Stevenson Q&A: Athletic Director Brett Adams, Part 1

athletic director Brett Adams has overseen the school's entire sports history.

Seventeen years ago the school, then known as Villa Julie College, was accepted into the NCAA. Now, Stevenson has 21 intercollegiate sports and is starting its newest, a football program, this fall.

Adams had a big hand in building the athletic department from the ground up, and has helped turn many teams into national competitors. He also coached the men’s basketball team for 17 years until resigning from the position this past March.

Now undertaking the difficult task of starting a football program, Patch caught up with Adams and asked him the about sports at Stevenson. This is part one of a two-part question-and-answer session with Adams.

Patch: What made you want to start a football program?

Brett Adams: Well, actually, it’s been about five years in the process...where the conversation [about football] really started to heat up was when we purchased the Baltimore Ravens' old practice facility...

We reviewed schools that had started it within the last 10 years, and it unanimously came back that we should do this. It’s really good for our students, it’s good for retention. We have five Saturdays built in where students are going to stay on campus and go to the games.

It adds other parts of the campus dynamic, such as we’re starting a marching band…In addition to that, it was a way to bring the alumni back on campus, especially with homecoming.

Patch: What are the schools you researched when trying to decide whether or not to start the program?

BA: Christopher Newport had started it in recent years and Shenandoah [University] had started it in recent years.

Patch: How did you settle on hiring coach Ed Hottle to lead the new football program?

BA: Well, we did a national search and the search...and we had many applicants...We knew Ed Hottle because we were in the Capital Athletic Conference (CAC) and Gallaudet University was in the CAC...he basically resurrected a 100-year-old program that hadn’t existed for the last couple years, and they never had a winning program in 100 years...in a very short period of time, he had a winning NCAA program and was Coach of the Year.

So, we felt he was the right fit. We had some connection, and...went through the search committee, and presented him to the board of trustees and he was an absolute perfect fit.

Patch: Between your experience building Stevenson athletics and coach Hottle’s experience rebuilding Gallaudet, would you say you guys are qualified to build this new program?

BA: Resurrecting a program is no different [than] starting a program, which means recruiting is a major component, enthusiasm is a major component, organization, confidence, building a staff, and he had already proven that he could do that.

And Gallaudet is a very difficult job. It’s the national school for the hearing impaired, and he not only went after hearing-impaired kids, he went for mainstream kids. Those are hard kids to find, and he did...

He’s done a masterful job here as well, so he was the perfect fit. Starting programs is unique, it’s not easy, and you have to have a guy who has his glass half-full. He’s a visionary and a 'we can think it, we can believe it, we can do it' type of person.