Steve Irvine and Mark Ingram Q&A Part 2

By Steve Irvine

BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA - November 14, 2024

What is your assessment of the job that Andy Kennedy has done with the UAB men’s basketball program?

“One of the things I love about Andy is, and this is a complimentary statement, is that he's never satisfied. I mean, we win games, and there's some times that he's not happy. I never met Nick Saban, but just from a distance, he appears to be that way. Just like a super competitor, drive for perfection. If we aren’t outrebounding, outhustling, out diving on the floor, winning 50-50 balls, better at free throws, better at 3-pointers, executing the offensive perfection, then he's not happy. We might win by 20 and he's still going to grumble a little bit. I appreciate that about him because he is so driven. He knows what we're capable of, right? And he loves UAB. As a former player and having been involved for so long, even when he wasn't here, he's still, like, his heart is involved, he still paid attention.

The wind blows hard at the top. So, you know, people are going to be gunning for you. They see you that your preseason number one (in the AAC), teams are going to get up for you. So, you know, our players have to recognize that. Our coaches know it, but our coaches are veterans. They're veterans in their craft and in what they do. They're just older, wiser, more mature in the way that they handle their business. You're trying to constantly say that to young people. Young people, I think, sometimes feel like that's just coach speak. The Vermont game was a great game until we didn't win, right? But if you just were there as a neutral party, man, that was a fantastic game. Do you know that was the largest non-conference crowd we've had since South Carolina (Dec. 14, 2022)? It was almost 700 students, which for us is a large student crowd. I think that's the best non-conference student crowd we've had since that (South Carolina) game. So these are all positive things. Unfortunately, we came up short.

I've been asking fans, when's the last time you were this excited about the returning basketball team? And I mean, some people go way back to Mike Anderson. I think the team that we had, that Jerod (Haase) had returning after the Iowa State victory, would probably be the most recent. But that's been almost 10 years. That was the 15-16 season. That's nine years ago. You know, we just couldn't get some shots to go down (against Vermont). If you make a couple of shots we win that game. How many times does it go in and come out? Good shooter, it's not like the players aren't good, or they've gotten lazy, there's none of that stuff. Sometimes it just didn't go down, but I'm excited about the basketball season. Andy doesn't just have good players, he's also got some really good guys, which I think comes from him. It's part of the recruitment, and it's also part of how some coaches do see themselves as educators. You asked me that about Trent, I think Andy is another one that does see that and helping them be better people. I mean, some of these guys, there's not any of them that wouldn't say hello to you when you walk down the hall. Frankly, it's been that way since I got here. I don't know if, it is a greater level of appreciation at our level, maybe they didn't have as many opportunities out of high school and so they feel different. I don't know what the why is behind that. Is it the coach? Probably. Is it how they recruit? Yeah, I think so. I mean, if I can choose between you and the other guy and you kind of seem like the same player, I'd like to have a good locker room guy than not a good locker room guy. So, I think that's probably part of the recruiting process, too.”

Speaking of that, when you have guys like Yaxel Lendeborg, who is more than just a good player, how important is it for the athletic department to maximize marketing of that player?  

“I don't know why it is that it's just more spicy to read negative news. You pick the subject, and that seems to be true. And it's really unfortunate on so many levels, 99.9% of the student-athletes that we have here are all kids you'd like to have come home with you for Thanksgiving dinner. I'm just leaving that .01 for chance, because I'm sure they're out there. I don't know who they are. I haven't met them yet, but they're probably there. But we have a lot of great kids here. We perform great in the classroom. They're model citizens almost all the time. They're young people, do they make mistakes? Well sure, just like you and I did. They make mistakes. They'll say something they shouldn't, or drive too fast, or a park in a place they shouldn't. Typical young people things that often times get magnified. But the number of kids that we have that you love for your own children to be around, as sort of like people that they would look up to, it’s off the charts.”

Where are you at in the progression of the Bartow Arena renovations?

“We started a facilities master plan when we got invited into the American and a lot of the things that they came back to us with, on the discussion of where our facilities rank,  we already knew. We just had not, maybe in a comprehensive way, compiled it to see how different are we. Frankly, we we are better than them in a lot of spaces. Our football practice facility, we moved in (2017) and it's still better than most what everybody has. It's better than what some people have in the Power Four, so it's not just good for our league or Group of Five, it's really good.

Are there things that we wish were a little different? Yeah, sure. But, by in large, we have what (we need). There was a national boys (soccer team), I can't remember what age group, Under 19 or something, that came to our soccer stadium a few years ago. The coach said it was the finest on-campus soccer-only facility in the country. Now, I don't know if that's true. But saying that means it's really, really good. Our softball stadium is great. You know, we used to have a track that was in the shape of a square. And now we have a beautiful eight-lane, very fast track facility for our track team. We've built five beach courts. I know that not everybody' is paying attention to all of this that I'm talking about, but we're one of the few schools in the country that have five courts on campus. It's better for practice, it's better for hosting tournaments. You have warm-up courts during these matches, so it makes it more efficient when you run these matches.

So, we started this master plan. You're coming out of the pandemic also and pricing was crazy high. We were trying to get estimates on what stuff cost during that time that things were at a peak. So we've received Phase One approval (on the Bartow Arena renovation) from the board. What that means is we can explore it. They're very supportive of the general concept of the renovation. They understand the why, how it would be funded, how we were raising money for that. We continued to sort of revise the scope of it. We had all these ideas and it's like, okay what are the most important components of it and now what do we think that costs. We're actually waiting right now just to get kind of a return new estimate on what it is going to cost. We've been actively raising money and done very well to this point. We hope to continue making progress there.

NIL is a real competitor to this. We're trying to be competitive in football and basketball, trying to raise money for the collective. Until not long ago we, the athletic department, were not allowed to even get involved in that. It's really been in what feels like the last six months that we've been allowed to sort of get involved to help just sort of manage it a little bit and be more actively engaged in it than we were before. So, we have people in the community trying to raise the money, which is appreciated, and now we can be a little bit more (involved) in terms of the strategy and working with the people to help message the strategy better than before.

We've been trying to do both of these things but they do compete against each other a little bit, which is hard. It's not that they're not both valuable, they're both valuable. The things we want to do to Bartow Arena, I think the fan base will really like. It's just modernizing it. We think the bones of the building are good. We think that structurally that it's sound. It's about things like polishing up the concourse. You know, there's not any history in the concourse. We don't have one image of a former player. With all the All-Americans that we've had, not just (men’s) basketball, it's three sports, the two basketballs and volleyball, we've had a lot of All-Americans. We’ve had Players of the Year. What about images of Mo Finley hitting the shot against Kentucky or Chris Giles tussling with Ralph Sampson. These are awesome pictures of us in awesome moments in our history. Gene Bartow, there's not one image of that. There’s not one image in the whole concourse, I'd like to change that. We have a Hall of Fame that's not displayed anywhere, which is really unfortunate because we've had some really great players and coaches come through here. Those people and their friends and family deserve to be able to go to some place and point at a plaque and go, ‘That’s me or that’s Mom.’”

What are your thoughts on the growth of the fall sport programs?

“We got invited into the American because of all the progress we had made in terms of our facilities upgrades, because it demonstrates our desire to be successful. OK, but  but now we stepped up into a more competitive league. I don't think that anybody could debate that. I guess you could but when you look at the two military academies are having the best football seasons they've had since the 1940s, Tulane I think will be in the top 25 if they're not already. That’s football but it is more competitive in every possible way. Andy would tell you that from a basketball standpoint. Look what South Florida did, we all know what Memphis is and we brought some of the best out of C-USA. Charlotte has been really competitive, Florida Atlantic went to the Final Four. We brought the best with us and joined these other tough teams. 

In the fall, we hired a new men's soccer coach, David Lilly, who is doing a fantastic job. David won four games and had five ties. Last year, I think we just had zero wins and four ties. If you consider the ties and the wins together as nine, it's a five game improvement is the way I see that, in a tougher league. So in his first year, he goes from zero wins and four ties to four wins and five ties. That's a significant improvement. Lisa Mann, our women's soccer coach, she's in her second year. She was undefeated at home, which is a first in program history. They got the five seed in the tournament. So it was a really strong year there. Volleyball is right on the cusp of making the conference tournament. Again, we brought some of the better teams out of the USA, notably Rice, who's not just good in our league, they're good nationally. Everybody would say that they're really, really good and they continue to be good. In the American, South Florida is really, really good. I think we're hanging in there with those sports. We've got two more competitions in regular season, and based on how we do and how everybody else does, we're right on the bubble of getting into the conference tournament. They only take the top eight into the conference tournament, so if we could do that, that'd be great, but we're gonna be close.”

Overall, have the benefits of moving into the AAC been what you expected?

“Benefits that have been talked about most is financial. When people talk about it, they talk about financial benefits. It is more revenue for us. The travel, in terms of distance, is about the same as what we had. The increase in cost of travel is that Conference USA, in the sport of basketball, did a thing they referred to as travel partners. Our travel partner in C-USA was Middle Tennessee. So, if you were, let's call it North Texas and its travel partner was UTEP, North Texas would go play Middle Tennessee on Thursday and they would come play us on Saturday and go home. That's three legs of travel instead of four, so that was a nice cost containment measure of three legs instead of four.  At the exact same time, UTEP was playing us on Thursday, and they go into the Middle on Saturday. We don't do that in the American. Now, that means you go out and back, out and back, out and back, so it's more expensive. Why do we do that? Well, because in the American, we have this fantastic contract with ESPN, which gets all of our games on ESPN. One of the platforms may not be on the flagship, but at worse, you're on ESPN3, which means we're recruiting a young lady from Serbia in the volleyball, and her family can watch her play. That's important when you're recruiting, to be able to say, ‘Hey, look, you can always watch your child play, no matter where you're from.’ That's a big deal. It's a big deal for the exposure for the brand of the university. Then the other part is, who are we aligned with? We're aligned with other schools in large major TV markets. We go down to Tampa to play sports now. We're already going to Houston and San Antonio, but now we're going to Philadelphia to play sports. We're going to Memphis regularly. We're going out to Wichita. We're going to Tulsa, Oklahoma. We're going to other major markets, Annapolis, Maryland, which is just football, but it's right there on the edge of Baltimore. You're taking the brand to new major markets and that's good for the institutional brand. That's where we become a marketing vehicle for the institution. So all that's been terrific.

The competition is hard, that's what we wanted. It's been talked about since the moment I got here by our fans and people that we wanted to be in a different league. And how do we do it? How we did it was we started by trying to be the best version of ourselves. And that was all pre-NIL. That's just created a new challenge. But raising the money, like I said, you can't expect to be in good at track on a square track. You can't expect to be any good at football practicing inside that square track, which by the way also sloped 10 feet. We practiced uphill-downhill in football, or side hill, whatever the coaches choice was of the day. It's like how can you possibly be good at that? We built a new football practice facility and we immediately got better because football players went ‘Whoa, I can go to the next level from here.’ Whether they could or they couldn't, we were providing the tools to get them all the resources they need to be successful.  That’s what they want. Do you care about my sport? When beach volleyball kids show up, they go out there and see that we have five courts that most people don't have, they go ‘They really care about that here.’ We become more attractive and then it's what's the school like, what's Birmingham like and do I like the coach, what about the team and the opportunity play and all that. It’s the same thing with softball. Soccer kids come here they see the stadium and go ‘Wow, soccer matters here.’

What we've done with the basketball practice facility. Now they have a place where they can go 24 hours  day. We were saying that 24 hours a day, I think our coaches were telling recruits that they could get in the gym and shoot 24 hours a day, that just wasn't true. You know, if you were a men's basketball player, you couldn't shoot while women's basketball was having practice, and certainly not while volleyball was having practice. And that was true for everybody else. Women's basketball couldn't shoot during men's basketball practice or volleyball practice. We weren't really providing them a place where they could, any time of the day, go work on their game. And now we do.’”