GREENSBORO, N.C. ? UNC Greensboro Director of Athletics Nelson Bobb was among nine individuals named to the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame’s induction class for next fall on Friday evening.
The class was announced at NewBridge Bank Park prior to Friday night’s Greensboro Grasshoppers game. Joining Bobb in the induction class are former major leaguer Dick Culler, professional football player and current NC State network analyst Johnny Evans, former North Carolina A&T athletic director Bill Hayes, retired standout high school football coach Doug
Henderson, former professional football All-Pro Haywood Jeffires, retired NFL star Sammy Johnson, retired tennis star Allen Morris, and former Olympian and assistant soccer coach at UNCG Siri Mullinix. Mullinix is currently an assistant coach at Virginia Commonwealth.
The class will be inducted at the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame Banquet on Monday, Sept. 21, 2009 at the Greensboro Coliseum. For ticket information, contact the Greensboro Sports Commission at 336-378-4499 or go online at www.greensborosports.org.
With 26 years of service at UNCG, Bobb is the longest tenured athletic director in the Southern Conference and also the longest in the 16-school North Carolina state university system. He has the fourth-longest same-school tenure among athletic directors currently in all of NCAA
Division I. He is the only person in the university’s history to hold the position on a full-time basis. Bobb announced last month that he is stepping down from the position July 1.
It is the third consecutive year that a Spartan has been inducted into the county’s Hall of Fame. In 2007, Michael Parker was enshrined, followed by Lynne Agee last year.
“It is very humbling to be recognized in this way,” said Bobb. “I am very thankful to the selection committee, some of which have been dear colleagues and friends over the last 26 years. Words can not express my gratitude towards them for everything they have meant to me during that
time, and this honor just furthers those feelings.
”There are some great individuals being enshrined with me. But few things could be more special than to see Siri receive this honor at the same time. We were there with her when she won national championships on our soccer pitch, earning MVP honors in the process, and then cheered for her as our ?hometown girl’ in the Olympics a few years later. It will truly be a wonderful night for me and am looking forward to it greatly.”
Bobb, a native of Gahanna, Ohio, first arrived at UNCG in July of 1983, taking over a program that fielded eight teams on the NCAA Division III level. Prior to his arrival, the department had been guided by a men’s and women’s coordinator of athletics. The University authorized the shift to Division I in February 1987 and he guided the program through the unprecedented change in competitive status in just five years, transitioning from Division III into a brief Division II stint, to its
current Division I status.
UNCG is one of only a dozen institutions to ever compete in all three divisions. However, no other institution has made the complete shift of all teams from Division III to Division I in that short of a time frame. Bobb has also guided the athletics program in its transition from a new Division I member into the Big South Conference, to its current affiliation as a member of the historic Southern Conference. In the midst of the Spartans making it to the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament in just their fifth year of Division I competition and winning the Big South’s Commissioner’s Cup in consecutive years (1994-95 and 1995-96), the Southern Conference announced on December 18, 1995 that it was offering membership to three institutions
? one of those being UNCG.
During his tenure, Bobb has watched over the construction or renovation of all of the Spartans’ athletic venues. He began that process by serving on the committee that built Fleming Gymnasium and the HHP Building in 1989. He then moved onto the transformation of Campus Field in 1991 into what is today UNCG Soccer Stadium ? one of the premier venues in all of college soccer.
In 1999, he oversaw the construction of the UNCG Baseball Stadium and the renovation and lighting of the UNCG Tennis Courts. Most recently, he added to the list the transformation of UNCG’s softball facility to become a top-of-the-line stadium venue, and the reconfiguration of seating in Fleming Gym, which added chairback seating on both sides and additional stands under one of the baskets.
In addition to the elevation of the men’s basketball program in its move to the Greensboro Coliseum next season, current projects that Bobb and his staff have initiated are the planning stages for a new training center and locker room facility in UNCG baseball stadium, improvements to the auxiliary practice gym at the HPP building and a complete renovation of the
building’s locker room facilities. Ground breaking for the baseball project is slated for this summer and to be completed by the fall of 2010. The locker room restructuring is tentatively slated to take place in the 2010-11 season.
Under Bobb’s guidance, Spartan student-athletes have consistently graduated at a rate equal to or higher than the general student population at UNCG. Each of the last three academic years, more than 40 percent of UNCG’s student-athletes earned a 3.0 GPA or better.
On the field of competition, Bobb was at the head of the program for four of the school’s five men’s soccer national titles at the Division III level, a men’s soccer national runner-up finish in Division II and a third-place finish for women’s basketball at Division III in 1988. All told during Bobb’s 26 years, women’s basketball appeared in the NCAA Tournament seven times, men’s basketball twice, men’s soccer 16 times ? including trips to the round of 16 four of the last five years, women’s soccer eight times, volleyball three times, baseball twice and softball once.
During his tenure, UNCG teams have won 37 conference tournament titles, 28 as an NCAA Division I member. They have also won 67 conference regular season titles, 41 of those since moving to NCAA Division I.
A big part of the success in the move to Division I has been the funding of scholarships and the success of UNCG’s Spartan Club. During Bobb’s tenure, a total of 24 endowments and 19 annual scholarships have been established with several more endowments nearing their completion.
Bobb was inducted into UNCG’s Athletics Hall of Fame in February 2008. He was also named the Division I Southeast Region Athletic Director of the Year at the NACDA Convention last summer.
Within the department, Bobb has overseen a staff that has grown to more than 60 today and has guided the department through the NCAA Certification process successfully twice.
A 1970 graduate of Kent State with a bachelor’s degree in education, Bobb also holds a master’s degree in secondary education from Kent. As an undergraduate, he was a three-year letterwinner on the football team as an offensive guard and earned All-Academic recognition from the Mid-American Conference as a junior. He was an all-conference choice his senior year.