Q&A with UE Director of Athletics Dr. Kenneth ‘Ziggy’ Siegfried
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In May, Colorado Rockies Pitcher Kyle Freeland and his wife, Ashley, gave $3 million to the University of Evansville for a baseball clubhouse. The new facility, which will be located near German American Bank Field at Charles H. Braun Stadium, is expected to be finished in the summer of 2025.
The baseball clubhouse is part of UE’s strategic athletics plan called Pathway to Excellence. Dr. Kenneth “Ziggy” Siegfried, UE’s athletics director, unveiled the initiative last year with six primary goal areas. He spoke with Inside INdiana Business about the new facility and the strategic plan’s progress.
Tell me about the plans for the new baseball clubhouse.
For the Kyle and Ashley Freeland Clubhouse, the first step is we’re working to partner with a design company to do the construction drawings, and we are close to selecting those. Then we’ll start to work on where exactly the clubhouse is going to go. Right now, we believe that’s going to be down the first baseline.
The clubhouse will include a nice locker room and coaches’ offices. We’re looking at some lounge space and a few other things that will go inside the facility. We’re trying to determine if it’s going to be one level or two levels, but it’ll end up being about a $3 to $3.5 million project.
The new clubhouse falls under the facilities goal area of the strategic athletics plan unveiled last year. What other facility objectives have been met, and which projects are still in progress?
We also have a turf project through a partnership with intramurals on campus. It’s about a $1.2 million turf project next to the armory by the Lloyd Expressway. It will be done this month, and it’ll be for campus intramurals.
Then for men’s and women’s soccer practice, we also have a sports performance center that we’re beginning to see what phases we can start with that. That is for our athletic strength and conditioning area, which will move from the Arad McCutchan Stadium to what’s currently in the Carson Center. It’s basically us taking over a gym and doing a little more than a million dollars worth of work to repurpose that whole area so we have space to fit more student-athletes.
The softball turf project has been done now for a while. There are several others that we are raising money for, but the ones that are in progress right now are those that I mentioned.
What education objectives have been met, and which projects are still in progress?
That’s one of the areas we’ve done extremely well in. Our goal is to be the top in the Missouri Valley Conference when it comes to educating our student-athletes. This past year, which means the end of 2022-23, we broke our overall departmental GPA record at 3.492. This year, we followed it up extremely close to that with 3.44. So our GPA, the last two years, we’ve had our highest and second highest ever.
We’ve also implemented a life skills program to holistically develop our student-athletes with professional career development and several other things that are over and beyond the education they get in the classroom.
Our graduation success rate is in the top three of the Missouri Valley Conference right now. We had a 97% graduation success rate, which is an NCAA rate that they follow. We’ve done several initiatives to continue to enhance what’s called our academic progress rate, which is another NCAA threshold that you have to meet to show that you’re being successful in retaining and graduating student-athletes and keeping them eligible.
What competition objectives have been met, and which projects are still in progress?
We took a huge step forward this past year with baseball, making it for the first time to the NCAA Super Regionals. In our women’s golf program, we had an MVC champion, Kate Petrova, who won the MVC golf tournament. We had our first-ever volleyball MVC player of the year, Giulia Cardona. Men’s basketball tripled their win total from a year ago. Great progress there.
And mainly in baseball, but also one in volleyball, we had many individuals who earned All-American honors, which is not something that we’ve had a lot of in the past. It was a really good year, and we’re hoping to do even better coming up.
What campus and community engagement objectives have been met, and which projects are still in progress?
That’s the one that we probably have the most strategies and initiatives on. When it comes to our attendance numbers this year, specifically for men’s basketball, they skyrocketed. We also did 3,500 community service hours in our programs. We launched a Paint the Town Purple initiative. We did a lot of stuff around campus community engagement, but those are some top-level highlights.
What enrollment management objectives have been met, and which projects are still in progress?
We collaborated with enrollment management on campus and our coaches to put together a plan to make sure that we are contributing positively to our enrollment goals on campus.
When you look at student-athletes paying for tuition, housing, meals and stuff like that, we increased by a million dollars from the previous year. That’s an unheard-of number; we won’t be able to do that much increase probably ever again. But we put a structure in place that allowed us to do that because the majority of our student-athletes aren’t on scholarship, so they are paying for at least a portion of their tuition and other expenses.
What resource objectives have been met, and which projects are still in progress?
We put a huge emphasis on our ticket sales. It was right around $550,000 a few years ago. This year, we were at $900,000. We increased specifically for men’s basketball. If you look at a few years ago, we only generated $38,000 individual game tickets for men’s basketball. This year, we did $170,000. A lot of that was our team was winning, and we had some good marketing strategies.
We enhanced fundraising, both for unrestricted and restricted funds, including our Purple Aces Club, which supports a lot of different teams. We also worked closely with the campus to create a zero-based budget for athletics so we can make sure that we’re remaining within budget but also knowing where our valuable resources are being spent.
Part of the resources is also the money we raise for our facility projects. Part of the goal is to raise a specific number, which, I believe, we put down $5 million for facility upgrades. Just with the turf and baseball clubhouse alone, that’s $4.2 million generated for those projects. Even though one was not fundraised, we utilized other resources. It’s all part of the plan.
How are you measuring success regarding the Pathway to Excellence plan?
We have clear-cut strategies and initiatives for each goal area. We have timelines. We have metrics where we’re meeting on a monthly basis to see what goals we’ve accomplished and what goals we still need to accomplish. It is very much measured in one to two to three-year increments.
Then as we reach our goals, we’re also adding additional goals. To make it simple, in football terms, we’re trying to get first downs. We’re not necessarily trying to throw a bunch of touchdowns. Or I could say in baseball terms, singles instead of home runs.
We also have captains for each of the goal areas that have committees. That way, those captains are keeping people updated in our department about our progress. They have a coach on each committee, a student-athlete, a staff member and usually five to six people.
What do you hope to accomplish in the upcoming school year?
With education, I want to further enhance our life skills program. That will continue to be a priority for us. We created it this last year. Now I want to take it to the next level.
From a competition standpoint, we want to continue to be in growth mode. Some of the programs that maybe were not as successful, we want to see growth in those. For those that were successful, we want to see that they can follow that up with the same success or even better success.
With campus and community engagement, I’m hiring someone to oversee external relations. We’ve put that as a big part of what we’re going to do moving forward—increasing our attendance and increasing our ability to be out in the public facilities. We have to finish our sports performance center. It’s our top priority project. I fully expect that to be done sooner rather than later.
With enrollment management, we track how we’re contributing to our overall goals on campus, and we have a well-laid-out tracker for all of our programs as they relate to that. But, we also have some goals to make sure that we’re part of enhancing the overall brand of the university, which includes the athletics department.
We don’t believe that we contribute to enrollment with just the number of student-athletes we have. We also believe that part of our job is to be the front porch of the university, help drive people to know more about the University of Evansville and hopefully get more students.
Around resources, we’ve hired some fundraising staff that has done a great job this past year, but we want to continue to enhance dollars raised for operations and also facilities. And we want to continue to increase ticket sales.
We have exact strategies and initiatives for what we want to accomplish. One that’s important to share regarding competition is that we have sports that are resourced at different levels. A swimming and diving program may not receive the same level of resources as men’s and women’s basketball. We’ve created individualized plans for each sport to set those expectations.
It may not be realistic for our swimming and diving program to win the conference championship, but they can win individual championships right now. As we continue to do things to hopefully enhance the resources, they can work towards competing in the top half of the conference. We have those individualized plans so programs know expectations, and they were a part of building those expectations.