DePauw University athletics faces a challenge, a big challenge. By next year, they will have to fill not one, but two vacant coaching positions.
Women’s field hockey head coach Gina Willis and men’s basketball assistant coach Brian Oilar have announced they will be stepping down from their coaching positions after this year.
“It’s hard to be upset about it,” athletic director Stevie Baker-Watson said. “It’s bittersweet movements for us because we do consider ourselves family, but at the same time, we’re really happy for them.”
So where does DePauw go from here? As of now, the two sports programs, along with Baker-Watson, find themselves in the information-gathering process, as the two transitions were made official last Tuesday with the job openings currently posted.
Men’s basketball already has close to 100 applicants for the job.
“It’s our job to…determine what our criteria are…what’s important to us with this position,” men’s basketball head coach Bill Fenlon said. “We’ll put our heads together and try to come up with a short list of folks we want to talk to and get to know a little bit better.”
Along with notifying other DIII programs and alumni of the positions, DePauw has also reached out to certain people who they feel would make strong applicants.
But regardless of who the applicants are, DePauw tries to make its overall recruitment processes different from any other athletic program.
“When I was hired here, I was very impressed with the process,” said head football coach Bill Lynch, who has been recruited twice having left DePauw in 2004 and returned in 2013. “The campus visits were very good…I think [with] their approach, they wanted every candidate to leave having not only the university getting a good feel for the candidate, but making sure the candidate had a real good feel for the university.”
But it’s not only the coaching staff and Baker-Watson who will have an influence on the two candidates who will fill these positions. Baker-Watson plans to meet with the players of both teams to gather input.
“[Field hockey players] will literally tell me, ‘these are the traits that we want to have of this person coming in,'” Baker-Watson said. "‘They need to understand that academics come first, they’ve got experience coaching college aged women,’ you know…whatever it is, they’re going to tell me that.”
For men’s basketball, Baker-Watson will get an idea from Fenlon of what he wants her to ask his players when it comes to picking the ideal traits of an assistant basketball coach.
“The hope would be that by the time we whittle the list down that there’s not going to be anybody coming in here who’s going to be popping up any red flags for our guys,” Fenlon said.
But as much as the process is focused on finding another coach, Fenlon also looks at it as a way to “reevaluate.”
“It...reenergizes you a little bit in bringing in someone new…It makes you rethink what you’re doing. Like every time you have to teach something, you have to think about it first,” Fenlon said. “It’s an opportunity to maybe tweak things a little bit here or there, make some changes that maybe you haven’t made because you’ve been… rolling along in the same way.”
In terms of his assistant coach, Fenlon has worked with Oilar for more than just the six years Oilar has served on the coaching staff, as Fenlon coached him as a player during his time here as a student.
Both programs hope to make significant progress in their search before the school year ends, as they look to build on the success of their winning seasons from a year ago.