Meet the Swiss Army knife of the Bradley Athletics Department [Q&A]
Deputy Athletic Director Brad Chandler details his role at the university and shares his experiences leading up to his current position.
Managing an athletic departments can be quite a heavy task, with more and more layers added into the workload the further you investigate. Bradley was in need of a person who could manage this workload as well as bringing it up to a new level year after year. And it seems they finally found their guy in Brad Chandler.
After spending seven years in Arizona State’s Athletic Department, Chandler decided to make the jump over to the Midwest, joining Bradley University in 2021.
Two years into the job, Mr. Chandler sat down with me to discuss his journey so far and what he hopes to accomplish here at Bradley.
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—This interview has been edited for clarity—
As Deputy Athletics Director, how would you describe your main duties and responsibilities?
That's a tough question because one part I love about the job is that every day is different, and no two days are the same. And so, the easiest way to answer that is a little bit of everything.
Since coming here, you have worked as the Associate Director of Compliance as well as Chief Financial Officer. How have those positions developed through the last couple of years here?
I came here and my initial responsibility was to oversee the Athletics Compliance Office. As we've had some changes in personnel and just changes in focus and some things that we want to do, my role expanded into not only doing compliance but evolving into overseeing some financial stuff and ultimately becoming the chief financial officer here. And then I was able to hire someone behind me to groom and set him up as the chief compliance officer within the athletics department.
Compliance in athletic departments has been a major part of your career path so far. How would you explain to someone who doesn't know much about sports what compliance is in an athletic department?
The NCAA is the governing body of all college athletics. And so, there's three different divisions, and each institution is a member. So, it's a nonprofit organization where all the money that comes into the NCAA goes back out. Now within this, I don't even know how many sports they carry, and hundreds and thousands of athletic departments, there is this stick rulebook that has all these rules. And so, in compliance, we are part internal affairs to the athletics department. You’re part cop, you’re part teacher, you’re part lawyer, because the goal for the athletic department is to navigate everything that we do within the confines of this thick rulebook. As many of you may already know, the NCAA has a ton of rules, and so it's tough for our coaches to navigate and our student efforts to navigate what they're trying to do and win games within those rules.
Before Bradley, you were previously at Arizona State for seven years. What attracted you to moving to a Peoria after all that time?
Quite frankly, it was Dr. Reynolds, the Vice President of Intercollegiate Athletics here. He was a mentor of mine for about a year, and he had a job open up and I was looking to take that next step and get some more responsibilities. But most importantly, I wanted to hitch my wagons to a good leader because it's important to, regardless of what school you're at and what school you're working for, if you're working for good leaders, that's the best, I believe, the best way to professionally develop. And so, I was blessed enough to be able to come and work for Dr. Reynolds, and it was a great decision.
And finally, what are your aspirations for the future with Bradley? Are there any long-term goals you hope to meet?
We want to just keep growing this thing. Men's basketball is just vital to our success as an athletics department and it also shines a good light for our university when our men's basketball team has success. So, if we can continue to progress in men's basketball and make the NCAA tournament and make tournament runs, then everything else will kind of flow out from there. So that's a priority of ours. But it's also just maintaining good student athlete experience and developing young people. I think my purpose in life is to develop young people and coaches. But in my role as deputy athletics director, that's just the vehicle in which I'm trying to fulfill my purpose.