Weaver stepping down at VT...

[cityofRaven 2,443]

Good Riddance I say. Does this open up for Beamer to step down as Head Coach and move in the AD spot?

[bhs7695 185]

Beamer's timetable just got more interesting, but no way I believe Beamer will be the next AD.

[bhs7695 185]

I didn't think Weaver would be able to last much longer

[bluefieldRocks 14]

What's his health condition that's making him step down?

[Deleted Account 5,203]

What's his health condition that's making him step down?

 

Parkinson's.

 

I'm shocked he lasted this long.  It's just a shame what this disease will do to people.  He's faced it with strength and dignity.  Unfortunately, the body's weaker than the soul.

 

It will be interesting to see his replacement.  I'd be shocked if it were Beamer.

[GMan 3,569]

Parkinson's disease plus I heard he needs hip replacements.  You could tell he was going down hill by just listening to him talk.  He was getting so bad that he had to record his part of the Hokie Hotline for the last few weeks instead of being there and doing it live.

 

No way Beamer will ever be AD.  New AD will come from somewhere else and may or may not have VT connections.  Sharon McCloskey will be the acting AD (a job she's had for a while, although that has never been made public) until a new hire is made.

[Deleted Account 5,203]

Parkinson's disease plus I heard he needs hip replacements.  You could tell he was going down hill by just listening to him talk.  He was getting so bad that he had to record his part of the Hokie Hotline for the last few weeks instead of being there and doing it live.

 

No way Beamer will ever be AD.  New AD will come from somewhere else and may or may not have VT connections.  Sharon McCloskey will be the acting AD (a job she's had for a while, although that has never been made public) until a new hire is made.

 

I would give you naming rights to my remaining children if you'd hire Jon Oliver as your new AD.

[legend11 32]

Good Riddance I say. Does this open up for Beamer to step down as Head Coach and move in the AD spot?

I read your "good riddance" as a sign that you didn't like what Weaver did during his time as AD.  Is that true? 

 

And there is little to no chance Beamer takes the AD position.  As GMan said, they will probably hire from outside of VT circles.  My guess is that they'll also wait until we have a new school president as well.  

[bhs7695 185]

Parkinson's disease plus I heard he needs hip replacements.  You could tell he was going down hill by just listening to him talk.  He was getting so bad that he had to record his part of the Hokie Hotline for the last few weeks instead of being there and doing it live.

 

No way Beamer will ever be AD.  New AD will come from somewhere else and may or may not have VT connections.  Sharon McCloskey will be the acting AD (a job she's had for a while, although that has never been made public) until a new hire is made.

Don't forget the multiple back surgeries he's had.  A tribute to his playing days at Penn State.

[GMan 3,569]

I read your "good riddance" as a sign that you didn't like what Weaver did during his time as AD.  Is that true? 

 

 

He may have good business sense but he was an absolute dick when my wife and I met him several years ago.  Acted like it hurt him to even say hello/acknowledge us.  He made us feel like we didn't matter, even though we have been Golden Hokies since 1998...don't guess our pockets were deep enough for him to waste his time with us since we didn't drop five figure plus donations in his pocket...

[legend11 32]

He may have good business sense but he was an absolute dick when my wife and I met him several years ago.  Acted like it hurt him to even say hello/acknowledge us.  He made us feel like we didn't matter, even though we have been Golden Hokies since 1998...don't guess our pockets were deep enough for him to waste his time with us since we didn't drop five figure plus donations in his pocket...

Well, sorry to hear that.  I ran into him once as a student about 3-4 years after his diagnosis (2008/2009 or so) and he was perfectly pleasant to my friends and me.  Guess you caught him on a bad day... or I caught him on a good one.  

 

But that doesn't change the fact that during his tenure, he's made VT sports much better than when he started.  Our football team is perennially competitive, we've upgraded all of our sports facilities, and we're nationally relevant as an athletic program.  I'm not so obtuse to suggest that no one else could have done what Weaver did, but he has done nothing but build successful programs on top of what he had already built.  

 

Yes noon games are annoying, and yes I want Stick It In back, but at the end of the day, VT is much better because Jim Weaver was there.   

[BHS03 99]

He may have good business sense but he was an absolute dick when my wife and I met him several years ago.  Acted like it hurt him to even say hello/acknowledge us.  He made us feel like we didn't matter, even though we have been Golden Hokies since 1998...don't guess our pockets were deep enough for him to waste his time with us since we didn't drop five figure plus donations in his pocket...

Alot of people in those positions seem like dicks. Oliver Luck is the definition of a dick in the way he handles his business. He is pretty good with fans though which surprises me.

[GMan 3,569]

Well, sorry to hear that.  I ran into him once as a student about 3-4 years after his diagnosis (2008/2009 or so) and he was perfectly pleasant to my friends and me.  Guess you caught him on a bad day... or I caught him on a good one.

 

Nope, I caught him on a day when there was more $$$$$ floating around than what I have...

[GMan 3,569]

Will Stewart said it best in his article on TSL...this is paid material and I apologize to Will for stealing and posting it here....

 

 

Personal reflections on Jim Weaver’s retirement

Will Stewart, TechSideline.com, on November 13, 2013

 

 

What you’re about to read will be different than anything else you’ll read about Jim Weaver’s retirement announcement. I’ll warn you ahead of time that you may not like some of it. But I promise you that it will be blunt, honest and personal.

 

In the end, Jim Weaver’s long career at Virginia Tech is ending quickly. We all know that his health has been eroding since the early 2000s, when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, a fact that he announced publicly in 2006.

 

But I always thought that when the end came, it would be an announcement that Mr. Weaver was retiring at the end of an academic year, months in the future, or perhaps at the end of the next calendar year. A good source told me a few months back that a contract buyout was in the works, and I figured it would extend through the end of this academic year (May/June 2014), maybe even all the way through the end of 2014.

 

But instead, we find that it’s going to be soon: the end of December 2013.

 

Before I continue, let me preface the rest of this column by saying that I have a different perspective on Jim Weaver than perhaps anyone else, certainly different from the large majority of what you’ll read in the wake of this announcement. To be completely honest, for a time there, I disliked him intensely.

 

Many of you know that for 13 years it was Jim Weaver and (within the VT athletic department) only Jim Weaver who refused to grant media access to TechSideline.com. We started operating as media — as best we could — when I quit my “day job” and started working on the site full time in August of 1999. We requested media access for the first time that fall, and for the first time, Virginia Tech, in the person of Jim Weaver, refused to grant us media access. We attempted to argue logic with him, but it was a no-go; as an old-school guy, he simply hated the Internet, specifically anonymous message boards like what we had.

 

For the next twelve years, I typed up a letter each fall requesting media credentials, photo credentials and interview access for the coming academic year. Every year, Virginia Tech politely sent back a letter saying “no.” I pictured Sports Information Director Dave Smith receiving my letter each year, walking down the hall, asking Mr. Weaver, “Any change?” and Mr. Weaver looking up from his desk to briefly say “no” before returning to his work.

 

There were a couple of times in the late 1990s where Mr. Weaver didn’t just rebuff our attempts to gain media access; he also actively took steps to limit our operations and damage our business. He once used his influence as AD to bump me from weekly appearances on a local radio sports talk show, and he personally appeared in my place, instead. Roanoke Times columnist Jack Bogaczyk once emailed me that Weaver had boasted that he was “going to put Hokie Central out of business.” (I don’t remember the context; I just remember Jack passing that anecdote along to me via email.) And I suspect he had a pretty active hand in Virginia Tech’s push to get us to stop using the domain name HokieCentral.com in the early 2000s, though I’ve never been able to get anyone at Virginia Tech to acknowledge that, beyond winking and nodding. There were other things, over time, that I won’t get into or simply don’t recall anymore.

 

So there’s no love lost between me and Jim Weaver. I had things I was trying to accomplish, and he actively and passively blocked our efforts for years. Regarding the issue of media access, it got to the point where Virginia Tech’s refusal to grant media access to any online entity at all (not just us) was openly derided, at least by those who pay attention to those things. Virginia Tech was the last holdout among major Division 1A schools, and finally caved in the Fall of 2012. Why? It depends upon whom you listen to, but one person told me it was because Rivals.com, in the person of owner Yahoo! Sports, was going to sue. Others closer to Weaver say “it was just time.”

 

I tell you all this not because I have an axe to grind, but to point out that my perspective is different from most. It’s actually the perspective of a former adversary who doesn’t know Jim personally at all.

 

In the coming days and weeks, you’ll read many reflections on Jim’s tenure as AD, or as he prefers it to be said “Director of Athletics.” Many will be glowing and complimentary, and they should be. He has accomplished some great things here. Those who know him professionally respect him. A friend of mine who works in the athletic department likes working for Jim, because (a) “he has an open door policy and is very accessible” and (b) “you always know where you stand with him.” A lot of people who work in the Virginia Tech athletic department have worked there for a long time, and that tells you that regardless of what you think about Jim Weaver’s public persona, he must generally be a good person to work for and with. They also tell you he’s got a good sense of humor, something we don’t see publicly.

 

It’s a shame that his career is ending in illness and poor health. But it’s worth noting that because of that, there will be a tendency to not give a blunt, honest accounting of his tenure at VT, because it’s poor form to say anything negative about a person whose health is failing.

 

I don’t have any such encumbrances, because the last time I spoke to the man face to face was in the last century. I don’t even remember when I last saw him person. And as I detailed above, our business dealings were adversarial in nature. Always. I have very much the outside perspective on Jim Weaver, and our history colors the way I view him … but probably less so than you would think. I’m still able to respect and acknowledge the good things he has done.

 

Having said all that, here’s how I view Jim Weaver’s tenure and legacy.

 

You might think it’s difficult to sum up Jim Weaver and his time at Virginia Tech, but for me, it’s easy. And I’ll even quote Jim Weaver himself, who said when he hired James Johnson to be head basketball coach, “I believe you hire the right person at the moment in time.”

 

He said a version of the same thing when he promoted Pat Mason to replace Pete Hughes last June: “… Pat Mason was the right person for the job at this time.”

 

I think you can sum up Jim Weaver’s tenure at Virginia Tech the same way: he was the right person for the job at the time.

 

That “time” was the summer of 1997, when athletic director Dave Braine left Virginia Tech to take the same position at Georgia Tech, for twice the salary. Dave had turned the VT athletic department around from a financial mess with the two major programs on probation into a financially stable department with a football program in a major conference: the Big East.

 

In June of 1997, I wrote an article called Portrait of the Next Virginia Tech AD which wasn’t bad, in retrospect. I correctly wrote that the number one priority was for Virginia Tech to get into an all-sports conference. (The Hokie football team was in the Big East, but almost all other VT sports programs were in the Atlantic 10.) I felt that hiring an AD that could get the Hokies into a conference like the SEC, Big East, or even the long-shot ACC, was Job One.

 

However, I did not correctly envision the importance of facilities improvements. I seemed to think that with the building of the Merryman Center underway and other facilities that Dave Braine had initiated or upgraded, the brick-and-mortar part of the job was taken care of. Facilities upgrades were a priority that I didn’t fully grasp.

 

It turns out that Jim Weaver was the right person to accomplish both jobs at Virginia Tech: conference membership and facilities upgrades.

 

Don’t misinterpret me: Jim Weaver did not “get Virginia Tech into the ACC.” The machinations that accomplished that were well above his pay grade. But once those machinations were underway, and the ACC powers that be were forced to look at Virginia Tech, they found an athletic department that was well run, was operating in the black, had good facilities (with plans to upgrade) and was committed to academics at a much higher level than they expected. It took a lot of political maneuvering to get the ACC to look at Virginia Tech, but once they looked, they found a peer institution and had no objections to extending an offer of membership. Credit for that goes to Jim Weaver.

 

When he started the job in September of 1997, no one said to Jim Weaver, “Get the department ready for ACC membership seven years from now,” but he did it anyway, because it was in his nature. It was how he did business. Others might have plunged the department deep into debt as part of an aggressive growth plan (cough-Maryland-cough-Tennessee-cough), but that isn’t Weaver’s style.

 

Someone told me at the time that Weaver aggressively invested in academic support early in his career at Tech, an expenditure that no one sees from the outside, but which improves the quality of an athletic department to those who know how to properly evaluate such an operation. For his tendency to balance the books, stay out of debt, and improve academics, Weaver was definitely the right person for the job at that point in time. When ACC membership was offered, Virginia Tech was ready for it.

 

As for facilities, I don’t need to talk much about that. You know about his track record there. One thing Dave Braine said when I interviewed him in the summer of 2012 that really stuck with me was this:

 

You know, I don’t think I could have done what Jim Weaver has done here … I look at that stadium, and I look at some of the changes that have been made around here with facilities and everything, and I don’t know whether I would have had the vision to do that, or whether I would have had the fire to do all that.

 

Virginia Tech needed so much work on facilities when Jim Weaver arrived in 1997, way beyond the “finishing off the Merryman Center” task that I thought was the only thing necessary. Weaver came in and made sweeping facilities upgrades across the board that were beyond the imagination of people like me back then, and he did it without plunging the department irresponsibly into debt, and without putting the department’s finances into the red. Jim Weaver was the right person at the time for that job, too.

 

But he’s no longer the right person for the job that needs to be done now.

 

Virginia Tech athletics badly needs a person of energy and vision to re-ignite a fan base that, like many around the country, is pulling back from its athletics programs. Football season ticket sales are falling, actual attendance is falling, the basketball programs are struggling, and donations are taking a downward turn.

 

Jim Weaver had great vision to do the things he accomplished in 16 years, but I don’t think he had the vision, and he certainly didn’t have the health or energy, to do what’s needed next. He manages the books and builds facilities; he doesn’t inspire the masses. And inspiration is what Virginia Tech requires now.

 

There’s nothing wrong with that. He was the right person for the job in 1997. He is not the right person anymore. It happens to all of us, whether our health is failing or not, whether we’re approaching retirement or not. Eventually, we’re no longer a good fit, and the irony is, the better we are at our job, the quicker things advance to the point where we’re no longer a good fit for that job. Not in all cases, mind you, but a lot. We build things, and they outgrow us. That’s a sign of a job well done, not of failure.

 

So it’s time. Jim Weaver’s failing health has forced his hand, but the timing is right. And I say that not with the satisfaction of a person seeing a former adversary exit the arena, because I don’t feel that way. I simply feel, despite the disdain I once had for the man, that he has done an excellent job setting the table. Now it’s time for Virginia Tech to find the next person … to find the right person at this time.

[bhs7695 185]

I've had good and bad experiences with Jim over the years.  Mostly I never cared for his ego that showed at times and I never cared for his name/presence always being there on the pre-game for football radio broadcasts, post-game broadcast credits (and a special thanks to Tech Director of Athletics, Jim Weaver) and his own Tech Talk Live segment.  I thought it was extreme arrogance to have weekly appearances on both.  On the flip side, he always provided some good info on the TTL segment which you probably don't have out of weekly show with other schools that I'm aware of when it's just the coaches.  I don't believe Ollie Luck is on the WVU coaches show.  With Jim's controlling nature over info relating to the VT athletic department, I also hated the fact he seemed to be so against the internet and those sites that wanted to cover VT athletics while most everyone else didn't seem to have a problem with the internet..  I remember being at a function with Jim and someone coming up to him calling him "Dream Weaver" a reference that Will made about Jim in some of his past columns when it was still HokieCental.  Jim immediately fired back:  "You better not have got that from HokieCentral!"

 

There are some things the man did well, and some things he didn't.  Overall I wish him a happy and healthy retirement and I'm excited to see who the next VT AD will be to help guide the Hokies towards the next step into the future.

[legend11 32]

It's understandable where Will is coming from, and I am by no means suggesting that Weaver is stepping down from the position too early.  But there's been weird backlash from VT faithful to keep reminding us that we aren't supposed to like this guy.  At the end of the day, his tenure's eulogy should be overwhelmingly positive considering where VT athletics came from and where they are now.