Year-10 was roller coaster for EWU AD

It's been a pretty good run of 10 years for Eastern Washington University athletics director Bill Chaves.

During his time there has been substantial success for his football team that became both a perennial postseason player and culminated in 2010 with the Eagles winning the Football Championship Subdivision national title.

The basketball team followed with its second trip in school history to the NCAA tournament in 2015.

But all that success was bound to have its downside, for the school at least, with coaches getting offers they just could not turn down.

In the span of 10 weeks between this past January and March it meant that both football's Beau Baldwin - hired in January at Cal-Berkeley as their offensive coordinator - and Jim Hayford in basketball, who crossed the state to lead Seattle University's program, departures that left Chaves with big shoes to fill.

Looking back at those tumultuous weeks, Chaves recently told the attendees at the West Plains Chamber of Commerce annual Roos Field breakfast that he might have been one of the few Division I ADs who had to replace both his head football and basketball coach in such a short amount of time.

But Chaves thinks he was fortunate, too.

"You're always prepared that something can happen when folks are achieving," Chaves said.

While Baldwin had been in the sights of a variety of programs - and in the rumor mill on a number of others - it was only a matter of time before the right situation presented itself.

"More than likely, if you're an FCS coach, and you're lucky enough to be considered for an FBS position, chances are it's a rebuild," Chaves said.

The question becomes: Is it a two-generation rebuild?

"I think that Beau was again very thoughtful on what he thought his success level could be at any one of those places," the 50-year-old Chaves said. "You would not be in this business if you weren't optimistic of your chance to succeed."

As for Hayford, "I think Jim evaluated what he's done here in six years (and) what he could do at another institution the next three to four to five years," Chaves said.

Passing the baton:

The odds of being able to walk down the hall to find people to be both a head basketball and football coach are admittedly pretty long Chaves agreed.

Maybe not so much on the football side with the selection of Aaron Best, a true "Eagle 4 Life" who arrived in Cheney in 1996 and found his niche. In ascending the ladder to become head coach it's only the second time in modern program history that has happened.

The first one - Dick Zornes - didn't do a bad job when all was said and done.

"On the basketball side it just was unique that we had someone whose been here with us for eight years, crossed over two coaching staffs (and) has seen a lot," Chaves said of new head coach Shantay Legans. "From a basketball Xs and Os standpoint I think he's going to do a great job," Chaves added.

Arguably, Baldwin's departure could not have come at a more critical time, right before National Letter of Intent signing day in February.

But the situation could have been worse had Baldwin taken a head coaching job and gobbled the assistants as well. Receivers' coach Nick Edwards did accompany Baldwin to Cal while Troy Taylor got the offensive coordinator job at Utah, along went Keil McDonald.

"We did lose coaches but it wasn't the traditional where the whole staff goes and the need arises to go outside for a new hire," Chaves said.

Timing was incredibly important," Chaves said.

He praised EWU President Dr. Mary Cullinan who understood that it was possible that, "The answer was right here," Chaves said. "Then I could, in a sense, reassign someone to that position."

The facilities:

Eastern's two major sports facilities, Roos Field and Reese Court are ancient by today's standards. The original Woodward Field opened in 1967 and Reese in 1977.

Reese Court has had notable updates - new seats and a video display - and still looks pretty good at 40. It will see another update thanks to "Some one-time dollars that were doled out to institutions by the NCAA," that will remodel former offices on the east side of the building and allow for what Chaves called a Student Athlete Success Center. On game days that will become the Eagle Club area with the hope to have it complete by the time Big Sky play begins.

The bigger issue is of course Roos where demand for season tickets is up 25 percent over 2016, and those are month-old figures he expects to see rise.

In a long-time and ongoing effort to make improvements to the stadium, the school has brought in the consultant firm of Phoenix Philanthropy to offer an outside view and identify directions where the school might go to fund the needed expansion and updates in the half-century-old stadium.

There are plenty of ideas on how and what this might look like, but that all requires private dollars, which have been increasingly hard to come by.

"Sometimes it's great to get an external viewpoint," Chaves said. "You can get caught up in the forest a lot."

Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].