Being a female? No.
Being the TYPE of female she is? Absolutely.
Always remember, when these people pat each other on the back, a lot of it has to do with which "boxes" they check off in their fuzzy view of the world. That's how she got the job in the first place.
"TYPE of female" makes me feel grimy just reading it. There's a reason I never put out the information I had learned, because I thought it would backfire if we published it.
She probably got her job because she said she would fire Jeter. It's not because the administration in Chapman Hall at the time (or since) had thought he was bad at his job, it's that he was making a lot more money than they wanted to pay. Santiago signed off on the big raise after 2006 and the occupants in Chapman Hall have never been comfortable about it since. Santiago was probably one of them after awhile - buyer's remorse.
I mean it makes sense, doesn't it? Go out and hire Koonce even though the guy couldn't get through one page of his Powerpoint presentation without piling up five grammatical errors. Koonce's problem, in the administration's eyes, was that he was too much of a buffoon and couldn't execute his c***amamie plan.
Amanda isn't an idiot. She's smart - smart enough to know that she had to be smart about how she went about it. So we had a lot of qualified people that were bounced out of the athletic department because those people would also sound the alarm on any bad sh*t to undermine the program.
Geiger wasn't brought in here to look like the bad guy, but when Amanda was hired and got the team back downtown she won over a lot of people by making a move that was obvious to everyone in the spring of 2013. Hell, it was obvious to a lot of people in the summer of 2012 - anyone wanna go back to the dozens of arguments about on-campus vs off-campus? You'll find me pushing for an on-campus arena for years, but I was always outnumbered on this board and for good reason. The 2012-13 season made it plainly obvious that it was a sh*t decision, and all Amanda had to do was walk in and make the move back downtown to win over a lot of people.
Amanda ran Machiavelli's playbook like a genius.
But she's like Daenaerys Targaryen - she's a conqueror, not a ruler. Once she fired Jeter, what's she done for the program? Succeed in academics? The program was succeeding academically for years before she got here. Support inclusion for women? UWM's compliance with Title IX has been one of the high points of the school, we could add 2 men's sports and still be in compliance with scholarship rules coming from Title IX.
The Orthopedic Hospital of Wisconsin corporate sponsorship? Their sponsorship of Milwaukee Athletics goes back to 2011. Their donation to the practice facility is nice, it also came after the Bucks dumped them for Froedtert.
Speaking of the practice facility, that $25 seg fee was reworked to make it an "athletics facilities fee" in order to make it for more than a basketball
arena, and collected millions of dollars before getting cut. The proposed cost of the practice facility looks suspiciously close to the amount of money the fee had brought in to that point.
Is she getting credit for the Sitzberger donation? Has anyone
seen or heard from Fred Sitzberger since he made the donation? For someone willing to give $1 million directly to the basketball program, he's curiously absent from basketball games.
I can forgive people for thinking he's just one of the many fans who has just abandoned the program - after all, following Jeter's firing we had a 45% drop in
announced attendance that hasn't recovered in any kind of meaningful way. Anyone who has been around this program knows the guy was giving money to the university in a more common capacity, but they had a fire to put out in athletics so he probably agreed to be their huckleberry.
Are we gonna give her credit for the baseball stadium that she had no part in besides being the AD when Mike Zimmerman got his stadium built? If he had done it in 2010, George Koonce would have that sh*t on his resume.
Or maybe we should give her credit for the renovations to the Arena, all paid for by Harris Turer - a long-time donor to the program who
just happened to have a need for an updated facility for his hockey team? He's also not a donor anymore. Neither are a lot of the people who came in during the Pearl era and stayed during Rob's tenure and bailed during our civil war.
What
have our old donors been up to, anyway?
Honestly, though, we all know what this is. This isn't some award that AB has been working to win. This is NACDA coming up with an award to justify its own existence, because a lot of college athletics is just that - a big 'ol circle jerk. You get nominated by someone, the selection committee says "sure why not." So how much you wanna bet Amanda's got a connection or two on the committee? LeCrone's one.
Good for her. It's a meaningless award that's just a line on a resume. If you or someone you know is super talented at creating resumes, please feel free to swing by the Klotsche Center and offer to help her fill one out.