Mitch Barnhart Thursday Press Conference
University of Kentucky Athletics Media Conference
Kroger Field – Lexington, Ky.
Thursday, Aug. 3 2019
Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart
MITCH BARNHART: Good to see everybody. Welcome back from summer. I guess it’s not officially over, but I guess it’s close enough, and summers seem to get a little more compressed as we go every year. But it’s good to see everybody. It’s hard to believe that 2019 is already on us. It’s three weeks from today that we’ll open our sports seasons officially.
Then in less than a month we’ll be right back here at Kroger Field where we go for a new football season. Coming off the 2018-19 season we finished 14th in the country in the Directors’ Cup. I don’t think that was missed by anybody. We had an outstanding year.
A lot of our teams did a lot of really, really great things and a lot of things to celebrate. We won championships in volleyball and men’s soccer. We had our best football season in 40 years. We had five top-10 national finishes and some truly unbelievable elite performances by a lot of people, highlighted by a few of those. I’ll give some of those to you just to remind us of what was accomplished
Josh Allen was the National Defensive Player of the Year. Abbey Cheek was the National Player of the Year in softball. Asia Seidt was the Elite 90 Award winner at the National Women’s Swimming and Diving National Championships, and she’s the Arthur Ashe Scholarship Award winner. Rhyne Howard was the National Freshman of the Year. Daniel Roberts, if you weren’t following Daniel Roberts and what he did in track and field, incredible performances in the hurdles, and he and Grant Holloway went head to head in some of the most remarkable races in hurdling history. It was really fun to watch, great duel, and Daniel was exemplary in those races. JJ Williams was a finalist for the national Player of the Year in soccer, and Katie Reed was the Senior Class Award winner for women’s softball. So really, really some outstanding performances by a lot of people, and CJ Conrad, I’ll close with that one, CJ Conrad was Pop Warner National College Football Award winner.
So some really neat awards won by our young people in a lot of different ways. Represented some things they did athletically, some things they did scholastically, and some things they just did in the community, and it seems like we had young people hitting on all fronts, so that was really exciting and some neat things for us.
I thought we took some positive steps in our student-athlete experience division. We expanded from an area formerly known as CATS. We’ve continued to expand that into a Student-Athlete Experience (division), which is pretty cool. They took the first year under Jason Cummins’ direction was an area that we’ve expanded a little bit — not a little bit but a lot, and done some unique things there. It’s been a lot of fun to watch that grow.
In short, I think we’re in a good place in our department. A lot of good things have happened. We continue to shore up our facilities. Most recently we opened the Kentucky Proud Park, and that happened last February and March, and so we’ve had an opportunity to be in that for almost a year now, and our second season will be upcoming under Coach Nick (Mingione), so that’s been great.
Our coaching staff in total, and I say that our coaching staff, I’m talking about all of our head coaches, is arguably the best staff I’ve ever worked with, and Kentucky has become a place where they want to be. We have 16 head coaches. On the average they have been here more than 10 years, and 13 of them have been here for at least six years, and I think that speaks to the city of Lexington, speaks to the University of Kentucky and it speaks to the ability to represent the Commonwealth in a great conference. So we’re really, really proud of that and the stability we have in our coaches has been remarkable.
That’s yielded some success in a lot of different facets. Success in our women’s sports programs is something I want to continue to pinpoint. Eight of our women’s sports programs finished in the top 25 nationally and the coed rival team finished fifth nationally. So that’s eight, arguably nine of our programs, of our women’s sports programs finished in the top 25. An emphasis on our women’s sports programs has been something that was important, and we’re continuing to be very proud of their results, and our women’s teams have all posted GPAs above a 3.0 GPA, so that’s really good. For our seventh year, 14 straight semesters, our department has had above a 3.0 GPA collectively. So I’m really proud of that effort of our young people in the classroom and things they continue to do.
All the good things going on here only serve to keep us going and keep motivating us to do some more. I don’t think this is a group of coaches or student-athletes that are ever satisfied with where they are. I think they want to continue to get better. I thought last year was a really, really good year. I still think we have a lot left in our tank, and I think where there’s greatness still to get there. We can do more.
So we continue to want to try and pursue that top five national ranking in the elite — in the Directors’ Cup in the Elite 1-3-5 we’re trying to achieve. That’s something we think is very doable for what our department represents and how hard they work at it.
The work has already begun. This fall we have championships to defend and football to build off of, and not before too long we’ll be back in Rupp Arena as Cal starts his 11th year at the helm for University of Kentucky.
As you all know, it’s our men’s basketball program and football programs that allow us to do all the things that we do across our department, and we have to get those right. Those are really important to us. Those two programs have never been in a stronger position since I’ve been here, but things don’t stay that way without a whole lot of work and a whole lot of folks pouring into that and working at it.
We lost some great players in football, but Coach (Mark) Stoops has built a lot of depth, and I think we can have some more success and continue to have a lot of fun in Kroger Field in the Southeastern Conference. The team reports today. I’ll meet them officially tonight as a group, so the work is just beginning, and we’re also getting ready to host fans here in Kroger Field, and our message to those fans is simple: We need you here. We’ve got a healthy increase in our season ticket base and that’s been good. If people have bought their season tickets, we are thankful. If they haven’t we are asking to get involved and go ahead and buy their season tickets, and when they come, be loud. Be loud for eight games and get after it. We’re looking forward to that.
As it relates to a couple other things, the SEC made a decision earlier this summer to allow member institutions to make independent determinations on public alcohol sales. President (Eli) Capilouto said right up front he thought that was the right decision to allow institutions to make those decisions and make it their — make individual decisions on their own.
After consultation with President Capilouto and our partners on campus, including the campus safety officials, we’ve decided to not have public alcohol sales at any UK athletics events during the 2019-20 season. It is our goal as well as our responsibility to create a safe, secure, positive engaging environment for fans of all ages and from all walks of life.
We believe we have an outstanding college fan experience at our games, though we recognize we can always find ways to do better. We also care about disrupting what we have currently in place.
We’ve made the decision with that in mind, recognizing there’s strong feelings on both sides of the issue, and I get a lot of emails regarding all of it on both sides.
In closing, I want to thank everybody for their patience and for those folks that reached out to give us their thoughts, understanding we’ll continue to listen, but at the end of the day, that’s where we are, and we think that it’s the best decision for the University of Kentucky at this juncture.
With that, let me close by saying how excited we are to begin the season. Last year in total we had more than a million fans come to the University of Kentucky and watch Kentucky Athletics, and I think it’s an incredible — it speaks to our fan base and incredible support that our student-athletes get from the Commonwealth of Kentucky. That’s why we go border to border every June (on the Big Blue Caravan) just to try and meet people and reach out and touch our fan base a little bit and let them know that we appreciate them, and that we appreciate them traveling over the highways and byways to get to Lexington to support our team, so we’re thankful for that.
Let me stop there and open it up for questions and sort of give you guys a chance to find answers to things we might not have covered.
Q. On the alcohol topic, the question I get a lot is why can it be sold in premium seats to those fans and not in the general seating to everybody else?
MITCH BARNHART: Yeah, I think there’s experiences that you have in different areas of your stadium, and I understand that that’s a concern. We’ve got a fan experience in the public areas of our stands that I think is sort of where we want to be right now. There’s an availability in the premium areas that is different, and we recognize that, but the overarching 55,000 people in the stands, we feel like we’ve got an experience that feels like we think at this point in time a college experience should feel like and that we feel like gives families still an opportunity to enjoy Kentucky Athletics.
It isn’t a money issue. We don’t want to get into the money issue. Is there money to be made? I have no idea. That wasn’t a decision point for us. The decision point was what we wanted it to feel like, what we wanted it to look like. At this point in time, we want it to feel like — we feel like it’s a pretty solid place and a pretty neat experience at the University of Kentucky. So we’ll leave it at that.
Q. When you talk about the experience, what is it in your mind? What is a good college —
MITCH BARNHART: I can’t define that for every person. I know what we feel like it looks like. It looks like families coming to games. It feels like building a young fan base of encouraging people to come for something I hope is — I’ll say family friendly. It’s not always — we understand there’s exceptions to all of that. I don’t care what game you go to, you’re going to get a person that the language isn’t exactly great or somebody brings something in or something happens outside the gates. It’s not going to be perfect. But at the end of the day, I think that what we’ve created is a pretty good family environment.
Each institution will look at that different, but for us at this point in time, I think this is where we want to be. We’ve tried to be thoughtful about music choices, about spanning the genre of music choices. I always get plenty of letters about music. (Laughter.) Everybody listens to the same stuff, and they know the words to every song.
So I don’t think you’re going to please everybody on every issue, but what we’ve tried to do is say in the overarching piece, we want people to feel that it’s a family friendly, safe place to come to watch sporting events that focuses primarily on young people that play the games and keep the focus there.
And so we’re going to try and do that.
Q. What’s different about the — I guess the thing I struggle with and I think a lot of people do, what’s different about the fan who can afford a premium seat being able to be responsible enough to drink? It feels like it’s like the general population cannot be trusted to drink responsibly if they’re given that —
MITCH BARNHART: It’s an availability issue. It’s a little more confined to that area. We have fewer people in terms of responsibility, in terms of that we don’t have, but when you do the math, it’s not near the numbers, the mass numbers that we’re responsible for, and I don’t say responsible for — there’s decision making that goes into all that, too. Everyone — there’s no one size fits all in these things. I think each institution is going to have to make their own decisions. There’s some institutions that have said, hey, we’re going to open it up and that’s what fans want.
I’ll be honest with you. I think that as I read my mail and I read a lot of it, there wasn’t this overarching piece that said, hey, if you open up alcohol sales that your department is going to just — your season ticket sales are going to explode and you’re going to get all this new fan base. The other side to that was, I’ll be honest with you, I felt like if we said we are going to do that at this point in time with what people have enjoyed about the experience at Kroger Field and at Rupp Arena, part of that is that they would walk away from us if we did that.
So I felt like we were in a better — not a better spot, and I say it’s not — it wasn’t — let me separate the two pieces, too. I say it was not a money decision. The money decision to have people come and buy tickets and be a part of our group, that is a money decision, I get that. So don’t think I’m speaking out of both sides of my mouth. The money decision I am talking about is the selling of the alcohol.
I’m not worried about that part. I want to get this part right. I’m not saying we have. I hope we have. I hope we’ve got it right. I hope we’ve got it at least for this period of time, but we’ll monitor it and see where it goes, but at this point in time I feel like that’s the right place for us to be, and that’s my call. Dr. Capilouto has been terrific and supportive and we’ve talked about it, but between our campus safety folks and everyone else, we feel like it’s the right place for us to be.
Q. You kind of touched on monitoring like the Texas A&M, LSU, some have already said they’re going to allow it. How much will you monitor them?
MITCH BARNHART: I think we’ll always pay attention to that. We’ll keep track of what’s going on nationally and sort of where everybody goes. There’s people in our league that have already made the decision not to sell alcohol in the public spaces. We’re not the first one to do that. There’s several other schools that have made that same decision. I’m sure when we get in our conference meetings we’ll have those conversations and continue to talk about it.
But at this point in time we’re comfortable with where we are.
Q. Is this the decision, or is this a case you just didn’t feel like there was enough time to implement —
MITCH BARNHART: No, I’m not — this is the decision. I don’t want to address this every year, so I’m not coming back here, this year’s decision is — I’m not doing that. This is where we are. We’ll watch it and see where it goes. But at the end of the day, I’m not making a yearly decision on this thing. That’s not where we want to be. People know me well enough, once we make up our mind or something, we sort of keep going down for a while until — I’m not stubborn, but I’m not going to make a decision for just one-offs is what I’m trying to say. We’re not going to make a one-off decision. We’re going to monitor it for a while, and if there’s something that says, it makes good sense to change our thought process or directions, then we’ll do that. Right now I feel pretty good about where we are.
Q. Are there other revenue-generating opportunities that you’ve kind of compared against the possibility of alcohol that you might be bringing in this year?
MITCH BARNHART: We’re always looking for revenue opportunities. If you’ve got ideas I’m wide open to them. That’s awesome.
No, you know, I think that our staff is pretty good about moving forward and trying to find ways. We didn’t say, oh, gosh, we’ve got to replace — we never counted on that to begin with. That wasn’t something we counted on, alcohol sales to begin it, and said, okay, this is the answer. That is not going to be the answer for anything that’s going forward in college athletics. If that’s our answer, we’ve got real issues in college athletics. We’ve got to figure out the right way to do this thing and get the right formula for our budgets and our programs and our teams. Alcohol is not an answer for that, okay.
So we’ll always continue to try and create different revenue pieces for our program because the expenses of college athletics are not going down, they’re going up. Travel is going up, recruiting is going up. All those pieces go up. Cost of tuition is going up. The things that our program is responsible for are not going backwards. There’s essentially anywhere between a 3 to 6 percent growth in expenses almost every year for all the different reasons I’ve talked about. So we’ve got to find ways to continue to create revenue that allows us to be able to compete and to keep our program viable the things that everyone expects us to do competitively and academically and socially and monitor where our program is.
If we’re looking for those pieces of it to be the answer, I think we’re in the wrong spot.
Q. Talking about season ticket holders, another question I got recently on basketball in particular, the schedule — Cal has been very outspoken about neutral site games, maybe to the detriment of the home schedule at times. What are your conversations about that?
MITCH BARNHART: I don’t think we’re doing anything a whole lot different in the neutral schedule than what we’ve been doing. We’ve sort of done — I know we always try and work really hard to get some home-and-homes, DeWayne Peevy over here does our basketball schedule, and he very cognizant of the fact that we’re trying to get about 19 to 21 games a year in Rupp Arena, including our two exhibition games, and we try and work diligently hard to get the home-and-home with them, and we’ve got the Louisville every other year. So we’re trying to put those pieces of the puzzle together.
There are going to be some really important neutral site games that we’ll want to try and continue to pursue. Those are important to us. They’re important for recruiting, they’re important for visibility. There are national exposures that our program has relished and enjoyed, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. That’s a good thing. But we’ve also got to recognize the balance of having a strong home schedule and putting something in place that our fans will enjoy seeing in Rupp Arena, and our conference thankfully, our conference has really ratcheted up its efforts in basketball. Our home basketball schedule in the conference is really tough, and all of a sudden there’s some incredible basketball teams coming in here in the conference season, too. So you’ve got those nine plus generally one or two, so you’re getting to 11 or 12, plus your two exhibitions. So you’re at 13 or 14, and then you’ve got some games that give you a chance to bring some people in here, that, number one, want to play at Rupp Arena, and number two, gives us a chance to get guys experience up and down our roster. You hope that’s the way that works out.
But you’ve also got to be smart enough to understand what that looks like in terms of your strength of schedule and the net and all that as it relates to postseason.
Q. Have you guys — should we stop talking about the Indiana series? Is it even worth —
MITCH BARNHART: Feel free to stop. (Laughter.) You’re good. You just stopped it. Thank you.
Q. With the football, on the football side, is there a thought of kind of getting away from those FCS games and maybe trying to move in another FBS opponent down the road?
MITCH BARNHART: I think we’re in a good spot. Our scheduling philosophy has worked out pretty well. Going back to what I said last year, and I don’t know if you were here last year or not I can’t remember but I apologize if you were. Last year I said this: The FCS opponents are important. They’re important for the game of college football. If those schools began dropping college football, we lose opportunities for young people in high school to go play college football other places. We’ve got to keep those folks alive.
Those folks only can stay alive if they have about a game or two a year on their schedule, they can get some money from an FBS school that allows them to keep their programs rolling. Really important to do that. The game of college football is not in trouble, but it needs some help, and we’ve got to make sure we prop it up in the right way, and propping it up in the right way means scheduling some of these FCS schools and making sure they have a chance to keep their programs viable because that creates opportunity, and that keeps people excited about the game of football.
Q. You’re the CEO of this athletic empire and you have to pay attention to the bottom line, but over the years, especially the past few years, I’ve heard the average fan say that you probably focus a little bit too much on big donors. What do you have to say to the average fan who’s been faithful for the past couple of decades, has continued supporting the program but may not be able to write this big check? How is the University of Kentucky appreciative of them?
MITCH BARNHART: Well, I think we’ve tried to come — a couple things I would say is we’ve kept our season tickets pretty flat in football. They have not gone up hardly at all over the last seven, eight years, so we’ve tried to keep our expenses relatively flat. There’s plenty of entry points for people to come to Kentucky football games, Kentucky basketball games. The lower bowl is hard. We understand those things don’t turn over very much at all. The upper bowl there’s opportunity. There’s been openings for people to buy tickets to come to Rupp Arena.
So I’d say there’s plenty of entry points. Do I have to pay attention to our donor base? Absolutely. I have to do that. That’s part of what we do. We’ve got a big operation. There is no question about that. But that’s what we’ve also tried to go border to border across the state and we went down in the coal mines in eastern Kentucky this year. And we went to the western part of the state and spent time out there. Those are important things that we do. We try to keep and stay connected.
So yeah, not all of it’s going to be a perfect deal where we make — again, everyone looks at it a little bit differently. But we try and stay connected a variety of different places. One part of our student-athlete experience was to take all of our student-athletes to eastern Kentucky and work over there with some of the folks over there and some of the projects over there. We’ve worked really hard at that.
So I think there’s different ways we try and connect. In terms of the actual — so you’ve got to find a balance between, yeah, do you want a program that competes at a high level in the SEC? Okay, here’s what it costs to do that, and we’ve got a responsibility to do that. It is not going to be easy. If you look at some of our ticket prices, our prices are probably on the higher end in terms of basketball, but they’re on the lower end in terms of football. So we’ve tried to find a balance on that in terms of everything else we’ve done, women’s basketball has been pretty flat, volleyball, all of our other sports, there’s an entry point for everyone to come in and enjoy Kentucky athletics.
Yeah, do I have to pay attention to it? Absolutely I do. Yeah, that’s my responsibility to the young people that compete in our sports. If I don’t do that, then we don’t keep 16 head coaches for an average of 10 years apiece. They don’t stay. We don’t have athletes doing the things that they’re doing. I don’t get to read that list of wonderful accomplishments that I get to read. If you don’t want me to read that, then we don’t have to pay attention to any of that.
Q. You mentioned your role, and you’re the basketball committee chairman in a year. Does Cal still get to come out on Selection Sunday with a conspiracy theory about how everything was stacked against him?
MITCH BARNHART: Cal will always have a comment on the bracket.
Q. Your visibility on the national scale has really increased with the SEC ADs and now the Selection Committee. Is that just a matter of wearing two hats? I know that being on those committees takes time away from your position here, so can you kind of explain how being in those positions can help the University of Kentucky or are they separate?
MITCH BARNHART: Well, first off, I wouldn’t be able to do any of that if I didn’t have the staff that I have. I’ve got a remarkable staff. From top to bottom, they’re a remarkable group of people. We’ve been blessed by some really good administrators that have been here, and they’ve gone on to do some remarkable things.
Having said that, the group that I have here now is remarkable. They do incredible work, and they work really long hours, and we couldn’t do what we do on a national scale if it wasn’t for what they do. So my thanks goes to them, first and foremost.
Secondly, I think it does help as it relates to the University of Kentucky. It puts us in a position of people — I’ll say recognizing some of our athletes and some of the coaches and things that they’ve accomplished. I think there’s some recognition in all of that for them, and I hope at the end of the day that when we represent Kentucky on a national scale, there’s some sense of pride for our institution.
I will say it’s an honor to represent our program and our university on a national level. I truly enjoy that on a national level. I think there’s a lot of decisions being made at a pretty high level that it’s good to be a part of those most of the time, and I think it’s — you have an opinion that hopefully through experiences you’ve had over the 35 plus years you’ve been in the industry, they’re helpful in making those kinds of decisions.
We’re at an interesting time in college athletics, and I think sometimes those experiences need to be remembered and thought of and asked about, and I’m hopeful that what we offer is of help. So I think being in those conversations is good.
In terms of time, there’s a lot of time. It catches up to you pretty quick. And so all of a sudden you look up and the calendar is two months later than what it was last time you looked at it, and you haven’t been home a whole lot. But you know what, because of these folks over here on my left, it goes pretty well because they’re really good at what they do, and they are very, very helpful.
Q. The LSU, new LSU football facility sparked some controversy down there about that and brought up the issue of the arms race as far as facilities go. Is there any way to control that, or is it just going to continue being left up to every institution about how much money they want to put into those types of things?
MITCH BARNHART: Yeah, I think each institution has to answer that on their own merits, what they want to do. I think that we’re in a really good spot. I think that we’ve invested in things that have had an impact on our program. We’ve got several things out there we’re trying to work on. The renovation of Memorial Coliseum is huge on my list. It is really, really important to me to renovate that facility to a spot that gives it credit to the history of the facility that it deserves, recognizing the people that it deserves to recognize. Our tennis facility, we need to work on that. It is something that we’ve talked about moving. We’ve got the plans for it. We would like to move it.
Clearly we’ve got — Mark has asked about the indoor, and we want to talk about the indoor and see if there’s some things we can do with the indoor facility and our indoor track and working our way through that and trying to uncomplicate that a little bit.
But in terms of the actual arms race, I think institutions, they get behind, and then all of a sudden they want to jump up and get ahead, and all of a sudden — I don’t know if you’ll ever completely get out of it, but I do think you can be in a good spot. I always say, I’ve said this, and I said it a long time ago. Again, I’ve been here long time that I don’t remember what year I said much, but I remember saying we didn’t have to be the best house in the neighborhood but we just needed to be in the neighborhood. As long as we’re in the neighborhood and we can have a conversation about being in it, I think that’s okay.
What we’ve developed in my opinion, I think in our staff’s opinion and in our coaches’ opinions, some really classy facilities. Our facilities are really nice. Our student-athletes enjoy coming to them every day, and they enjoy working out, and they enjoy where they live, so to speak.
That’s first and foremost in my mind, making sure we get those pieces right, that they feel like they’re worthy of being in the SEC and that we’ve treated them well and that they’ve got all the things that they need to really compete. We don’t need some of the things that I think are in some of the facilities in today’s world, but I think that the necessities of what we’ve got to have to compete, we can do that, and we’ve got enough. We’re working at that at a pretty high level.
Q. Looking back at this historic football season, how does that change the bar of success for the program if it does at all?
MITCH BARNHART: I think it’s more consistency, making sure we maintain consistency about our program. That’s what Mark’s — obviously our goal is Atlanta. We want to get to Atlanta. For Kentucky football that has long been a dream and a goal. I don’t think it hurts to dream big dreams or think big thoughts, but in terms of consistency, maintaining our growth, and that could be finding a lot of ways. We lost a lot of people off last year’s team, and so we’re going to have some new faces in those roles and having to figure out how all that fits together may take a bit. But we’ve got eight home games. Everything except four conference games are played here in Kroger Field, and that’s exciting for us. I think it’s great for our fan base.
So hopefully we can — the learning curve will be short for those folks that need to jump into that. We’ve got experience in some really good places and have some experience. Clearly we lost some folks in the secondary, but our offensive line is strong. Really good group in the offensive line. We’ve got an experienced quarterback coming back and a few playmakers that are really outstanding.
It’s a really good spot to build off of, and I think consistency is what we’re trying to reach for, is to be a consistent performer in the SEC.
