Current position | |
---|---|
Title | Athletic director |
Team | UMass |
Conference | Atlantic 10 Conference |
Playing career | |
1996–2000 | Ithaca College |
Position(s) | Guard |
Administrative career (AD unless noted) | |
2003–2005 | Yale (assistant AD) |
2006 | Yale (associate AD) |
2007–2011 | Yale (senior associate AD) |
2011–2015 | Georgia Tech (senior associate AD) |
2015–present | UMass |
Ryan Bamford is the current athletic director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was previously hired on March 23, 2011 as an associate athletic director at Georgia Institute of Technology by then athletic director Dan Radakovich and promoted to senior associate in June 2013 by incoming athletic director Mike Bobinski. Bamford also served at Yale University as senior associate director of athletics for varsity sports administration. [1] [2]
Bamford's father, Steve Bamford, is a long-time college athletics administrator. He served as director of athletics at Plymouth State University in Plymouth, New Hampshire for 13 years before joining the Eastern College Athletic Conference in 2000 as an assistant commissioner. The elder Bamford most recently served as the conference's interim commissioner, a post he was appointed to twice in his last five years prior to a 2013 retirement. [3] Bamford attended Ithaca College and was a guard on the basketball team. He left Ithaca as a 1000-point scorer (13th all-time) and all-time leader in single-season and career three-point field goals. [1] He earned a degree in Sport Management in 2000, and added a Master's degree in athletic administration from Springfield College in 2003.
Bamford worked in the athletic department at Springfield College (2000–02) as a graduate fellow. He has also previously held positions with the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC), Octagon Sports Marketing, Plymouth State and the University of New Hampshire. [4]
Bamford was hired at Yale University as an assistant athletic director in 2003. He was promoted to associate athletic director in 2006 and then senior associate director of athletics in 2007. He left the department as the lead administrator for internal operations.
During his time at Yale, he oversaw the football, men's basketball, and men's and women's fencing programs. In addition, he supervised Yale's varsity support service units of sports medicine, equipment operations and strength and conditioning, as well as all intercollegiate scheduling, event management, and postseason championships for the 35-sport department.
Bamford served on a number of NCAA and Ivy League committees, including four years on the NCAA Division I Women's Lacrosse Committee, which he chaired from 2009 to 2010. [1] As part of the administration at Yale, Bamford was responsible for successful new parking regulations for the annual Harvard-Yale football rivalry game, [5] as well as dealing with student pranks associated with the rivalry. [6]
As senior associate director of athletics at Georgia Tech from 2011-2015, Bamford had direct oversight of all internal operations and supervision of the football, men's basketball and baseball programs. In 2011, he assisted athletic director Dan Radakovich in the search process for a men's basketball coach. On March 28, 2011, the Jackets hired Brian Gregory as the 13th head coach in program history. [7] Bamford oversaw scheduling for both Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets football and Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets men's basketball and was involved in a January 2014 incident when Tulane University attempted to cancel a series against Georgia Tech, including a home game scheduled for September 6, 2014. [8] Later that evening, Tulane reversed the decision. [9] Bamford shared his thoughts on his time at Georgia Tech with Atlanta Journal-Constitution beat-writer Ken Seguira prior to leaving the Flats for UMass. [10] [ clarification needed ]
Named director of athletics in March 2015, Bamford was given direct oversight of a 21-sport athletic department with 650 student-athletes, 175 employees and a $33m budget. In his first six months at UMass, Bamford generated interest and visibility for the athletics program by announcing the department would fund the Cost of Attendance gap for its scholarship student-athletes. [11] In addition, Bamford has been consistently lauded for his transparency and fan-friendly approach in interviews, on social media and in person. [12]
In December 2015, Bamford and his department came under fire in a column by The Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaugnessy for honoring former men's basketball coach John Calipari [13] with a fundraising event in Boston and a banner-raising ceremony in the Mullins Center. However, after the two-day celebration, many sources concluded the events were a huge success for UMass in generating interest around a golden era of Minutemen basketball. [14] [15] [16]
Bamford has often answered questions about the football program's move from the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) to FBS and leaving the Mid-American Conference for FBS Independent status in 2016, a decision that was made in 2013. [17] [18] After only four years, The Boston Globe published an article on the University's lack of progress as a Football Bowl Subdivision member school [19] with Bamford saying, "I didn't come here to fail." Bamford has been widely recognized for his ability to schedule football opponents for UMass as they start independent status in 2016. [20] When Bamford arrived at UMass in April 2015, the Minutemen had only one FBS home game scheduled for the 2016 season. By August, UMass announced 5 home games and in November the addition of a sixth home game (Boston College). Perhaps one of his greatest accomplishments is producing eight football games in eight years (from 2016-2024) with regional rivals Boston College and UConn. [21] [22] [23]
National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Football Bowl Subdivision independent schools are four-year institutions whose football programs are not part of an NCAA-affiliated conference. This means that FBS independents are not required to schedule each other for competition like conference schools do.
The Atlantic 10 Conference (A-10) is a collegiate athletic conference whose schools compete in the National Collegiate Athletic Association's (NCAA) Division I. The A-10's member schools are located mostly on the East Coast and Midwest of the United States: Illinois, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is the oldest, largest, and flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system, and was founded in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College. It is also a member of the Five College Consortium, along with four other colleges in the Pioneer Valley.
John Vincent Calipari is an American basketball coach. Since 2009, he has been the head coach of the University of Kentucky men's team, with whom he won the NCAA Championship in 2012. He has been named Naismith College Coach of the Year three times, and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015.
The Boston College Eagles are the athletic teams that represent Boston College, located in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. They compete as a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I level, primarily competing in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC).
The 1996 NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament involved 64 schools playing in single-elimination play to determine the national champion of men's NCAA Division I college basketball. It began on March 14, 1996, and ended with the championship game on April 1 at Continental Airlines Arena in the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey. A total of 63 games were played.
James "Bruiser" Flint is an American men's college basketball coach, currently an assistant coach at Kentucky. He was most recently the head coach at Drexel University.
The UMass Minutemen are the athletic teams that represent the University of Massachusetts Amherst; strictly speaking, the Minutemen nickname applies to men's teams and athletes only — women's teams and athletes are known as Minutewomen. The Minutemen and Minutewomen compete in NCAA Division I sports competition primarily as members of the Atlantic 10 Conference. UMass is one of only 16 universities in the nation that plays Division I FBS football and Division I men's ice hockey. The nickname is also applied to club teams that do not participate within the NCAA structure.
The UMass Minutemen basketball team represents the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Amherst, Massachusetts, in NCAA Division I men's college basketball. They play their home games in the William D. Mullins Memorial Center. The Minutemen currently compete in the Atlantic 10 Conference.
Derek William Kellogg is an American college basketball coach who currently serves as an assistant coach for Creighton. Kellogg previously served as head coach of the Massachusetts Minutemen, his alma mater, being named to the position on April 23, 2008, replacing Travis Ford, who left to take the head coaching job at Oklahoma State University. He was removed from the position on March 9, 2017. After being let go by the Minutemen, he was named head coach of the LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds, which represented the school's Brooklyn campus. He was named the first head coach of the current LIU team upon its formation in July 2019 when LIU merged the Brooklyn athletic program with that of its Post campus, creating a new program that now competes as the LIU Sharks, and served in that role until he was fired and replaced by Rod Strickland on June 30, 2022. After his firing from LIU, Kellogg returned to his alma mater UMass as an assistant coach for one season before leaving for Creighton in 2023.
The UMass Minutemen football team represents the University of Massachusetts in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS). The Minutemen compete as an FBS independent. Since 1965, their home games have been played at Warren McGuirk Alumni Stadium on the university's campus in Hadley, Massachusetts.
In American college athletics, a vacated victory is a win that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has stripped from an athletic team, usually as punishment for misconduct related to their sports programs. The team being punished is officially stripped of its victory, but the opposing team retains its loss—thus, vacated victories are different from forfeits, in which the losing team is given the win. The practice of vacating victories has been criticized by players and sports journalists, but remains one of the NCAA's preferred penalties for infractions related to past misconduct. Over 160 college football teams and 270 college basketball teams have had wins vacated.
The UConn–UMass rivalry is a sports rivalry between the UConn Huskies of the University of Connecticut and the UMass Minutemen of the University of Massachusetts.
The 1972 UMass Minutemen football team represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst in the 1972 NCAA College Division football season as a member of the Yankee Conference. The team was coached by Dick MacPherson and played its home games at Alumni Stadium in Hadley, Massachusetts. The 1972 season was the first in which Massachusetts was named the "Minutemen," as the university had changed their nickname from the "Redmen" due to changing attitudes regarding the use of Native American-themed mascots in sports. It was also the last season of the NCAA's University and College Division setup, as they would split athletics into three numbered divisions in 1973, with UMass moving into Division II. Massachusetts performed strongly enough in the regular season to earn a spot in the 1972 Boardwalk Bowl, which at the time served as the NCAA College Division East championship game. The team defeated UC Davis by a score of 35–14 and finished the season with a record of 9–2 overall and 5–0 in conference play.
James D. Fiore Jr. is an American sports administrator who served as the Director of Athletics at Stony Brook University from 2003 to 2013. Fiore was named Stony Brook's athletic director in 2003 and was fired in 2013 after numerous accusations of sexual harassment, misappropriation of university resources and employment discrimination.
Chester Stephen Gladchuk Jr. is an American college athletics administrator and former American football player and coach. He is currently the athletic director at the United States Naval Academy, a position he has held since 2001. Gladchuk served as the athletic director at Tulane University from 1988 to 1990, at Boston College from 1990 to 1997, and at the University of Houston from 1997 to 2001. Gladchuk attended Worcester Academy and then played college football at Boston College from 1970 to 1972. He coached high school football in New Hampton, New Hampshire before moving to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he worked as an assistant athletic director and earned a master's degree in sports administration. Gladchuck's father, Chet Gladchuk, also played college football at Boston College before playing professionally with the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL) and the Montreal Alouettes of the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union, now part of the Canadian Football League (CFL).
The 1995–96 UMass Minutemen basketball team represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 1995–96 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. The Minutemen, led by eighth year head coach John Calipari, played their home games at William D. Mullins Memorial Center and were members of the Atlantic 10 Conference. They finished the season 35–2, 15–1 in A-10 play to finish in first place. The Minutemen won the A-10 Conference tournament by beating Temple in the finals. They were awarded a #1 seed in the NCAA tournament. The Minutemen advanced to the Final Four, losing to eventual National Champion, Kentucky.
The 1993–94 UMass Minutemen basketball team represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 1993–94 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. The Minutemen, led by sixth year head coach John Calipari, played their home games at William D. Mullins Memorial Center and were members of the Atlantic 10 Conference. They finished the season 28-7, 14-2 in A-10 play to finish in first place.
The 2017–18 UMass Minutemen basketball team represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 2017–18 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. The Minutemen were led by first-year head coach Matt McCall and played their home games at the William D. Mullins Memorial Center in Amherst, Massachusetts as members of the Atlantic 10 Conference. They finished the season 13–20, 5–13 in A-10 play to finish in 13th place. They beat La Salle in the first round of the A-10 tournament before losing in the second round to George Mason.
The 1991–92 UMass Minutemen basketball team represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst during the 1991–92 NCAA Division I men's basketball season. The Minutemen, led by fourth year head coach John Calipari, played their home games at Curry Hicks Cage and were members of the Atlantic 10 Conference. They finished the season 30–5, 13–3 in A-10 play to finish in first place. The Minutemen won the A-10 Conference tournament by beating West Virginia in the finals. They were awarded a #3 seed in the NCAA tournament. The Minutemen advanced to the Sweet Sixteen, losing to #2 seed Kentucky in the East Regional semifinal.