Big South commissioner Kyle Kallander retiring with hope after 27 years at the helm
In March 1997, Kyle Kallander stepped out of the Palace at Auburn Hills. He was a bit tired, he remembers. He wore a dark mustache. Suit. No hat to protect his head from the chilly Detroit spring. It was the first year of Kallander’s tenure as commissioner of the Big South, a mid-major conference in a then-less-professionalized NCAA, and he’d just watched Charleston Southern fall to UCLA in the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
After he shook the hands of CSU coach Tommy Conrad and his staff, congratulating them on a season well done, Kallander exited the arena and saw what he’d never seen before.
“I came out of that game, and there was an ice storm,” Kallander said, chuckling. “It was the first ice storm I’d ever been in. I couldn’t figure out how to get into my car.” The Seattle native, then just 39, said he didn’t have any gloves or an ice scraper or “any clue” what had happened: “I think I used a quarter to scrape my windshield off just to try to get out of the parking lot.”
Kallander laughed as he tried to recall the details of this story in the Big South Conference’s headquarters in Charlotte last week, about a month after he announced that he’d be retiring at the end of the 2022-23 season to support and spend more time with his family. The now-64-year-old commissioner, who wears a silver goatee instead of the dark mustache he had decades ago, will leave his post as the longest-tenured member in the Big South and the second-longest tenured commissioner of any Division I conference.
That means the end of the season will mark 27 years of advocating for the mid-major conference in an ever-changing NCAA world. Twenty-seven years of managing the ebbs and flows of membership realignment. Twenty-seven years of adapting to all the challenges and opportunities that come with managing sports in the digital age. Twenty-seven years of taking risks, like sponsoring football in the conference; of leading through crises, like announcing COVID-adjusted plans and schedules from the Big South’s in-office studio; of experiencing highs, like seeing the Winthrop men’s basketball team win in the NCAA tournament in 2007 and witnessing the Liberty women’s basketball team’s Sweet Sixteen run in 2005; of feeling the thrill and bittersweetness of Coastal Carolina winning the 2016 College World Series and then leaving the conference the day after.
Twenty-seven years of walking out of arenas and stepping into unfamiliar storms, rustling pockets, finding a way forward.
“You don’t give 27 years to anything if you don’t genuinely care about it,” Winthrop men’s basketball head coach Mark Prosser said at the Big South Conference’s media day in October. Prosser was one of several league coaches who praised Kallander for his fairness, competence and commitment. “The fact that he’s been with us for 27 years, through a lot, through conference realignment and everything else, and to have our league still healthy and viable, there’s a lot to be said for that.”
Kallander’s departure opens up a slew of questions about the Big South and its future. Who next will lead the conference? And where does this leave the Big South, and other conferences like it, in an NCAA that has changed more in the last five years than Kallander’s first 22 as commissioner?
Kallander hasn’t yet been overcome with nostalgia, he said, and hasn’t dwelt too much on what the Big South will be when he’s gone. There’s too much to do still, he says. But is the outgoing leader concerned at all about the stability of the Big South and its place in the NCAA? What about his concerns with the general direction of college athletics?
To these questions, he answers a swift and resolute response.
“We’ve always found a way, regardless of the change that has taken place, to manage Division I college athletics, and to manage ways to provide these opportunities for our student-athletes,” Kallander said. “We will continue to do that. I do believe we have some work to do to protect the long-term of college athletics. And there are concerns around that.”
He added: “But clearly the commitment on the part of the Big South institutions and the Big South Conference are to continue to provide those opportunities. And we will find ways to do that.”
Below, the commissioner explains why he’s bullish on the future of the league and much more. This two-part interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Big South through the Kallander years
Alex Zietlow: What do you think will be your biggest accomplishment after your 27 years are up?
Kyle Kallander: It’s really hard to say. I think what I’m most proud of in the Big South Conference is the culture that we’ve built as a league. Really from the very beginning, our member institutions were looking for leadership. They were looking for direction. And they haven’t hesitated to support our collective vision that we’ve needed to get done in the Big South Conference. And that’s made it so easy for me to work in this conference. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been here for 27 years.
Q: Twenty-seven years is a long time, and it’s particularly long considering how fast the world of college athletics can change. What was the Big South Conference like when you started?
A: The day I interviewed for the Big South Conference job was the day that UMBC announced they were leaving. And UNCG, that was in the league at that point in time, had already announced they were leaving. That left six schools committed to the league. So our president said, “You’ve got two main charges. One is to expand membership. And one is to increase revenues.”
Q: Simple enough.
A: Yeah, right, right. But I’ve been really pleased with what we’ve been able to do from a membership perspective. Now, alignment continues to swirl, there continues to be issues, as there always will be. So it’s always been an issue we’ve been dealing with. (This offseason, the Big South saw Hampton and North Carolina A&T depart for the Colonial Athletic Association, pushing full-time membership back down to 10.)
But we went out and added Elon and High Point at first to get us back to eight. And we started sponsoring football in 2002 (in part to retain and attract members). … We’ve built a strong, stable league. Even though we’ve had some changes recently, I’m very confident about the stability and security of the league and the future going forward because our schools are committed to what we’re trying to do. So we came in at that point in time and built a league people respected, that people believed was really, from a perception standpoint, more acknowledged regionally and nationally.
At that point in time, we didn’t have a website. This whole digital world was just being born. I was at the Southwest Conference before I came to the Big South. I think it was like a year or two before when I was at the Southwest Conference when I first actually saw the internet. So it was all brand new. So everything that we’ve done in the digital space has been within the last 27 years.
Now everybody has, it’s not like we’re the only ones, but to see the change — we were always really aggressive in that space. We actually started looking and were actually prepared to start doing live streaming in the late 90s, early 2000s, because there were actually companies out there who were beginning to do that. But then we had the dot-com bubble burst, and all those companies crashed and went out of business.
But we came back around and got through that, and we were actually, I think, one of the first conferences to have a digital network and to do live streaming. ... We were the first — if not the first, one of the first — to have an online digital network for live games. We built that early and it was pretty successful.
Q: About when was that?
A: Around the 2005 timeframe. … But we grew that very successfully and ended up selling the Big South Network to ESPN as part of our ESPN+ package. So that was obviously another huge change in terms of what the conference was like. Back then, we were talking about eight schools: I think when you’re smaller, you’re a lot more collegial. It was then, and continues to be, pretty compact geographically. ...
And then on the revenue side, we were able to start doing some really good things, working together again, kind of going with the culture of working together to generate revenue through corporate partnerships. And so, it wasn’t just the conference selling corporate partnerships or our inventory, but it was the Winthrops, the Coastals, the Radfords and other inventories. So again, working together we could be successful generating revenue. Whereas if we’re just trying to do our own thing, it’s not as successful.
Investment in Big South basketball
Q: The Big South Conference has an explicit emphasis on basketball. There’s a Basketball Incentive Plan, which, so long as it hasn’t been amended since Winthrop’s run to the NCAA tournament in 2021, is pretty significant. When did this start?
A: Around when I first started, there was a big emphasis on football. It was a lot more of a broad-based focus at that point in time. And quite frankly, our membership didn’t wanna play favorites with any sport. It’s admirable. Most institutions … they didn’t want to “tier” sports, so to speak. So for us to take the step we did, around 2015 or so, to really prioritize basketball, that was really a change in thinking on the part of our leadership.
Q: How did the membership react to that?
A: They reacted positively. They came to me and asked, “What do we need to do to really help the Big South move forward?” And I said, “You gotta be good in basketball.” Now, it wasn’t without some pulling of teeth and twisting of arms to get certain minimum standards in place, when you say, “Hey, this is what your budget needs to be. We need to provide the cost of attendance as part of our scholarships. We need to make sure we’re fully staffed. We need to make sure that we’re doing certain things around scheduling. You gotta limit your guarantee games because we gotta win games. You gotta pay attention to what we’re doing from a facilities standpoint.” So all those things are part of our minimum standards. ... And I thought we were making good progress up until the pandemic.
And then everybody had to take a step back, so I think we’re still recovering from that, because we suspended our minimum requirements during the pandemic around basketball, but they’re back in place now.
Kallander on NIL, college athletics, Big South
At Big South basketball media day, Kallander said that while he thought college athletes should be able to monetize their name, image and likeness, he also gets worried that the commercialization of college athletics is “getting to the place where student-athletes are going to be employees” and that this reality is “too separated from what makes college athletics unique, which is the ties to the academy.”
He added that Congressional intervention could help rectify a lot of the issues surrounding NIL: If Congress makes it so leagues can pass legislation to provide standards for NIL without the fear of litigation, then leagues can put in place some common-sense rules to protect college athletics “from the arms race in NIL through inducements and trying to outbid each other” while still making it so college athletes can benefit from their NIL.
Q: Regarding your thoughts about NIL and Congressional intervention: How is this sort of thing advantageous and important to a conference like the Big South, when the ACC and SEC are advocating for the same thing?
A: Well, I’m not necessarily looking at it as beneficial to the Big South versus the ACC or the SEC. I’m looking at it more from the perspective of what’s good for college athletics generally and the collegiate model. If we had some ability to control our spending in certain ways, whether it’s salary caps for coaches, or other expenditures, to make it more standard... that will allow us to I think protect college athletics, make it distinctive from the professional model. Allow more of that money that’s maybe being spent in other ways to really benefit student athletes. And to protect what we’re trying to do in college athletics versus what a professional model might be.
Because if we just continue to go down this path of spending all this money on coaches, on locker rooms, on everything else, then there’s going to be an argument of, “Student-athletes should be paid. There should be compensation.” And I just think that is a step too far for college athletics.
Q: Among some wistful fans, there is an idea that the “sky is falling” when it comes to college athletics. How do you feel?
A: The Big South and Big South institutions are committed to providing Division I opportunities for our students. And we will continue to pursue that.
The change we’ve seen in Division I in the last five years has been dramatic, given what college athletics traditionally has been. Now, some of that change certainly is positive. We want to provide more opportunities for student-athletes to benefit, especially considering the revenue that’s coming at the upper level, they should benefit from some of that. But between some of those changes that have taken place, the litigious environment we’re in currently, there’s gotta be some ability to control some of what we’re doing. And we need some help in doing that.
But there are special moments in college athletics in Division I. And some of the best moments are the underdogs. Some of the best moments are provided by the Big South Conference and conferences like it. And I think everybody wants to see that. And all this conversation we’re having around transformation, there’s no interest in changing the NCAA basketball tournament, mainly because what makes that event so special is some of those moments.
So we want to protect that. We want to continue to see that. If Division I shrinks — if a certain amount of conferences decided that they wanted to do their own thing — and then that just becomes another professional league in some ways. Which isn’t bad in and of itself, but it loses the specialness and the distinctiveness of college athletics.
I personally, and a lot of people like me, want to see us find a way to protect that within the new world of college athletics. And certainly it’s different. And there are a lot of things we’re not going back on. We’re not going back on NIL. We’re not going back on transfers. We have to figure out how to best manage that. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
Life in the Big South after Kallander
Q: Who is an ideal successor?
A: I told our presidents that I’m playing Switzerland on that.
Q: What? Oh you’re being neutral. I see.
A: I’m being neutral in terms of their search and their selection. ... I don’t think there’s any ideal background. I think it’s more about the character of the person, what they’re vision is. I think you’re going to have to have somebody who understands the NCAA, so trying to bring somebody from the outside, not that it couldn’t work, but it is more of a challenge, especially with all of the changes that are taking place right now. You’re going to have to have somebody who has really good skills in building relationships.
Q: Is there an update on the timeline of hiring your successor?
A: We’ve hired a search firm. It’s Collegiate Sports Associates, which is headed up by Todd Turner, former AD at a number of places in Division I. So they’re currently in the process of talking to our people, our CEOs and our ADs, to kind of understand what our membership is looking for in the new commissioner. So we’ll probably start the interview process after the first of the year. And they’ll probably name somebody in the March-April time frame.
This story was originally published December 8, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
