Bill Michaels Show 5-11-16

[Jimmy Lemke]

Did anyone hear it? I was with a customer during the show.

[Jimmy Lemke]

Link: http://www.billmichaelssports.com/051116-wednesday-hour-2/

Wow. I'm just continually blown away by this.

[IWB]

It gets worse every time you hear something. I understand Bill Michaels honoring the request of the writer to not publish the report, but I would love to see it.

[Jimmy Lemke]

I transcribed the Bill Michaels report. I paraphrased a few things.

What was in the document Bill Michaels has:

- Dr. Helen alleges poor commitment. Begging coaches to buy into 50/50 raffle. "Everyone is embarrassed."

Koonce

- Koonce: "I'm now the King N-Word in this place."

- Goes to recruit, tells coaches to recruit kid during dead period. Coach refuses.

- Must fire two assistants and one administrative position.

Costello

- Over his head. Other candidates qualified

- Talks lewd and crude to coaches

- High school atmosphere

- Places Kevin Fitzgerald in charge of academics

- Informs team in 2011-12 that they won't play postseason w/o winning HLT

- Climate study, put on administrative leave

Geiger

- Reputation concerns with Maurice Clarett/Ohio State

- Geiger stops basketball staff from working with academics of players

- Said he will earn his money, had problem with his car.

- Fitzgerald says Donald Thomas can't enroll in school, enrolled a day late. On Fitzgerald.

- Strength coach left in 2012 for Minnesota and no offseason Strength Coach in summer 2012.

- 30 for 30 comes out and everyone used it against UWM in recruiting

- Geiger was out to "get Rob Jeter," painted Rob as "a bad guy."

- Geiger said to people that Rob Jeter was the reason other AD's were gone, which is a flat out lie.

- Geiger and other AD's went straight for cutting instead of trying to propel raising revenue.

- Fitzgerald informs the staff the APR score is good. Provided inaccurate numbers and misinformation that obviously would be discovered later.

- Staff told by Chapman Hall that Paul Plinske would be hired. Braun, "due to some stuff going on," was hired.

- Coaches were told by Fitzgerald to forward his resume and name to area high schools and businesses.

- Kevin Fitzgerald leaves "early summer 2013."**************************************************

- Wanted out. Levar Ridgeway left for Shorewood, felt unwanted at UWM.

Braun

- Coaches would be hired, come because of UWM's reputation for athletics, then find it's a shitshow and leave.

- Tennis coach goes to Amanda Braun, asks for increase in budget to properly feed athletes and get equipment, she says "We will win as much as we can afford."

- First all-staff meeting, 5-29-13. Abar Rouse OTL documentary. Braun says Rouse did the right thing but insinuates there will be no whistleblowers at UWM. One of the staff members says "We all walked out of the meeting bewildered and had the feeling now of all of us in the athletic department being targeted. Felt bad for the basketball team, they seem to be the #1 target of Amanda Braun."

- 8-25-2013. Malcolm Moore, major concern he will not be admitted into graduate school. Was in limbo the entire time and worried they eliminated all of his options. Fortunately with a lot of pushing from the staff, they were able to get him admitted as a non-degree seeking student.

- Some players on some of the teams had issues. One had problems with drugs that came forward and self-reported and said he had a problem. Amanda Braun wanted to throw him out. The staff of the team said no, we have to take care of this guy.

- 10-8-2013. Amanda Braun comes in to talk to the entire basketball team and voices her displeasure about how things are going with the basketball players. Some of the people are prompted to write papers in regards to actions and insensitivity of some of the comments.

- A little while after that they are informed that they have some APR issues and the program is going to be put on a postseason suspension. According to diary, Rob Jeter is stunned at this because he was told all along they were in compliance.

- Basketball team raked over the coals for being over budget by 50k only to find out they were not credited certain monies and find out they were over 30k in the black.

- Hired a fundraiser (Jenny Gryniewicz). Braun upset David Nicholas.

- AD was not going to participate in postseason this year. Email from booster saying "wait a minute we talked about this I'm paying the money. There's no reason for this."

- A couple of boosters send e-mails saying they "don't want to be a part of this particular person's agenda anymore" speaking of Amanda Braun.

- Talk of cutting ties with some D-I games regarding schedule

- Successful tennis coach fired for questioning culture. Some employees fired for speaking up during culture studies.

- Team wants to announce the end of APR issues at tip-off luncheon, Amanda Braun says no, that she wanted to do it. Employee outside basketball says everyone was confused because this was a great opportunity to put the problematic past behind them with media there. Instead Braun wanted to release it a different way. Release came right before Christmas (almost 2 full months later)

- People knew when others were going to be fired. Sandy Botham found out she was going to be fired in the hallway (Costello)

- Henschel fired after 3 seasons (24-28-4, 4 conference titles, 2 NCAA Tournaments). Team's high GPA

- DeeDee Merritt, administrator asked by compliance to go on long term trips with team to Oklahoma State and Vegas for academic monitoring. At this point DeeDee is considered a "Rob Person," supporting Rob. Amanda Braun decides she's too expensive to pay for. Braun didn't like Merritt going on this trip.

- Anybody who spoke up in climate study and said "yes we have an issue" was let go."

- People brought in to make things better screwed up and never took responsibility.

- Firing of Daron Sutton. "This is just bad."

- If you read it yourself this is 'embarrassingly bad.'

- Document was confirmed as accurate by three separate people who have nothing to do with each other. Someone was keeping a running journal and people were adding to it.

http://www.billmichaelssports.com/051116-wednesday-hour-2/

[Skrapheap]

I just read, on the eunuch board, a long post by Mke2Chi, a poster i remember reading before. Since the overall article was negative about Braun, i was nodding agreement.

There was one point made which i had not seen raised before, and which flabbergasted me: the claim that one of the people on the search committee which selected Braun had previously had a intimate relationship with her. If the prior relationship was known, what was that person doing on the committee? That should have disqualified that committee member as a conflict of interest. Now i'm wondering how much of a role in Braun's selection was played by someone who should not have been on the committee in the first place.

It's not that the claim, if proven, would lead to Braun's firing, though i think that it should. It's disappointing to consider that the hiring was not the result of mere incompetence.

[Jimmy Lemke]

I just read, on the eunuch board, a long post by Mke2Chi, a poster i remember reading before. Since the overall article was negative about Braun, i was nodding agreement.

There was one point made which i had not seen raised before, and which flabbergasted me: the claim that one of the people on the search committee which selected Braun had previously had a intimate relationship with her. If the prior relationship was known, what was that person doing on the committee? That should have disqualified that committee member as a conflict of interest. Now i'm wondering how much of a role in Braun's selection was played by someone who should not have been on the committee in the first place.

It's not that the claim, if proven, would lead to Braun's firing, though i think that it should. It's disappointing to consider that the hiring was not the result of mere incompetence.

PART 1/2

Okay, I'm done acting like I don't know about the document.

I was told about Amanda and her ex on the S&SC shortly before the hiring. I want to say they told me on a Friday, she was hired the following Tuesday and her press conference was that Friday. That is a rough timeline. It was shared with me because the people who found out favored Paul Plinske (as did all but one person who worked in athletics, a student intern). They did so because they had been told (this is several people, mind you, over three separate conversations) by Chapman Hall that Plinske was the pick, and then at the 11th hour all of a sudden Amanda Braun was the choice.

I don't know how much you know, but Paul Plinske was going to be hired in November 2012, when a member of the faculty spoke up and said there needed to be a national search as per UWM bylaws. I'd also heard that the chancellor was also pressured by a high-ranking Wisconsin politician with no direct ties to UWM, and that the pressure had been to open up the search.

I know that the November 2012 thing was happening because I was told about it by people who were close to the situation. Then in late February/early March, different people were telling me about this same politician interfering and the chancellor changing his mind in the last days from Plinske to Braun.

They told me about the relationship between Braun and the Search and Screen Committee member. I was hesitant to write a story on it, for obvious reasons. I didn't want to be the guy that shouted and pointed out a lesbian relationship when I had openly endorsed the other candidate (http://www.brewcityball.com/forums/content.php?558-Paul4AD). I didn't want to be branded some bigot and I knew I had to have that fact cold before I reported it.

So I was ultra-careful about it, and all I could get from anyone was that Braun and this person had been friends at their previous workplace - and even then only one person acknowledged that much. I didn't do enough digging because if I had, I would have found all the protection I needed. A personal, romantic relationship between Braun and this Search and Screen Committee member was irrelevant because they had actually worked together. A professional relationship is just as damning. But I didn't know about this until about a month ago. It's weighed heavily on me the last few weeks, knowing that there was a professional working relationship and I didn't do the leg work to find out.

Months later, someone here who supported the hiring of Braun (not an athletic department employee, but someone who worked for the university) told me that Braun's ex had recused herself from the finalist process. I never looked into it because by that point I had met Braun, thought she was a nice enough person and was actually listening to me on important stuff...I mean, why would I want to replace someone who convinced the university to take my advice and buy the naming rights? Why would I want to replace someone who was going to actively fight to make my baby, the basketball practice facility, come to life? Why would I want to replace someone who seemed so accessible - we put together that Meet-and-Greet down at Powers on 10th in South Milwaukee and we had something like 60 people come out to meet her in the middle of July. It was a great feeling, especially since we had just started our booster club (the Black and Gold Club (http://blackandgoldclub.com)). It felt like we finally had an athletic director who was going to be my athletic director. So by the time the person told me Braun's ex recused herself from the finalist round, I couldn't care less.

Something funny about that is it doesn't matter if she recused herself from the finalist round. As long as Braun advanced during any rounds in which she was not recused, that should have disqualified both her and Braun from moving on. This person should have left the Search and Screen Committee the moment Braun passed initial vetting by the university (HR does vetting first to cast resumes off the pile of people who are not qualified or don't meet basic requirements).

Every time someone says I hate Amanda Braun, it makes me feel a little sadder each time. Because I remember how optimistic I was in July 2013. I even convinced people to not talk about how the Prahl twins and Trinson White weren't being taken on road trips, and when it was brought up I played it as she just was new to this and didn't know what she was doing, she just needed help figuring it out.

I didn't fall away from being one of Braun's supporters until after the NCAA Tournament, when the APR ban was handed down. I shouted at one of the coaches over the phone because I thought it was their fault, and it wasn't until later, when I learned the truth, that I turned around 180' on the athletic director. I saw e-mails, I saw directives. I saw things from a bunch of different departments. When you isolate each one, it doesn't look like much. Cut a corner here, cut a corner there, make a snip at this budget, move this person out of athletics, bring in this person who doesn't do the job well, promote that person to a very high level despite obvious incompetence. When you put it all together, and see the entire picture, it's incredible.

I guess what I should say is this: I've seen the document. It's eye-opening. It's big. There's several parts in there that will make you shake with rage. It's also incomplete. I've got a different perspective than the authors of that document - by the way, they'll never be able to figure out all of them. They may guess a couple, I'm sure they believe they know of one or maybe two. But there's no way Amanda Braun's going to figure out every author of that document, even if she holds it in her hands, because there's so much inside baseball in that thing that you'd never know the entirety of who contributed. There are some people they may think contributed to it who have never even seen the thing. That's by design.

I don't know all the authors, but I know most. Quite a few of the contributors - in fact, more than half of the ones I know if my memory serves - still work in athletics. One of them, hilariously, is even part of Braun's 'inner circle.'

By the way, there are several things that I know of that aren't even in the document. They touch on some things that only show the perspective of the administrator and not the media member. I've had certain media members share things with me, of their interactions with the university, that don't show up in the document because these people don't contact media. Most of them are paper-pushers.

The initial group that started putting together the document did it before Amanda was ever hired. They did it after a climate study was conducted by IMPACT Sports (btw, this firm comes up a couple times in the document) in 2012. That study was put together essentially to figure out what the hell was going on in athletics, since it had been now (at the time) two athletic directors who had failed so miserably - meaning George and Costello. The study was basically IMPACT Sports interviewing everyone in athletics about the climate in the athletic department. The document talks about it, names a bunch of people who spoke up about the bad things in athletics. People spoke up because they felt empowered, like there was finally going to be change that would lead to the university engaging with its athletics program and getting things going in the right way. Because this place really is a sleeping giant, and the people who work here do care about things getting better.

But the climate study never really lead to any change, and so the authors started pulling together their own notes - across a bunch of sports, a bunch of departments, a growing group of employees - with a couple of them taking the notes and putting them together so everyone else can say they don't have the document. I think I'm one of a few people who has actually seen the full thing. Bill Michaels said it was about 30 pages. There must be a couple versions of this document because the one I've seen is closer to 50.

[Jimmy Lemke]

PART 2/2

The authors are really smart about the document. It never existed on any university property. I'm guessing that if Michaels' version is around 30 pages, it's because everything was clipped out that would betray the identity of any contributors.

It's more of a running diary than a full-on document, but it's clear. It's full of dates, numbers, names. It has little things, not all about AD's themselves. One part talks about a staff meeting where Koonce's numbers guy (who wasn't an AD employee) twice says he needs an interpreter because an accountant has a thick accent. That dude is a total schmuck. That's one bullet point in something like 50 pages of them. There's another that talks about how one AD berated a non-revenue sport head coach in the atrium at full volume, being "very demonstrative with their hands" in full view of a dozen students and several other AD employees. That's another bullet point.

Those two examples are the smallest of small. They don't tell you anything other than Koonce's numbers guy was a dirtbag and that AD was very unprofessional. Two small bullet points.

One thing is for sure. Bill Michaels evoked easily less than 5% of what's in that document.

[BBF]

I volunteered to be on the review committee before the hires of Koonce and Costello, and was not so employed. I know something about appropriate vetting. After those two debacles I decided I would not ask again. Rather clearly the vetting did not improve.

Over the years various people in the athletic department that I knew would occasionally suggest to me that I should seek the AD position. It struck me as a ridiculous suggestion: while I have achieved some prominence in my field, it is not athletic administration. I wouldn't pretend to have the typical qualifications for the job. But neither did Pat Richter.

What I think we are all seeing is that the real heart of the job isn't technical qualifications. What the person in that role must have is character, integrity, judgment and an absolute commitment to the student athletes and the University, bereft of any personal ambition.

[TheSultan]

"Character, integrity, judgement and commitment to student athletes and the University" and "personal ambition" shouldn't be viewed as mutually exclusive attributes. I have seen plenty of people in University administration have plenty of the former while still being personally and professionally ambitious.

[BBF]

Ambition can be good motivation to improve or a distracting, even dangerous bias. It depends on the character of the individual. I prefer to take the risk out of play. In the case of the Milwaukee AD position, that gamble has failed repeatedly.

[TheSultan]

Well I don't know if "ambition" has been the problem with the UWM athletic directors. I find it more to be an issue of "competence." The University has just made a bunch of shitty hires.

[dylanrocks]

All in all, I would have much preferred to have had an A.D. like Charlie Gross, someone who liked the community, liked the students, liked the fans and liked going to games.

The only thing he'd be doing behind the scenes is trying to make the program as good as it can be with what it has.

I covered Charlie's teams when he was activities director at Homestead and there was hardly ever a sporting event that he missed -- basketball game, tennis match or cross country meet.

[BBF]

Carroll College got a very good individual.