La Salle athletic director Bill Bradshaw to retire as last of an old-guard era | Mike Jensen
Unless La Salle hires Bradshaw's replacement in his own mold — if there is quite such a thing — there will be no Big 5 athletic directors who went to the school they work at.
Call Bill Bradshaw the last of the old-guard local athletic directors. La Salle University announced Tuesday that Bradshaw, class of 1969 at La Salle, will retire as AD at the end of the academic year.
It wasn't a big shock. Bradshaw, 71, was originally brought in to be interim AD. He was never going be working until he was 81.
Unless La Salle hires Bradshaw’s replacement in his own mold — if there is quite such a thing — there will be no Big 5 athletic directors who played a sport at their alma mater, or even went to the school where they work. Bradshaw played baseball at La Salle, just as Don DiJulia played hoops and baseball at St. Joseph’s and Steve Bilsky played hoops at Penn, as others had before them.
Bradshaw made some impactful coaching hires. He brought in Speedy Morris to be the women's coach at La Salle, saw that work out for two seasons, then decided Morris should be the men's coach. That worked out, too.
"I almost did it again," Bradshaw said over the phone Tuesday, mentioning how DePaul women's coach Doug Bruno was twice a candidate for the men's job out there.
Replacing Joey Meyer as DePaul's basketball coach, with his father, the legendary Ray Meyer still around and wielding influence, provided Bradshaw stories he brought back to Philly.
"I got things like, ‘Dear Bill, the train leaves a noon — be under it,’ " Bradshaw said. "Some were worse, like about wearing cement shoes. Not so subtle.”
After 16 years as DePaul’s athletic director, Bradshaw took over as Temple’s AD, and his hires during his 11-year run on North Broad Street included Al Golden, Steve Addazio, and Matt Rhule to coach football, Fran Dunphy to coach basketball, and Tonya Cardoza to coach women’s basketball.
Back at his alma mater, Bradshaw last year hired Ashley Howard to coach men's hoops and Mountain MacGillivray to coach women's hoops, presumably his last big hires.
You could argue that Bradshaw’s biggest local impact involved Temple football and conference realignment. He was brought in by Temple in 2002 without any experience at leading an athletic department with a football program and you wondered whether maybe his job was to wind things down after Temple football had been tossed out of the Big East.
"I remember half the committee wants football to be gone and half wants to get it going," Bradshaw said of the people hiring him. "I said, 'I have to look under the hood.' "
He found Temple football a temporary landing spot in the Mid-American Conference, which bought time as the Owls football program found solid ground under Golden.
“People [at Temple] were saying, we’re not in a league, why should we continue?” Bradshaw said. "The league was saying, ‘We don’t know if you’re going to continue, why should we bring you in?’ It was a fragile time.”
Transitioning from the John Chaney era at Temple was his other big challenge on North Broad Street.
“You know what, he was the lowest maintenance coach I ever had,” Bradshaw said. "When I say that, people don’t believe me. He was. But when he was in front of a microphone, he was a terrorist. I told my wife, ‘I can miss the game, but I can’t miss the press conference.’ "
The next Temple conference move seemed like a home run at first, a place in the Big East for all sports. Except the Big East as it was didn't hold. It split in two, with basketball schools retaining the name, football schools either leaving for greener pastures or forming the new American Athletic Conference, which quickly turned into Division I's sixth-best league. More of a solid double than over the wall.
Bradshaw was old guard in another way. He had zero problem picking up the phone and calling you to set you straight. That part of Bradshaw was usually appreciated even if the call itself didn't quite produce common ground. He'd work the case like an attorney, phrase by phrase.
He's the only person who ever led a Big 5 athletic department, and then a second one, and then the first one again.
Going back to La Salle three years ago, Bradshaw said: "It was going to be heavy lifting. The president described it to me that way. It wasn’t a retirement job.”
That made sense, since Bradshaw’s personality was never the retiring kind. An era will officially end on June 30.