Jim Copeland

[scoreboard1910]

Condolences and sympathy to the Copeland family on the passing of Jim yesterday. Through it all, Jim was a good person in a very tough situation as our AD. We can look back and question some of his decisions, but Jim was a good guy and a friend to many.

[ALEX LIFESON]

Wow, prayers go out to his family. I knew he had been ill for a while, but, didn't know it was this bad.

[smupony94]

Thank you for all you did for us Jim.

[Special_Delivery_Smu_Fans]

Sorry to hear of his passing. Rest in peace.

[Junior]

Thoughts and prayers.

[BIGHORSE]

As the years went by we drifted apart, when I heard that you were gone I felt a shadow

cross my heart.

[mr. pony]

Condolences to the Copeland family. Thanks, Jim, for your service to SMU.

From a 2006 Texas Herald story:

RETIRING WITH PRIORITIES IN PLACE
SMU AD Jim Copeland Ushered In New Stadium, Advancements For Women Athletes; NCAA Investigation Continues
By Rick Atkinson

UNIVERSITY PARK – When Jim Copeland took over as Director of Athletics at SMU in December of 1994, the situation around The Hilltop was pretty shaky. With just five seasons under their belts since the infamous “death penalty”, and bracing for the breakup of the Southwest Conference, folks involved with SMU athletics weren’t too sure about much of anything.

“There was a lot of uncertainty, to say the least,” Copeland said last week in his Moody Coliseum office.

But 11 years and three conferences later, the Mustangs under Copeland’s leadership have persevered and made important progress back toward athletic respectability.

“We were still kind of reeling from the ‘death penalty’ a little bit,” he said of his arrival in Dallas. “We had obvious facility needs, and we just needed to assess everything and then start setting priorities on what we need to get done first. And I think we’ve made some pretty good strides.”

Copeland pointed to the return of football on campus with the construction of Gerald J. Ford Stadium, increased opportunity for women athletes, high academic achievement, and the move to Conference USA as positive benchmarks for the future. School president R. Gerald Turner has said that SMU is now “well positioned to move forward.”

On the down side, the football team has had just one winning season during Copeland’s tenure and failed to make a bowl appearance. Men’s basketball did not make it back to the NCAA tournament either.

“Getting football and basketball back to championship level has taken longer than I had anticipated,” Copeland said.

Now, as he prepares to retire on May 31, it’s almost appropriate that another bit of uncertainty at SMU has popped up. Men’s basketball coach Jimmy Tubbs was fired April 6 amid reports of NCAA violations. The Dallas Morning News reported the alleged violations included the purchase of hamburgers for players, providing small amounts of laundry detergent, improper assistance by coaches with school work and excessive practice time.

SMU responded that Tubbs wasn’t fired for those reasons alone and that more serious violations have been uncovered. What are those violations and why won’t the school reveal them now? Copeland wouldn’t say, but offered this explanation:

“One of the things we don’t want to do is preempt the NCAA,” he said. “As they do their deliberations, there’s a process there that takes a long time.”

“We don’t want to speak out and preempt that process with too much detail. We can’t do that. It would be unwise for us as a school to do that.”

“We were very thorough with the investigation,” he said. “Because we were comprehensive and because we were thorough, we ran across some things that we know. And there’s no doubt about there being violations.”

“Having the NCAA sit there, even though their report hasn’t come out, we had a sense how they were responding to those things, as well.”

Right Decision

Bottom line, Copeland is certain SMU did the right thing in firing Tubbs.

“In terms of process, I think we had every right to do what we did,” he said. “There was enough that came out of the investigation … that we had reason to make that decision.”

Copeland said it may be later this summer before more information is forthcoming.

“I would never speculate on what the NCAA is going to do,” he said.

Some have suggested that the violations may go back as far as Tubbs’ days at the University of Oklahoma, where he was an assistant to Kelvin Sampson during the 2003-04 season. (The Sooners’ program is also currently under investigation by the NCAA.)

But Copeland said SMU’s decision was not based on anything that occurred while Tubbs was at Norman. “We did not look at his OU days,” he said.

This investigation comes at an awkward time for SMU - as Copeland leaves and newly-hired AD Steve Orsini arrives. Copeland said the timing was unavoidable.

“Anytime a coach is fired there is a certain amount of turmoil that goes on in a program,” he said. “Certainly, I did not want to create turmoil as I was retiring. But, in good conscience, I couldn’t ignore the things that we had found, either.”

Orsini, 49, current AD at the University of Central Florida, has been named chair of the 18-member search committee tasked with hiring the Mustangs’ new basketball coach. Copeland will serve as vice chair.

Copeland said he is pleased Orsini was chosen to succeed him. “I think it’s a great hire. I’ve known him through working in the Athletic Directors’ group of Conference USA, and I’ve been very impressed with the way he handles himself in that group.”

“I think there are some things that can be done and will be done here,” Copeland said.

Orsini has a track record as an accomplished fundraiser and builder of new facilities, certainly a major reason he was selected. He also has ties to the local area, having worked in the Dallas Cowboys organization from to 1984-93.

Dealing With Uncertainty

Why did Copeland choose SMU in 1994, during a time of such upheaval?

“It was really the people,” he said. “And that in itself may seem strange because one of the reasons that I almost did not take the job was I didn’t know who my boss was going to be. But, when I learned … more and more about the job, it seemed to me that the school wanted to do it right. They were interested in winning. And there would probably be the resources here to do some things we needed to do to be better.”

As for his eventual boss, President Turner, Copeland said, “I couldn’t have asked for somebody that would have been better for me to work with.”

Initially, a huge task for Copeland was getting faculty members, angered and humiliated by the football scandal, to trust athletics again.

“I spent a lot time with the … faculty, assuring them that our kids were going to go to school and they were going to graduate,” he said, “and that we were going to do that part of it right.”

Another area needing attention was the school admissions policy.

“One of the first things that was said to me when I came here … was we’ve got to change the admissions process,” Copeland said. “It wasn’t that we had to change admissions criteria; it was the process. Because again, it goes back to our history and the culture on campus. There wasn’t a lot of trust.”

Athletes interested in SMU were required to meet admissions requirements even before making a first official visit. “And the first admission didn’t necessarily mean they were going to get in,” said Copeland. The faculty, over time, agreed to changes.

“It took a little bit longer than I had hoped,” he said, “but we got it done. That’s helped. You see it in the way (football head coach) Phil Bennett has recruited.”

Accomplishments

When Copeland arrived, the decision had been made to move football games to the Cotton Bowl, from tiny Ownby Stadium on campus. SMU had erected extra bleachers and played at Ownby since returning to play in 1989 after the “death penalty.”

Copeland didn’t like the idea of moving football off-campus, but after studying Ownby, he knew it was necessary.

After first looking into renovating and expanding Ownby, razing it was determined to be the best option. Plans soon began for fundraising and construction of a new stadium. Gerald J. Ford Stadium opened on September 2, 2000 with a 31-17 win over Kansas.

“[Ford Stadium] has been one of the biggest things to help our program,” Copeland said.

His attention to academics has also paid dividends. SMU’s student athletes rank near the top in graduation rates among schools in Texas. The most recent NCAA Graduation Success Rate report, released in January, showed SMU among the top three Division I schools in Texas, with a graduation rate of 89 percent, trailing only Baylor and Rice. Nine of 14 Mustang sports graduated a perfect 100 percent of its participants.

SMU has added three women’s sports since Copeland’s arrival: volleyball, rowing and equestrian. Although Title IX requirements were a driving force, Copeland said he believed in creating more opportunity for women in college athletics already.

“What I realized, over time, was one of the great things athletics has done is give young people opportunities, some of whom could never have gone to college,” he said. “If that was one the reasons I was in the business, women should have those same opportunities. I can’t say I’ve always agreed with the interpretations of the law … but I certainly agree that women should have the opportunities.”

Finding a way to comply with Title IX requirements did, however, lead Copeland to make his toughest decision of all while at SMU: eliminating the nationally-respected men’s track team.

“It’s not that I didn’t think that was the right thing to do, because when you considered all the facts, it’s something we had to do,” Copeland said. “It was purely … dollars and cents.”

Copeland doubts men’s track and baseball, eliminated in 1980, will ever return to the Hilltop.

“You never want to say never … but I think the way college athletics are going, with Title IX, with budgets and all, there’s not a whole lot of chance that’s going to happen,” he said.

The move to C-USA last year is something Copeland believes will benefit SMU greatly. From the beginning, he had had misgivings about being in the WAC.

“I knew [the WAC] was a good conference,” said Copeland, a former AD at Utah. “It was just hard for me to see how it was going to fit geographically. It just never was easy being in the WAC. It had nothing to do with the schools or the way it was run. It was just the geography, as much as anything.”

Copeland sees C-USA as a good fit geographically and competitively. He also likes being grouped in the West Division with three other private schools with similar attitudes toward academics: Tulane, Rice and Tulsa.

“If you look at [our] overall program,” Copeland said, “we’ve had great competitive success.” Indeed, men’s and women’s golf, swimming, soccer and tennis teams have excelled. The women’s basketball team also made five NCAA tournament appearances during Copeland’s tenure. Since 1995, SMU has placed as high as 15th and never lower than 47th nationally in Director’s Cup standings, which ranks overall collegiate athletic programs.

But, he acknowledged, “The thing that people focus on is that football and [men’s] basketball.”

Unique Challenges

Copeland said SMU athletics has been forced to deal with unusual challenges in recent years.

“We’re unique in a lot of ways,” he said. “Most people point only to the ‘death penalty,’ … [but] I think the demise of the SWC has been the hardest thing for us to overcome. We’ve started to do that now, because we’re starting to build some rivalries. But it’s going to take some time.”

He also noted that Dallas is a tough media market to make a splash in, with several professional sports teams and the Big 12 conference receiving most the of the attention.

“It’s not like being in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” Copeland said. “And it’s certainly not like being in Charlottesville, Virginia, where you are the story.”

Throw in three conference affiliations since 1995, and the obstacles faced by SMU have been formidable. “I could probably write a book on the last ten years,” he chuckled.

Beating a good TCU football team last fall, a week after the Horned Frogs had knocked off OU, provided a much needed boost for the program. That turned out to be TCU’s only loss of the season on its way to the Mountain West Championship.

“It meant a great deal to the football program,” Copeland said. “And the fact that [Bennett] went ahead and won five games last year [and] finished strong at the end of the season. He’s got a lot of good athletes … who are starting to mature.”

What’s Needed?

Copeland said one of the most pressing needs now for SMU is a new basketball practice facility. But Moody Coliseum, he said, is “a great competitive arena” requiring only cosmetic upgrades and some renovation. “Have you ever been to [Duke’s] Cameron Indoor Stadium?” he asked. “It’s Moody,” he said, noting the two facilities were built at about the same time and their construction is similar in terms of bowl-seating arrangement.

A new swimming facility to replace ancient Perkins Natatorium would also be nice, Copeland said. “Both our swimming teams are really good. I mean, they’re really good. How they have done that, [in Perkins] - I’m still amazed. If we could find a major donor to put in a natatorium, that would really give us a shot in the arm as well.”

A “mini-campaign” is now underway to upgrade the soccer facility, Walcott Field, Copeland said, and the golf teams are in discussions with The Dallas Athletic Club about a new team facility there.

Copeland said the single highlight moment of his SMU experience has not yet arrived. That moment will be a bowl game for the football team or when men’s basketball returns to the NCCA tournament.

He thinks Bennett’s Mustangs may be very close to reaching a bowl and, with the right coaching hire, an NCAA tournament bid may not be too far off men’s basketball. “I still think this is a really good area to recruit in both football and basketball,” Copeland said.

As with most everything, there must be priorities in a college sports program. After AD stints at William and Mary, Utah, Virginia, and SMU, Copeland has his down pat.

“The first thing you’ve got to do is run the program right,” he said. “And the second thing you’ve got to go is graduate your kids. And then, we’re going to worry about winning.”

“[But] winning is important,” Copeland said. “Don’t get me wrong.”

In retirement, he and his wife, Susan, are looking forward to returning to Charlottesville, Virginia to spend more time with family, including five grandchildren.

“Just being around family is going to be important,” he said.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t think I’m going to have another real job. I may end up teaching at the University [of Virginia] or consulting for athletics programs. But I’m in no hurry to rush into any of that.”

His recent surgery to remove a kidney went well, he said, and he’s cancer-free, requiring no radiation or chemotherapy.

Copeland plans to make time for his favorite hobby, photography, and play a little golf. Fall trips to the beach and attending football games at his alma mater, Virginia, are also on the agenda. (Copeland was a three-year starting offensive lineman for the Cavaliers before playing for the Cleveland Browns from 1967-74.)

Will he still keep an eye on SMU? “Oh, sure,” Copeland said. “I’ve really grown fond … [of] this place and the people here. I feel like I have a stake in it. So, we’ll watch the scores every weekend.”

“And I’ll be back for that bowl game.”

[Insane_Pony_Posse]

Rest in peace Big Jim.

[peruna81]

prayers and comforting grace from God's hand for his family.

[SMU89]

RIP

From DMN

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... e86a3.html

[BUS]

Love you Jim. Say hi to Jay.

[ponyte]

My condolences to the family. I very much appreciate Jim and his efforts.

[Insane_Pony_Posse]

RIPFrom DMN
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... e86a3.html

We gotta rank right up there with a few of the most whacked out fans.
Some half-wit wrote a comment below the Dallas Morning News article
about Jim about how he "wouldn't answer my e-mails". Can't even give
the man and his family a break in death. I am telling you some of our fans
have no shame and really need their [deleted] beat.

[Eddie P]

Prayers for Jim and his family. He worked very hard under the enormous contraints this school put on itself through his tenure. There's a saying in commercial real estate that you always want to be the second broker on an assignment because the first one gets to deal with all the unrealistic expectations and nonsense. When they don't perform, they get canned. The second broker pops in and has a better time because the client realizes how unrealistic their expectations were and have modified them to something more reasonable. Now certainly, that is not a direct analogy to the SMU siutation, but its pretty darn close.

RIP Jim.

[SMU89]

RIPFrom DMN
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... e86a3.html

We gotta rank right up there with a few of the most whacked out fans.
Some half-wit wrote a comment below the Dallas Morning News article
about Jim about how he "wouldn't answer my e-mails". Can't even give
the man and his family a break in death. I am telling you some of our fans
have no shame and really need their [deleted] beat.

Probably b/c his emails had as much thought as his post.