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Have a few friends in the development and fundraising world of college athletics, and this name was given to me as a possible candidate. http://www.soonersports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?ATCLID=208803515 Not a bad resume. OU, Cowboys, Alabama. Seems like a home run hire to me.

East Central has a new head coach. Its former NSU head coach Kenny Evans. Evans returns to the high school level for the first time since 1981. He takes over after Bobby Klinck resigned to become the defensive coordinator at Broken Arrow. The former Riverhawk head coach is ready for something new. Its going to be an eye opening experience for me and its a new adventure, said the new Cardinal head coach. 32 years as a college football coach at seven universities. As far as the football goes, that part I feel good about. Evans takes over one of the top 5A programs in Oklahoma. Bobby Klinck did a great job. Its one of those premier jobs. They always have talent. That made it more appealing to me, Evans said. East Central has made three trips to the 5A title game, with their only championship victory coming in 2005. The Cardinals have been to the title game twice in the last four seasons. Both appearances ended in losses. Taking over a job like East Central comes with some inherited expectations. East Central has made it to the playoffs 16 straight seasons. East Central is also in an extremely tough district; they finished fourth last season. Its going to be tough because we have some good coaches in this district. Its definitely going to be a tough level, hopefully Im up for the challenge. Evans is a graduate of NSU and in his six seasons as Riverhawk head coach, he led his alma mater to a 22-44 record. He was fired in November. Evans took some time to look at what kind of opportunities were out there before deciding on East Central. "I looked at several different things. I interviewed at a couple division one jobs, thought about going back to that level," Evans said. "I interviewed for one head coaching job. Even as late as three weeks ago, I was talking to an NFL team about scouting for them." Read more: http://okgridiron.com/?p=389

When Lynn Hickey interviewed for the Texas-San Antonio athletic director job in 1999, UTSA President Ricardo Romo asked her if the school should consider adding football. Hickey told him no. “It was cost prohibitive,” Hickey said. She told Romo, “Be good at what you've got.” Hickey got the job. And a year later realized she had said the wrong thing. The top-selling T-shirt in the university bookstore proclaimed “UTSA football still undefeated.” The largely commuter school of 16,000-17,000 students had no identity and little campus life. On Sept. 7, Texas-San Antonio, in its third season of football and its second of Division I-A, hosts Oklahoma State in the Alamodome. Football is part of a Roadrunner success story. The Texas Legislature has declared UTSA an emerging Tier I university. Enrollment is up to 31,000, with many of those students now living on campus. The school has almost as many students from Harris County (Houston) as Bexar County (San Antonio). And UTSA football, while nowhere near undefeated, has drawn as many as 57,000 fans to the Alamodome for a game. “We didn't have any identity,” Hickey said. “Football has helped us change our persona. In Texas, kids grow up with football.” Hickey said UTSA once was a “but” school. As in, I go to UTSA, “but” I'm saving up to go somewhere else. And it was a bunch of Oklahomans who made the buts disappear. * * * When UTSA played its first game ever, Sept. 3, 2011, the city of San Antonio got quite emotional. Sports radio callers were moved to tears as they discussed the launch of the program. As Hickey walked through the pregame tailgating, she got marriage proposals. When UTSA's spanking-new marching band, 250 musicians strong, took the field, “people were blown away,” Hickey said. “It's been fun. It's a dream thing. How many people get a chance to build this? We've established a game experience for these students.” The Roadrunners won that inaugural game 31-3 over Tahlequah's Northeastern State, their coach's alma mater. Such symmetry seemed fitting. Hickey, 62, grew up in the Green Country town of Welch, where she was Lynn Sooter and scored 2,654 points in high school basketball. All four of her siblings were collegiate athletes, including brother Mark, who played basketball at OU. Hickey went to Ouachita Baptist, then got into coaching. She was on the OU women's staff in 1977-79, then Hickey became head coach at Kansas State (hired by DeLoss Dodds) and eventually Texas A&M (hired by John David Crow). Hickey became an associate athletic director at A&M. Hickey's Oklahoma ties are deep. When Hickey's mother was 19, she was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in Hitchita, halfway between Henryetta and Checotah in eastern Oklahoma. Among her students were Bill Self Sr., who became a longtime executive director of the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association and father of the Kansas basketball coach. Bill Sr.'s brother, Jeff, rented a pasture outside Hitchita from the family of Brad Parrott. Parrott grew up in Midwest City, went to then-Central State University and became a sports writer for the Oklahoma City Times. Parrott entered the corporate world, eventually made vice president at Southwestern Bell and retired from what is now AT&T, joining Hickey's staff as an associate athletic director for external affairs. Parrott spearheaded the fundraising and corporate/civic partnerships that made football possible at UTSA. When Parrott was with the Times, he once covered a Luther-Fairfax playoff game. Fairfax that night was coached by Larry Coker, who had grown up in Okemah, just down the road from Hitchita. Today, Coker is head coach at UTSA. His career has included stops as offensive coordinator at Tulsa U., OSU and OU, and six years as head coach at Miami, where his Hurricanes were 60-15 overall and 2001 national champions. Coker's defensive coordinator is Neal Neathery, who grew up in Stillwater and whose father was an OSU professor and Coker's Sunday school teacher during his Cowboy days. More OSU ties for UTSA: both Roadrunner basketball coaches are OSU graduates. Rae Rippetoe Blair was a Cowgirl player and assistant coach. Brooks Thompson was a star under Eddie Sutton. And Coker's defensive line coach, Eric Roark, played at OSU from 1979-82 for Jimmy Johnson. Read more: http://newsok.com/article/3864477