball to Butler’s President Bobby Fong,” The Indianapolis Star, April 3, 2010, https://www.indystar.com/story/news/education/2014/09/08/butler-bobby-fong/15276937/. 8. “The Butler Community Comes Together,” 2014-15. 9. As quoted in Marc Allan, “Ten Great Seasons: Bobby Fong Marks a Decade at the Helm of Butler University,” Butler Magazine, spring 2011, 20. 10. William C. Rhoden, “Performance Art That Would Make Any College Proud,” The New York Times, April 5, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/sports/ncaabasketball/06rhoden.html?_r=0, para. 17. 11. Fong, “How Butler Won the NCAA Tournament,” para. 4, 20. 12. Neville, Butler’s Big Dance, xii. 13. Allan, “Ten Great Seasons.” 14. “Dare to Make a Difference: Strategic Plan 2009-2014,” Strategic plan document, 2009, Copy in Dare to Make a Difference Folder, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, 14. 15. Ibid. 16. Allan, “Ten Great Seasons.” 17. Waller, Butler University. 18. “Phi Beta Kappa installs Butler chapter,” Butler Magazine, spring 2010, 5. 19. Rhoden, “Performance Art That Would Make Any College Proud.” 20. Terina Allen, “A Message on Job Titles for Human Capital Management Professionals,” n.d., https:// terinaallen.com/a-message-on-job-titles-for-human-capital-management-professionals/, para. 11. 21. Tim Layden, “The Perfect Game,” Sports Illustrated, 2015, https://www.si.com/longform/2015/1985/ villanova/index.html.
The Cinderella Strategy 247
Chapter 5 1. Nate Silver, “Butler’s Back-to-Back Championship Appearances a 7,500-to-1 Longshot,” FiveThirtyEight, April 4, 2011, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/butlers-back-to-back-championship-appearancesa-7500-to-1-longshot/. 2. As quoted in Zak Keefer, “3 Inches from the Greatest Basketball Story Ever Told,” The Indianapolis Star, January 12, 2016, https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/college/butler/2015/05/13/gordonhayward-shot-butlers-run-final-four/70680056/, para. 28. 3. Ibid, para. 33. 4. Ibid, para. 69. 5. Woods, Underdawgs. 6. Tim Layden, “A Fling and a Prayer,” Sports Illustrated, March 21, 2011, https://www.si.com/ vault/2011/03/21/106048202/a-fling-and-a-prayer, para. 3. 7. Ibid. 8. Woods, Underdawgs. 9. As quoted in Keefer, “3 Inches from the Greatest Basketball Story Ever Told,” para. 12. 10. Mark Mehler & Charles Paikert, Madness: The Ten Most Memorable NCAA Basketball Finals, (New York, NY: Sports Publishing, 2018), chap. 1, Kindle. 11. Bob Kravitz, “Butler Wins for All the Right Reasons,” The Indianapolis Star, April 4, 2011, para. 13. 12. As quoted in Marlen Garcia, “Second Chance at a Fairy Tale Ending,” USA Today, April 4, 2011, para. 9, 10.
Chapter 6 1. Keefer, “July 3, 2013,” para. 97. 2. Ibid, para. 54, 104. 3. Ibid, para. 121, 122. 4. Pete Thamel, “For Butler’s Stevens, Run Began in the Driveway,” The New York Times, April 2, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/sports/ncaabasketball/03stevens.html, para. 22; see also Jackie MacMullan, “Brad Stevens’ Story Isn’t Storybook,” ESPN, November 20, 2013, https://www.espn. com/boston/nba/story/_/id/10008273/boston-celtics-coach-brad-stevens-story-exactly-storybook. 5. Jon M. Jachimowicz, “3 Reasons It’s So Hard To ‘Follow Your Passion,’” Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2019/10/3-reasons-its-so-hard-to-follow-your-passion, para. 6. 6. Eamonn Brennan, “Stevens-to-Celtics a Win for All but Butler,” ESPN, July 3, 2013, https://www. espn.com/blog/collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/86026/stevens-to-celtics-a-win-for-everyone-butbutler, para. 17, 20.
248 The Cinderella Strategy
7. “Butler Reaps Publicity Value from Final Four Run, Butler Sports, April 1, 2011, http://butlersports. com/news/2011/4/1/4_1_2011_1693.aspx?path=mbball; “Strategic Plan Update: Spring 2011,” Strategic plan update document, 2011, Copy in Dare to Make a Difference Folder, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN. 8. Kristi Dosh, “Tournament Pays Handsomely for Schools,” ESPN, March 12, 2012, http://www.espn. com/blog/sportsbusiness/post/_/id/460/tournament-pays-handsomely-for-schools; Jenna Johnson, “Tiny Butler’s NCAA Tournament Success Provided a Bounce beyond Basketball,” The Washington Post, March 20, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/tiny-butlers-ncaa-tournament-successprovided-a-bounce-beyond-basketball/2013/03/20/8f749926-8ca3-11e2-9f54-f3fdd70acad2_story. html?utm_term=.392fe9f32983; Woods, Underdawgs. 9. Woods, Underdawgs. 10. See Brewer, Gates, & Goldman, In Pursuit of Prestige; Doug J. Chung, “The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics,” Marketing Science 32, no. 5 (2013), 679-698; Devin G. Pope & Jaren C. Pope, “The Impact of College Sports Success on the Quantity and Quality of Student Applications,” Southern Economic Journal 75, no. 3 (2009), 750-780; Toma, Football U. 11. Dustin Dopirak, “Even Though the Shot Missed, Butler Still Got Everything It Wanted,” The Athletic, March 12, 2019, https://theathletic.com/858394/2019/03/12/even-though-the-shotmissed-butler-still-got-everything-it-wanted/. 12. Ibid, para. 36. 13. As quoted in “Danko, Big East Officials Positive about Butler’s Move,” The Butler Collegian, March 21, 2013, https://thebutlercollegian.com/2013/03/danko-big-east-officials-positive-about-butlers-move/. 14. Johnson, “Tiny Butler’s NCAA Tournament Success …,” para. 5. 15. As quoted in “Butler University Will Join Big East,” March 20, 2013, http://news.butler.edu/ blog/2013/03/butler-university-will-join-big-east/, para. 3. 16. As quoted in J.P. Pelzman, “Big East Is Not Only Surviving but Thriving without Big-time Football,” Forbes, November 14, 2018, para. 26. 17. As quoted in David Woods, “For Schools Like Butler, without Major College Football, COVID-19 Financial Hit Has Been Less Severe,” The Indianapolis Star, October 15, 2020, https://www.indystar. com/story/sports/college/butler/2020/10/15/butler-basketball-still-finalizing-2020-21-scheduleseason-nears-barry-collier-big-east/3669308001/, para. 4. 18. As quoted in Sieck, “Bulldogs Begin Big East Era,” para. 5. 19. Nicole Auerbach, “Brad Stevens Discusses Butler’s Place in New Big East,” USA Today, May 29, 2013, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/bigeast/2013/05/29/qa-butler-basketball-coach-bradstevens/2370263/, para. 6. 20. As quoted in Tim Casey, “After Uncertain Times, the Big East Conference Is Thriving As a Basketballfocused League,” Forbes, March 11, 2020, para 10. 21. As quoted in Woods, “Scrappy Butler,” para. 25.
The Cinderella Strategy 249
22. As quoted in Mullenix, “Benefits of the Big East …,” para. 13. 23. Ibid, para. 8. 24. “Big East Enjoys Most-watched Season on FOX Sports Family of Networks,” press release, FOX Sports, March 23, 2017, https://foxsports-wordpress-www-prsupports-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/ uploads/sites/2/2017/03/3.23-Big-East-Ratings-Release-2016-17.pdf. 25. “FOX Sports Nets Most-watched College Basketball Season Ever,” press release, FOX Sports, March 21, 2018, https://www.foxsports.com/presspass/latest-news/2018/03/21/ fox-sports-nets-watched-college-basketball-season-ever. 26. Pelzman, “Big East Is Not Only Surviving …,” para. 15. 27. Casey, “After Uncertain Times… “ Chapter 7 1. Joe Posnanski, “Life after the Hail Mary,” NBC Sports, (n.d.), https://sportsworld.nbcsports.com/ doug-flutie-life-after-a-hail-mary/, para. 10. 2. See Chung, “The Dynamic Advertising Effect …”; Brian L. Goff, “Effects of University Athletics on the University: A Review and Extension of Empirical Assessment,” Journal of Sport Management 14, no. 2 (2000), 85-104; Pope & Pope, “The Impact of College Sports Success …”; Murray Sperber, Beer and Circus: How Big-time College Sports Has Crippled Undergraduate Education, (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, 2001); Toma & Cross, “Intercollegiate Athletics and Student College Choice.” 3. For a full portrait of the Noonball tradition at Boston College, see Jacqueline Tempera, “Noonball: A Love Story,” March 26, 2020, https://www.bc.edu/content/bc-web/bcnews/campus-community/ around-campus/noonball.html. 4. “Dare to Make a Difference: Strategic Plan 2009-2014,” p. 10. 5. “Strategic Plan Quarterly Update: Spring 2010,” Strategic plan update document, 2010, Copy in Dare to Make a Difference Folder, Irwin Library, Butler University, Indianapolis, IN, 10. 6. Ibid, 11. 7. US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/use-the-data. 8. The Butler University Fact Book (accessible online at https://www.butler.edu/oira/fact-book) contains numerous, regularly updated reports that provide basic enrollment snapshots. Particularly helpful were reports on five- and ten-year trends in enrollment, multicultural student enrollment, residence of fulltime undergraduates, and standardized test scores of incoming full-time students.
Chapter 8 1. Jeff Borzello, “Butler’s Bulldog Handler Gets Kidney Transplant from Brother, Inspires Other Donations,” ESPN, January 10, 2020, https://www.espn.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/28460774/butlerbulldog-handler-gets-kidney-transplant-brother-inspires-other-donations, para. 10.
250 The Cinderella Strategy
2. As quoted in Anthony Schoettle, “How Butler Made Its Bulldog a Marketing Dynamo,” IBJ, March 9, 2017, https://www.ibj.com/articles/62901-how-butler-made-its-bulldog-a-marketing-dynamo, para. 27. 3. “ButlerBlue2 tweets have Klout.,” Butler Magazine, spring 2011, 5; Woods, Underdawgs. 4. Woods, Underdawgs, 169. 5. Liz Clarke, “Blue II Has Taken Houston by Storm,” The Washington Post, April 3, 2011, https://www. washingtonpost.com/sports/blue-ii-has-taken-houston-by-storm/2011/04/03/AFw3XwXC_story. html?utm_term=.91c9dec18550. 6. “The Big Dawgs Tour 2013 by the Numbers,” Butler Magazine, spring 2013, 22-23. 7. Michael Kaltenmark, “How Can You Say ‘No’ to That Face? Using a Live Mascot as an Enrollment Strategy,” Master’s Thesis, (n.d.). 8. Scot Chartrand, “How to Take Mascots from Lovable and Huggable to Marketable and Profitable,” Front Office Sports, July 14, 2017, https://frontofficesports.com/how-to-take-mascotsfrom-lovable-and-huggable-to-marketable-and-profitable/. 9. Ibid. 10. “Recruiting the Class of 2021,” Butler Magazine, spring 2017, 5. 11. Michael Kaltenmark’s master’s thesis provides an in-depth account of the usage and success of the live mascot program in Butler’s enrollment strategy. 12. Mark Calcagno, “Blue Unleashed: Butler Finds Mascot Appeal Can Be a Marketer’s Best Friend,” Sports Business Journal, August 28, 2017, https://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2017/08/28/ Colleges/Mascots.aspx. 13. Sarah Bahr, “Meet Butler’s Bulldog Beauty Queens and Kings,” n.d., https://stories.butler.edu/content/ meet-butler%E2%80%99s-bulldog-beauty-queens-and-kings. 14. As quoted in Schoettle, “How Butler Made Its Bulldog a Marketing Dynamo,” para. 9. 15. Alan Blinder, “A School Is Training Its New Team Mascot. It’s a Puppy.” The New York Times, March 16, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/sports/butler-mascot.html.
Chapter 9 1. Neville, Butler’s Big Dance, 2-3. 2. Angevine, Hinkle Fieldhouse, 146. 3. “Butler Fans Excited To Own Piece of Hinkle Fieldhouse,” WTHR, June 7, 2014, https://www.wthr. com/article/butler-fans-excited-to-own-a-piece-of-hinkle-fieldhouse-more-seats-for-sale-today. 4. Ben Porter, The Principal Gift Checklist: How to Cultivate and De-risk Gifts of $5 Million to $100 Million, (Washington, DC: CASE, 2019), 25. 5. Roy Y. Chan, “Studying Philanthropy and Fundraising in the Field of Higher Education: A Proposed
The Cinderella Strategy 251
Conceptual Model,” in Facilitating Higher Education Growth through Fundraising and Philanthropy, edited by Henry C. Alphin Jr., Jennie Lavine, Stormy Stark, & Adam Hocker, (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2016), 2. 6. Woods, Underdawgs. 7. Clotfelter, Big-time sports in American universities. 8. “Butler Announces New Strategic Direction, Historic $250 Million Campaign,” October 5, 2019, https://stories.butler.edu/content/butler-announces-new-strategic-direction-historic-250-millioncampaign#:~:text=Butler%20Beyond%3A%20The%20Campaign%20for,from%20more%20than%20 27%2C000%20donors, para. 1. 9. Rachel Stern, “Butler Holds Official Groundbreaking for Historic $100 Million Sciences Renovation and Expansion,” October 5, 2019, https://stories.butler.edu/content/butler-holds-officialgroundbreaking-historic-100-million-sciences-renovation-and-expansion. Chapter 10 1. “A Conversation—Innovation and Leadership in Changing Times,” Butler Magazine, fall 2019, https:// stories.butler.edu/butler-magazine/fall-2019/conversation%E2%80%94innovation-and-leadershipchanging-times, para. 30. 2. “Dare to Make a Difference: Strategic Plan 2009-2014,” p. 17. 3. Blair H. Sheppard, Ten Years to Midnight: Four Urgent Global Crises and Their Strategic Solutions, (Oakland, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2020), 162. 4. Fong, “How Butler Won the NCAA Tournament,” 2010; Bobby Fong, “From the president,” Butler Magazine, spring 2010, n.p. 5. Neville, Butler’s Big Dance. 6. Burton R. Clark, “The Organizational Saga in Higher Education,” Administrative Science Quarterly 17, no. 2 (1972), 178; Burton R. Clark, The Distinctive College, (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1970/1992), 8. 7. Clark, “The Organizational Saga in Higher Education,” 235. 8. Burton R. Clark, “Belief and Loyalty in College Organization,” The Journal of Higher Education 42, no. 6 (1971), 515. 9. Pete Thamel, “Thad Matta Departs Ohio State without the Credit He Deserves—Just the Way He Likes It,” Sports Illustrated, June 5, 2017, https://www.si.com/college/2017/06/06/ohio-state-thadmatta-fired, para. 18. 10. “Blueprint for the Future: Butler University Self-Study, 2012-13,” Accreditation self-study, accessible at https://hlc2015.ku.edu/sites/hlc2015.ku.edu/files/docs/HLC/ButlerU_SelfStudy.pdf, 12-13. 11. “Brand Message Map, Butler University Marketing and Communications, 2017, https://www.butler. edu/marketing/message, para. 6.
252 The Cinderella Strategy
12. Jay Sharman, “Q&A with AMA Higher Ed Co-chair Jason Simon,” Storied U, December 13, 2016, https://storiedu.com/qa-ama-highed-ed-jason-simon/, para. 12. 13. Karl Agger, “Butler Brand Hunts ‘New Look,’” The Butler Collegian, February 25, 2015, https:// thebutlercollegian.com/2015/02/butler-brand-hunts-new-look/, para. 26. 14. Yzabel Tio, “The ‘Butler Way’ Withstands Even a Big East Loss,” March 19, 2019, https://www. theodysseyonline.com/the-butler-way, para. 1. 15. Mehler & Paikert, Madness, ch. 1, Kindle. 16. Sheppard, Ten Years to Midnight, 169. 17. “A Conversation—Innovation and Leadership in Changing Times,” para. 8. 18. Steven Mintz, “Higher Education Needs To Innovate. But How?”, Inside Higher Ed, February 6, 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/higher-ed-gamma/higher-education-needs-innovate-how. 19. Hayleigh Colombo,“Butler Plans Student-run Insurance Agency As Lure to ‘Boring’Field,”IBJ,August 14,2015, https://www.ibj.com/articles/54463-butler-plans-student-run-insurance-agency-as-lure-to-boring-field. 20. “Butler Launches Online Master’s in Risk and Insurance,” July 12, 2018, https://stories.butler.edu/ content/butler-launches-online-master%E2%80%99s-risk-and-insurance, para. 7. 21. Daniel Burrus, “Complacency Stunts Innovation,” July 15, 2020, https://www.burrus.com/2020/07/ complacency-stunts-innovation/, para. 1, 16 22. “Butler Receives $2.5 Million Grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. to Fund New Butler Beyond Transformation Lab,” October 8, 2020, https://stories.butler.edu/content/butler-receives-25-million-grant-lillyendowment-inc-fund-new-butler-beyond-transformation?_ga=2.232556055.964762628.16070027221943957336.1602252065, para. 5. 23. Sheppard, Ten Years to Midnight, 130. 24. As quoted in “Butler Beyond2020,” Butler Magazine, fall 2019, https://stories.butler.edu/node/1350, para. 11. Chapter 11 1. Jim Danko, “From the President,” Butler Magazine, fall 2017, n.p. 2. Woods, Underdawgs. 3. Ibid. 4. Angevine, Hinkle Fieldhouse. 5. Jeff Eisenberg, “Impatient Duke Fans Once Wanted Mike Krzyzewski Fired,” Yahoo Sports, January 23, 2015, https://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/ncaab-the-dagger/impatient-duke-fans-once-wanted-mikekrzyzewski-fired-153220260.html?guccounter=1. 6. “Butler University 2016 Style Guide,” 2016, https://www.butler.edu/file/94412/download, 17. 7. “Blueprint for the Future,” 13.
The Cinderella Strategy 253
8. Ibid. 9. Chung, “The Dynamic Advertising Effect of Collegiate Athletics”; Dana O’Neil, “How the Basketball Program helped Gonzaga University Flourish,” ESPN, March 29, 2017, http://www.espn.com/blog/ collegebasketballnation/post/_/id/119205/how-the-basketball-program-helped-gonzaga-universityflourish; Elka Peterson-Horner & Rick Eckstein, “Challenging the “Flutie Factor”: Intercollegiate Sports, Undergraduate Enrollments, and the Neoliberal University,” Humanity & Society 39, no. 1 (2015), 64-85. 10. Charles R. Taylor, “How Much Does an NCAA Championship Matter: A Call for Research on the Public Relations Impact of Athletic Success,” International Journal of Advertising 35, no. 4 (2016), 617-621. 11. Rick Seltzer, “Purdue Faculty Questions Kaplan Deal,” Inside Higher Ed, May 5, 2017, https://www. insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/05/purdue-faculty-votes-against-kaplan-process, para. 1. 12. Steven Alan Carr, Bill V. Mullen, & Dave Nalbone, “Online Folly Deprives Regional Campuses,” The Journal Gazette, May 5, 2019, https://www.journalgazette.net/opinion/columns/20190505/onlinefolly-deprives-regional-campuses, para. 11. 13. Peterson-Horner & Eckstein, “Challenging the “Flutie Factor,” 82. Epilogue 1. Chip Patterson, “NCAA Tournament 2018: Looking Back at 25 Best Cinderella Stories in March Madness History,” CBS Sports, March 15, 2018, https://www.cbssports.com/college-basketball/news/ ncaa-tournament-ranking-the-25-best-march-madness-cinderella-stories/, para. 1. 2. Ibid, para. 28. 3. David Woods, 25 Greatest Sports Stories in the History of Indiana, Indiana Sports History LLC, (Evansville, IN: M.T. Publishing Company Inc., 2017), 92. 4. Mike Lopresti, “Butler’s Incredible 2010 NCAA Run, Remembered by Coach K, Tom Izzo, Frank Martin and Jim Boeheim,” https://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-men/article/2020-03-05/rememberbutlers-incredible-2010-ncaa-run, para. 3. 5. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, “Monthly Update on Higher Education Enrollment,” November 12, 2020, https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/. 6. “Butler, Old National Partner to Support Businesses Owned by Underrepresented Groups,” August 12, 2020, https://stories.butler.edu/content/ONB-Center-DEI-Initiative. 7. Medcalf, “Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski Says NCAA Can’t Afford …” 8. Mike Lopresti, “Here Are a Few Ideas To Ponder for a One-city-fits-all NCAA Tourney,” IBJ, November 19, 2020, para. 4. 9. Ibid, para. 5.
254 The Cinderella Strategy