In just his second year on the job, athletic director Torre Chisholm has already been a firsthand witness to three conference championships, six coaching changes and a few public incidents involving his department.
The Vanguard sat down with Chisholm for an exclusive interview.
Skyler Archibald: You are now 16 months into the job. How would you assess your performance thus far as athletic director?
Torre Chisholm: I feel fairly positive about the direction we’ve set for the program. Obviously there are things that you don’t get to, or things that you think back and think I could have done that a little bit better. Going into your first AD job, you’re never really quite sure what you’re going to get or how you’re going to respond, but I feel fairly confident that I have responded in a sufficient manner.
SA: What are the things that you have done or that the athletic department has accomplished that have made you the most proud?
TC: I probably feel the best about the staff that we’ve been able to put in place. I think we have a very strong administrative staff and even with a lot of turnover, I feel great about all the head coaches that we’ve brought on board.
The downside of that is you’ve lost head coaches to other opportunities, but I think that we’ve done an excellent job of hiring great coaches for our student-athletes.
SA: Roughly 18 months after Jerry Glanville was hired as head coach of the football team his record is 4-11. Are you satisfied with him and the team?
TC: I think we would all like to see more wins. That said, I am thrilled with the level of the recruiting and the quality that the current coaching staff has been bringing in. As Jerry has said, it’s a matter of when that promise comes to fruition.
SA: There are many who would say that Montana is our biggest rival. Who do you think is PSU’s biggest rival?
TC: Personally, I think our biggest rival is Eastern Washington. They’re in a rural area, which is a bit different from us, but we’re both FCS [football championship sub-division] schools in states that are dominated by Pac-10 teams.
We face so many similar challenges with that. I think we recruit the same kids. They recruit heavily out of Portland and we recruit heavily out of the Spokane area, so there is a lot of natural rivalry ability there.
SA: What does the athletic program need to do to become one of the prominent, if not the prominent, athletic program in the Big Sky Conference?
TC: Our goal on paper is to be the “biggest in the Big Sky.” That means for most of our team sports we need to be winning the championship at least once every four years, if not every three years.
In individual sports, we need to be advancing individual athletes to regional and national competition with that same frequency.
Both of our basketball programs, we would like to see them become the Montana of football, in essence. So that everybody knows that if you want to win a championship, it goes through Portland State. Some of our other sports, we have a longer building process to go through.
SA: There are many who are drawn into the pageantry of college athletics: the big student crowds, the band, the stadium and the school colors. Is that type of scene obtainable here?
TC: I don’t want to say that that is the model that we are striving for. I think we can develop a special relationship with our students and with our alumni at Portland State.
A lot of schools fall into the trap of looking at Pac-10, Big 12, Big 10 schools and saying, “Hey we want to simulate what they’re doing.” The reality is that at Portland State we’re not going to simulate what a Washington State or a Washington or an Oregon does. We’re not going to have a 225-member band. We’re not going to have as many students live on campus.
What we have to do is find ways to be special and unique and craft our own relationships and build our own traditions with students and alumni. It’s not necessarily easy to do that, but if we do it, and we’re successful at it, then we will have crafted our own unique tradition.
Our real challenge is trying to find out: How do you connect the nontraditional student more effectively to athletics? And I don’t know if there is a program across the country that has done that. So I would love to be the first school to figure out how to do it.
SA: What has it been like since President Wiewel’s arrival on campus?
TC: I think it’s been great; he has already spoken to both the football team and to our overall student-athlete contingent.
He has been very supportive and I think it’s important for the athletes to know that there is someone at the top of the university that values what they do.
I think it’s exciting to have the university have focus and direction because then we get to figure out how athletics is a tool for the university to reach its overall goals.
SA: Last year you had the highs of the basketball team winning the conference tournament here in Portland and making it to the NCAA tournament, subsequently followed by the low of having two of the members of that team (Jeremiah Dominguez and Scott Morrison) suspended after being arrested in Mexico. Do you have any regrets about the way that situation was handled?
TC: If I think back to it, I could have probably waited one more day on the suspension, to see what additional information came to light. In hindsight, it looks like all the information that we were working off was media-driven and, looking back, it’s questionable how accurate that was.
SA: Is there anything current with that investigation or those two players involvement?
TC: We haven’t heard anything else. I haven’t heard of any follow-up either from the victim’s side or the Mexican authorities side.
SA: There has been a lot of talk and excitement about the renovations at PGE Park. There has also been some talk about the potential renovation of the Stott Center. What are the latest developments on those two projects?
TC: The PGE Park piece of it is really out of our hands. First, Major League Soccer has to assign a team to Portland for any of that to really come to fruition. The second piece of that plan is that the city would have to buy off on an investment to build a new baseball stadium and an investment to upgrade PGE Park.
There’s a lot of support for both and I think if it comes to fruition we’re just going to be a huge beneficiary of it. I haven’t seen all the facilities across the country, but it would be hard to imagine a FCS school that would be playing in a better venue than we would if that happened.
On the Stott Center, we’ve done some planning, and we know what can be done with the space, and conceptually what it would like and what it would cost.
I think if you ask folks across campus, everybody recognizes that the university has come to a point where it needs that sort of facility. It’s just a matter of when and where on the campus list of priorities that it falls, and that’s something that the new president will have to decide.
SA: What are you most excited about for the upcoming year?TC: I am looking forward to watching the development of the football team–as this group of players comes together and you can start to see them learn what our coaches are teaching.
I am clearly excited to watch what the volleyball team can do after only losing one player.
I can’t wait to see how basketball comes back this year. On the men’s side being able to watch some of the guys that redshirted last year be able to play. Between Dominic Waters, Phil Nelson and Jamie Jones I am really looking forward to seeing those guys play for Portland State.
I am looking forward to women’s basketball. We have a great coaching staff and great student-athletes. Three of those four teams play right here on campus and one other one not too far away so it’s a good opportunity for students to watch those teams perform. We are going to compete at a high level in those sports.