Throughout the year, the Southern Conference is featuring former student-athletes from around the league in a series called Where Are They Now. This will be an opportunity to get reacquainted with the student-athletes after their competition days have come to an end. The question and answer session focuses on a former student-athlete who has gone on to excel away from the field, course, mat or court.
Our next Where Are They Now feature focuses on former Citadel basketball player Richard Johnson, who is now the Athletic Director at Wofford College. Before being named Athletic Director, Johnson served as the Terriers' head basketball coach for 17 years.
Richard Johnson
The Citadel Men’s Basketball Player and coach; former Wofford Men's Basketball head coach
Current Profession: Athletic Director of Wofford College
In The Citadel’s 1981 men’s basketball media guide, it says you were a highly recruited prospect from the Chicago area. How did that make you feel and why did you choose The Citadel?
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Blue Island, Illinois, and I had correspondence with The Citadel and I had gone to a military high school and we had an ROTC program so it wasn’t a big thing. So I flew down to Charleston and I loved the place and the people. Les Robinson was the assistant coach then along with Mike Montgomery and I just had a good feel for the place and loved the weather and wanted to try it.
You went to a military high school, was it a lot different going to a military college?
A lot different. It was a completely different experience, but I learned a lot there and it helped me with what I do today; the self-discipline, motivation, and the management were all very important. You just didn’t have a lot of free time between the military, academics and basketball, but I think that helped me develop time management skills.
At the time of your graduation, you were the fifth all-time leading rebounder and you had the second-best career field goal percentage and then you were offered the job as the assistant coach. How did that make you feel taking on that role and moving up a few seats on the bench?
When coach first approached me about that, I thought ‘I’m really unqualified for this position.’ And he kind of laughed and told me he’d teach me what I needed to know and said, ‘what’s most important is his philosophy at The Citadel was to keep and develop players.’ When I was a freshman, there were seven with me and four left and two never really played. The class ahead of me had eight and seven left. So attrition was clearly a problem. So what coach Robinson did when he got job, is he wanted to know how to keep players here and wanted to know how to do a better job preparing them for the rigors of The Citadel. My job, in the essence, was to babysit them and get them through that first year.
When we went out and tried to tell them up front what it was going to be like. We may have oversold the negative part, but we’d rather run them off on the front end than rather have them come in and transfer and it was successful. We did a good job with that, we kept young men and I think we went seven years without losing a young man to the military.
I’m sure it helped those players that you were there and they could come talk to you after you had already been through the program.
And that’s really what I was doing, Les was coaching the team and the other assistant was doing that and I was kind of holding hands with the young ones. From that as I developed I was able to move up a little bit and do more on floor coaching. Those first couple of years, I had played with these guys so it was hard for me to be a coach to them, but it was more about trying to keep the retention rates. And when we were able to keep them, then Les was able to coach them and build a very solid program. Because of our success, I was able to get the Wofford job and he was able to go to East Tennessee State, so it was a win-win for everybody, but it was Les Robinson’s approach that made it all happen.
When you left The Citadel, you came here to Wofford College. You led the Terriers from NAIA to Division II. Talk a little bit about the transition from Charleston to Spartanburg and your transition from an assistant to a head coach.
It was interesting how all that transpired; I loved working for Les Robinson. It was a family kind of situation and I had no interest in leaving but I did want to eventually be a head coach. I think after nine years this opportunity came up and I think at first I wasn’t that interested in it because Wofford had been known primarily as a football school. The new athletic director Danny Morrison was hired and he called me, so I came up and visited with him and after 20 minutes I either thought he was a visionary, or crazy. If you look at the definition there is a fine line between visionary and crazy. He laid out his vision for where he thought Wofford could go. I said, ‘you know I’m in.’ And that started not only a personal friendship but it gave me the opportunity to really do some things here and start a program and kind of start it from ground zero. It was a lot of fun and a lot of hard work. Then when I got here we hired some really good people and was able to transition and able to hand the reins to Mike Young and he has done a terrific job.
Talk a little bit about the transition from NAIA to Division II and eventually to Division I and into the SoCon because that all happened in your tenure.
I’m one of the few guys that made those kinds of transitions and didn’t lose their job because it really is a hard thing and that’s why I don’t know if I would have tackled it without the support of Danny Morrison or Joe Lasane, our president at the time, but we transitioned and you have to have a lot of confidence in people because they’re going to be rough years. It was a tough transition from NAIA to Division II, but it was a really enormous challenge when we transferred from Division II to Division I. To give you an example, my last few games as a Division II coach were Mars Hill, Rollins and Newberry. My next three games as a Division I coach were Missouri, Vanderbilt and NC State and you’re playing with the same players. It was an extraordinarily difficult challenge, but one I knew going in what we were going to face so I was ready for it and I didn’t let it get me down. Slowly and surely we built it and got better. One of the big things was that we were eligible for the NCAA Tournament and play in the Southern Conference tournament and that made the difference in recruiting, and we were able to start getting better players as a result of it.
Your 200th win came at Clemson in the 1999-2000 season. You were at an ACC school, what was the atmosphere like at that game and what do you remember the most?
We had a unique situation in that game. We were pretty good, actually I thought we were very good that year. Clemson had Will Soloman, a great player, but it wasn’t a great year for Clemson and we got in the situation where we got down. Momentum is a huge part of the game and the momentum shifted and we started pressing. They started getting shaky with the basketball, we kept pressing and we erased a 17-point lead to take a three-point lead. There was a time out and we kept pressing. And my assistant said, ‘we’re up’ and I said, ‘yeah I know but I’m not backing off, that’s how we got here.’ We were able to build a lead and make free-throws down the stretch and we were able to win.
When you first took over at Wofford, the program had only seen two winning record seasons in the previous nine years. You take over and lead the Terriers to a 21-6 record and it’s first ever trip to a postseason. What was that like?
I learned from Les Robinson that it takes time to build a program. You have to build it slowly and you have to have the opportunity to coach some kids. My first week here, the president took me aside and said, ‘I feel bad what we’ve done to you. We’ve brought you in late and you don’t have the opportunity to recruit. He said, don’t just sign players. You’re here for the long term. Build the program the way you want to do it, don’t just sign players to sign players and feel like you have to.’ And that was so refreshing to hear, to have a CEO come up and give you that kind of time. So we were able to do that. We were able to, instead of going on and getting a quick fix or junior college players, my third year here I had nothing but freshmen and sophomores. I didn’t have a junior or a senior on the roster and it was a rocky year. It was our only losing season when we were Division II. I think we started 1-11 but we finished 10-17 so we had a nice little run at the end. When you know you have time to get it done, it makes a difference in how you approach it. So we were able to get better and get better players and finally build a program that young men wanted to come and play for.
Talk about the transition from a head basketball coach to an Athletic Director.
It wasn’t as difficult as you might think. It was a big adjustment in some respects and in others you had quality people already in place. Danny Morrison and David Wood had assembled a great team and I wasn’t ready to get out of coaching, but I knew at one time I wanted to be an athletic director, even during my days at The Citadel. That’s one of the reasons I got my MBA when I was in graduate school. But when the opportunity presented itself, what was very important to me was preserving the culture at Wofford and it was a culture of relaxed informality, camaraderie, and everyone being a part of the big team, and I didn’t want that to change. I believed we would go and hire from outside the department if I said no, so that was an easy decision, even though I wasn’t quite ready I knew I needed to do this.
It was very challenging that first year. I thought maybe I could talk them into letting me do both; coaching and be the AD. Two weeks into that I figured that wasn’t going to happen because it was just too hard. It was a full-time job and then some. I had really good people here as a core, as a base and I was able to supplement that over the years with a couple additional pieces and the team that we’ve built here over the last 20 years has just blossomed into, what I think, is one of the best around. They’re just fun to work with. Whenever I’m on vacation, I can’t wait to come back to work because I want to see my colleagues. What they do is push me; they make sure that I’m bringing my A-game every day because they always bring theirs. I think that’s what a quality team does and bring each other along. Most of the time they’re doing the pushing and I’m just doing what they want me to do. It has been a lot of fun and I look forward to doing this for as long as I can.
Since you took over as the Athletic Director, you have been a driving force behind a lot of improvements to athletic facilities. What are some of your other short or long terms goals you’d like to see accomplished?
The long term goal is to keep getting better. You can’t sit back and rest. We’ve had success at the conference championship level that we had envisioned when we made the transition. The football program is arguably one of the best in the league; men’s basketball won back-to-back conference championships; we won the championship in soccer and in baseball. What I want to do is get our other sports up to that level and I want to keep the sports that we have at that level. I want to continue to have cutting-edge facilities, continue to provide a quality experience for our student-athletes. We are graduating our kids at a high rate, we need to expand that and graduate them at an even higher rate. We need to provide more out-of-class experiences for them in addition to what they learn on the fields and courts, with internships and things like that. So those are the things we want to keep doing. We want to be the best in the league, I know that’s tough because this is a great league, but we want to be at the top every year.
You mentioned graduation rate. When you were the head coach here, you had 100 percent graduation rate of your players that were eligible. What has been your advice to the current coaches at Wofford so that they can also have high graduation rates?
We start with being involved with the kids. We are still small and intimate enough where we don’t have a specific athletic advisor for the department. So our students use normal faculty advisors like normal students would and that means coaches have to spend a lot of time with them. Our compliance office, Elizabeth Raab, spends a lot of time advising our student-athletes. But it’s that personal one-on-one touch that is key to helping your kids graduate. But more than that, it starts on the front end. You’ve got to bring in kids, and I learned this at The Citadel, that are going to make it in your institution. They’ve got to fit the institution. So we recruit on the front end and I make sure our coaches know this, you’ve got to recruit young men and women who understand the culture of Wofford and who are a good fit for Wofford. I don’t care how good of a player they are, if they aren’t going to fit here socially and academically, then they are not a good fit. Then they are going to transfer and your APR is going to go down the tank. So I think we’ve done a pretty good job of pre-screening if you would, or targeting our market to recruiting kids that fit the institution. And as a result of that we spend some time with them and try to give them some confidence and help when they need it, and the rest they do on their own.
How has going to two NCAA Tournaments propelled the athletic programs?
We were the media darling that year, CBS was trying to make a decision, they had I think four or five first time entries into the NCAA Tournament and they sent a camera crew to Charlotte to follow us in our locker room instead of William & Mary. It turns out William & Mary lost and we won, so they made the right choice. Just having that on the road to the Final Four and having that level of exposure, the radio shows, the call-in shows, the articles, the interviews on ESPN; all of that really markets the institution on a nation-wide basis and that kind of publicity is priceless and that’s why so many people try to get good at men’s basketball, because of the NCAA Tournament.
Under the old format, we were on against Wisconsin for about eight minutes in the afternoon and I think when our game got really good they went to us. When you compare that to last year with the new format, we’re on CBS primetime and they didn’t cut away. So we’re on for two hours against a nationally known program, BYU and Jimmer Ferdette and we had over 4.7 million viewers locked in for two hours. So that kind of exposure is literally impossible to get. You just can’t get it and the fact that we’ve acquitted ourselves well in both of those occasions, I think it makes our name more recognizable on a national level and that brings in more web page visits, and more people showing interest in the institution or at least having a familiarity with it. I got emails from people in Kansas as a result of that game, and they saw that we were over-achieving, if you will and one of them finally sent in an email and a check to join the Terrier Club. They had always been talking about it and they check the Wofford scores in Kansas and told me they’ve kind of adopted us. He told me he thought he’d put his money where his mouth is and said it’s small, but it’ll grow with his income. Then another one of his buddies sent in a check to the Terrier Club. We’re talking one hundred bucks or whatever, but it’s just the thought. Had one woman send an email saying she was pulling for us and I sent her a t-shirt. She sends me emails every now and then because now she’s a Wofford fan. So those are the kinds of things that it does in small ways and you get so many more touches on a national level that brings in students and it’s a case where if you look at the Ivy League, where they believe that athletics are the front porch to the institution and it gets people on the porch and then they open the door and see what you’ve got and I think that is what our basketball appearances have done for us.
You just assume that the Ivy League is Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, but it’s the athletic association. The Ivy League refers to the athletic association, that’s their conference. Their institutions have taken it to mean that they’re the Ivy League institutions and it’s become synonymous with great academics. From a marketing perspective I think that’s lost on some people. The fact of banning together for a common purpose, in this case athletics, can brand a whole group of schools with an academic tilt that really markets those institutions. I think that, more than anything, has helped us, when we went Division I and got into the Southern Conference. We’ve always been a good school academically; we’ve always maintained our standards, but it’s like the old saying goes, ‘it’s who you hang out with’ and the crowd we are hanging out with now is much better academically than the crowd we were hanging out with before. So that has helped as well.
When we went Division I in 1995-96, and I will never forget this, we were sitting in a restaurant in Denver, we had just played the University of Colorado and we played pretty well and they were in the top 20. So when they ran down the top 20 on ESPN they said Chauncey Billups had 17-points or whatever and 15 of them free-throws and the Buffs beat Wofford. And they said Wofford and pronounced it correctly. So we were high-fiving because they finally got it right. That was not a small thing, because when you say Wofford now, people get it in basketball and with four NCAA play-off appearances in the last five years that tends to help too.
What has it been like being in the Southern Conference for so long?
Even when I was out from 1985-1997, I was still right in the middle of it, Davidson, Furman, East Tennessee (when they were in), Western Carolina. I know a lot of the people, the history, the VMIs when they were in. When I started in the Southern Conference in 1972 we were going to William & Mary, Richmond, East Carolina and Marshall. The travel has changed, the faces have changed but there’s still great players. There were great players back then and they are still great players now. There’s outstanding coaches, I mean great coaches, guys who really know what they are doing. If you look at some of the coaches now, they carry on those traditions. We’ve had great upsets, the Southern Conference, look at the last three years, we beat South Carolina, Furman beat South Carolina, Elon beat South Carolina and the common thread there is that we all beat them at home, which is hard to do. When we get those people on our court we acquit them well. Charleston, what they have done over the last couple of years, with some of the names they’ve beat. This year, Charleston beat Tennessee, UMass and we beat Wake Forest. And those wins become fairly common so it’s a high quality level of competition. We get three teams in the baseball tournament (NCAA), we’ve had years where our school programs have been ranked in the top five. It’s just a great league and it’s fun to be around it. Our women’s programs in the Southern Conference are very good and that’s been a change.
I think coming from The Citadel to Wofford and having the opportunity to work with women athletes and see how they’ve progressed over the years. At one time I was not a fan of women’s basketball but the game has evolved to the point where I really like it and I almost like it better than the men’s game because they are where the men were a few years back in terms of team work and how they play the game and the style of play and I like that a little more than I like the one-on-one that we tend to play on the men’s side. So I’ve become a huge women’s basketball fan and that aspect of our league is going to continue to get better and better.
Women’s athletics has been a huge change. I can remember going on the road recruiting back in the 70s when women’s athletics were just taking hold and the women would play the prelim game to the men and I’d have a four hour ride home facing me and the men’s game starts at nine because back then, women’s basketball was a bunch of held balls and they lasted like three hours. They were interminable. So I was not a women’s basketball fan back then. As the level of skill and coaching as risen and teams have gotten better and individuals have gotten better they rival what the men do. It was a slow transition, which is the progression of things, that the men’s game has transitioned and I really do like the style of play on the women’s side. It seems to me more team orientated than even the men’s side is. It’s fun watching the enthusiasm and the excitement of the women, I wish they didn’t have some of the injuries that they have, but they put as much effort into it as the men do and then some, so that’s been a lot of fun.
The worst thing about my job here is I don’t have the one-on-one like I used to have when I was a coach. I’m not in the locker room; I’m not working with those kids on a daily basis so I don’t know them as well. The best thing is I know more of them. I’ve got 300 of them, I don’t know them all, but I try and you get to appreciate more of them you just don’t know them as in-depth as you did your own players.