It was something of a surprise, although maybe it shouldn’t have been, with this week’s announcement that NKU’s VP/Director of Athletics Christina Roybal would be moving on after three short years in Highland Heights to “explore other opportunities.”
Not that it ever seemed a great fit with the Californian Roybal, out of St. Mary’s by way of Northern Iowa, in her first job running an entire athletic department in a place far away from her limited experience.
Maybe we should have picked up on what Darrin Horn, NKU’s head basketball coach the last seven years and highly respected in his profession after stops at Western Kentucky and the University of Texas, had to say last week.
Talking about NKU’s Horizon Conference and NKU’s place in it now that NIL money and pay for players is a factor, Horn noted that once upon a time, the NKU basketball job was easily 1-2 in the league, clearly a prime place to be. No longer, Horn said, noting how four or five other programs in the league had improved their support levels to where NKU, which hasn’t won a Horizon title since 2023, is no longer out front.
Now this was coming from Horn, who had in my four years covering the program, nothing but the highest praise for the support he’s been given.
But there are other issues. As someone who was there when NKU started athletics with the basketball program that actually got its start between two of my high school classes at Covington Catholic with me offering to do whatever it took (sports information director, trainer, recruiter, ticket-seller, fundraiser) to help first coach and AD Mote Hils get things going, the nature of the program has changed.
Some of it good, some of it not so. Like so much of NKU, it has much less of a Northern Kentucky feel about it now. Not much institutional memory these days from folks who almost all seem to be from somewhere else, as if it’s almost a requirement.
In those early years, the thought was to build as much local support as possible for the new college. We played games before Regents Hall came online at almost every local high school whose gym we could borrow. Mostly ones where our players came from. With the Norse Club and Ed Pendery, we raised money to get NKU its first dorm — of sorts — the house for athletes on John’s Hill Road.
No way NKU could do much of that today. Mid-major basketball is in a tough place to populate with so many instantly eligible transfers and international players and some NIL money, it’s hard to build locally for NKU.
Say a player comes along with the talent to win for NKU, like Miami of Ohio point guard Evan Ipsaro out of Covington Catholic, or South Carolina’s EJ Walker from Lloyd. NKU can’t get those guys. Probably can’t even talk to them.
But then for others, like Illinois-Chicago’s 6-foot-6 guard Andy Johnson out of Cooper, who averaged 11.4 points a game as a freshman and 15.5 against Horizon League teams, why is he not at NKU? The same for a Jacob Meyer, the nation’s high school scoring leader at Holy Cross, who has averaged in double figures at Coastal Carolina, DePaul and UAB in his three college years. It’s a question out there for Northern Kentucky basketball fans.
This past season, the lone Northern Kentucky high school alum on the NKU roster played a total of seven minutes in four games. A quick look at the NKU roster this season shows that there were as many players from Perth, Australia; Hamilton, New Zealand; Antavaro, Madasgar; or Begijar, Spain, as from Northern Kentucky. Or from Hartford, Ct.; Salt Lake City or Charlotte, N.C.
There were as many players from Wisconsin as from Kentucky. And with all five top scorers either grad students or seniors, there will be an almost entirely new on-court roster for NKU fans to root for next season.
Maybe it’s one of the factors in NKU’s attendance dropping from an average 3,270 (with a Cincinnati home game) in 2023-24 to 2,822 last year to 2099 this season despite Roybal’s department “winning multiple (national) marketing awards” over that time, as noted in the NKU press release announcing her resignation.
In checking with the latest USA TODAY compilation of major college athletics and revenues, NKU was credited with raising $242,279 in ticket sales for a budget of $16,529,511 in expenditures in 2024. The rest was made up with some 82.14 percent in institutional funds and student fees, just out of the bottom 25 among the 232 schools charted.
Maybe it’s just the general sense that when you see a Horizon League promotional video that features schools in “Green Bay . . . Cleveland . . . Detroit . . . Chicago . . . Indianapolis,” when it gets to NKU, the video references “Greater Cincinnati.”
Maybe it’s realizing that in their recent campaign to increase ticket revenue by doubling many of the sideline seat costs, NKU lost many of the former players who were longtime holders of those seats in the process and you no longer see them at games.
Just recently, that original team got together at Jeff Ruby’s in Cincinnati as some 50 NKU’ers were guests of one of the players on those first Norse teams, Bob Griffin, and his wife, Carol, a cheerleader. Sadly, it must be noted, not a single current NKU staffer was there.
Or maybe it’s the way that 9,400-seat Truist Arena seems a better home now even with the six end zone sections for students closed down after a safety issue and problems getting the parts needed for repairs to re-open them. Although it’s not an emergency, just something of an eyesore. Often there were fewer than 100 students in place at tipoff where a couple thousand could sit.
Now there’s just a large black curtain walling the sections off serving as a backdrop for the bar that previously had been at the other end of the court. Not sure if there was another place in the country where you could get a drink at a stand-up bar just 20 feet behind the court while you might get run over by a player chasing down a loose ball.
And in order to accommodate the bar, they had to move the media seats behind the basket to tables without lighting on the concourse the past two years.
These kinds of issues take away from the addition of six sports during Roybal’s tenure and championships in lower-profile sports where there is less attention. But even in baseball, the roster – with just two of 36 players from Northern Kentucky – is mostly from somewhere else including 12 states and Saskachewan, Can., where the two Norse from the North Country equal the two from Northern Kentucky. In a sign of where college sports is going, 22 are transfers.
There are eight baseball players from Ohio, six from California, thee each from Indiana and Wisconsin, two each from Florida and Arizona and one each from South Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Illinois, Washington and Hawai’i.
NKU’s announcement talked about what comes next in the “expedited search” search for a new VP/AD under the leadership of VP Chris Calvert, and “with the support of the NKU Foundation, NKU plans to engage a search firm with expertise in recruiting athletics leadership.”
But one can only hope there will be some “expertise,” as well, in Northern Kentucky, the area for which NKU is the lone regional public institution of higher learning. But one with a history of going outside the region in its hiring.
Might be the time to remind those at NKU how the greatest hires after Hils’ early founding tenure began with the man who was here from the beginning with policies well ahead of the times, Dr. James Claypool, a Beechwood High alum. Then came men’s basketball coach Ken Shields; women’s basketball coach Nancy Winstel, baseball coach Bill Aker and AD Jane Meier.
Hall of Famers all: Shields and Aker both from Covington, Winstel from Newport, Meier a Villa Madonna Academy alum.
Seems to be a pattern here. And we always wished NKU could have figured out a way to hire Stan Steidel along the way. The former Dayton High athlete and coach and Dayton and Holmes AD was an innovative, competitive and smart sports administrator who came up with the concept of the All “A” Classic competition, preserving Kentucky’s one-class Sweet 16 while making it possible for small schools to win state championships. And raising millions of dollars in scholarship money for small school athletes along the way.
But Stan was a local, a coach and AD with extensive Northern Kentucky ties and support and an ability to put together coalitions of the like-minded, something that will be extremely important in NKU’s ability to compete and thrive in this changing and somewhat chaotic world of college sports right now.
Maybe that wasn’t an asset then for an NKU that seemed to want to downplay the “Northern Kentucky” in its name – and its hiring. Just a thought: If there’s no Northern Kentuckian for NKU in this AD search, the person named better be able to become one — and really want to become one — in a hurry.
This hire is a really big deal for NKU. Nothing is more public facing for an institution than its athletic program, like it or not. And NKU cannot afford to get this one wrong.
Contact Dan Weber at dweber3440@aol.com. Follow him on X @dweber3440.