GREENSBORO, N.C. - UNCG Director of Athletics Kim Record announced Tuesday that the athletic department has established the Nelson E. Bobb Athletic Scholarship Endowment.
With 26 years of service at UNCG, Bobb was the longest tenured athletic director in the Southern Conference and also the longest in the 16-school North Carolina state university system at the time of his departure. He had the fourth-longest same-school tenure among athletic directors in all of NCAA Division I when he stepped down.
"The overwhelming support that we had to fully-establish this endowment in such a short span of time is a true-testament of what Nelson Bobb has meant to UNCG - particularly the student-athletes and coaches," said Record.
More than $50,000 to endow the scholarship in Bobb's honor was raised in less than three months.
"Certainly, I am humbled by this gesture," said Bobb. "The university and the Greensboro community have been very special to me. I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by wonderful people and this is a testament to how great those people have been in support of our endeavors."
Bobb, a native of Gahanna, Ohio, first arrived at UNCG in July, 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 Dec. 18, 1995 that it was offering membership to three institutions - one of those being UNCG.
During his tenure, Bobb watched over the construction or renovation of all of the Spartans' athletic venues. 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, women's soccer eight times, volleyball three times, baseball twice and softball once.
Under Bobb's guidance, Spartan student-athletes consistently graduated at a rate equal to or higher than the general student population at UNCG. In the fall of 2008, 48 percent of the student-athletes had a 3.0 GPA for the semester and 47 percent had a cumulative GPA of 3.0 or better.
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 that summer. Last fall, he was enshrined in the Guilford County Sports Hall of Fame.