Vision and transformation in Lyke's first 13 months

ALSO FROM HEATHER LYKE: On the culture and a major change at the Petersen Events Center | On facilities, Heinz Field, Penn State, college hoops and more

When Pitt Athletic Director Heather Lyke speaks about the department she administrates, two concepts repeatedly show up:

Vision and transformation.

Colloquially, she is perpetually looking for things that can be improved.

Lyke counts former Ohio State athletic director Andy Geiger as one of her mentors and one of the people who made her the administrator she is today. His philosophy guides and informs Lyke’s professional approach, and one nugget he shared with Lyke early in her career has influenced her since she became Pitt’s Athletic Director last spring.

“He always used to say, ‘You don’t walk into a job with a golden baton,’” Lyke said to a group of reporters on Wednesday morning in the Petersen Events Center.

And so it was that Lyke arrived in Pittsburgh last March with her eyes wide open, looking for ways to take the proverbial baton she had been handed (indirectly) by Scott Barnes and get it a little closer to golden.

The first step was addressing the individual athletics programs, but before she could begin that process, Lyke needed to make an immediate hire for the wrestling program; Jason Peters had been fired two months before she arrived, so she inherited a program that needed a head coach right away. And within a month of her formal start, Lyke saw two coaches - Debbie Yohman in gymnastics and Julian Krug in diving - retire, giving her three hires to make in a relatively short amount of time.

Last November, Lyke initiated her first coaching change at Pitt by firing women’s soccer coach Greg Miller, and she tripled the number of firings in March when she axed basketball coaches Kevin Stallings and Suzie McConnell-Serio.

In roughly 13 months on the job, Lyke has hired head coaches in six of Pitt’s 19 sports. The personnel side of “transformation” has been more or less addressed, but the larger process of transformation has more than one side.

“Once you have the right people and everybody understands the expectations and they understand the belief system and they know what we’re trying to build,” she said Wednesday, “then we kind of shift focus to, how do we help them - provide them with the necessary tools and resources and facilities to have success in the ACC and nationally? That is what we can and want to do here.”

There’s a key word in there:

Facilities.

And if the transformation on the personnel level drew a great deal of attention - particularly in men’s basketball - the next moves will be considerably bigger. Lyke said Wednesday that the Athletic Department is looking at various ways of repurposing the land that currently holds the Fitzgerald Field House, Trees Hall and the OC parking lot.

Repurposing the land - not the buildings. And while the wrecking balls haven’t been positioned outside the Field House just yet, Lyke and company are already looking at what can be in those spaces.

“It’s all about vision,” Lyke said. “You have to have - you have to see things differently. So right now, we know the OC Lot is parking, right? Well, what if it wasn’t? We know where the Field House is right now, but what if it wasn’t a Field House? How would it look and feel differently?”

What it could do, in Lyke’s view, is better serve the student-athletes who compete and train there. 16 of Pitt’s 19 varsity athletic programs use that area of upper campus as a home base, a center for training and competition. And so transformation of the area “up on the hill,” as Lyke calls it, is now the centerpiece of Pitt’s facility master plan, which has been given the moniker “Victory Heights.”

“Victory Heights is about rethinking about the space really where the Field House is, where Trees Hall is, where the OC Lot is and what can you actually put in that space?” Lyke said. “84% of our student-athletes work out every day in a strength and conditioning room that is not air-conditioned. Probably not the best situation, and yet we get unbelievable recruits and we won an ACC championship in volleyball. You can’t use it as an excuse and we get talented kids here, but I just think how much better of an experience, how much better a position we can put them in for success if we had some of these facilities.”

Among the goals for the project: a 3,000-seat arena for volleyball, wrestling and gymnastics; an indoor track; a brand new strength and conditioning facility; a facility for performance research; and dedicated facilities for sports medicine, nutrition and sport psychology.

“The goals are really to transform the student-athlete experience here at Pitt, to show a demonstrated commitment to comprehensive excellence from a facilities standpoint,” Lyke said. “And that needs to happen.”

The Victory Heights project will, of course, cost money and likely a lot of it. Fundraising will be a significant element in the project; Deputy Athletic Director Christian Spears said the process is in a “silent phase” of recruiting potential donors, although he said the possibility exists that the project could be expanded to include retail establishments, restaurants and/or residences.

The “vision and transformation” will show up on the North Shore, too. Lyke doesn’t intend to build an on-campus stadium, but she believes she can improve the experience at Heinz Field. Her department has already spread the students from a set of vertically-stacked sections in the corner of the north end zone into one wide swath that encompasses the entire end zone. She hopes that creating a more connected band of students will increase the engagement for that section and the stadium as a whole.

Lyke said there will be other new features at Heinz Field this fall as the Athletic Department attempts to “create some traditions.” And throughout the implementation of those additions, Lyke will observe them, consider them and, as she has done since she arrived 13 months ago, make the necessary changes.

“It’s hard for me to go to an event and be like, ‘Okay, everything here was perfect today.’ You always can evaluate and say, ‘What can we do better?’”