Maine's AD knows NU program well
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BY CURT McKEEVER / Lincoln Journal Star
Blake James got to take his daughter to her first day of kindergarten Wednesday, a moment that, under ordinary circumstances, he’d easily rank as the most prized of his week.
But as interim athletic director at Maine, he knows there’s another item on the calendar this weekend that will pack as much, if not more, of an emotional charge.
James, you see, is coming with the Black Bears’ football team to Lincoln, where from the fall of 1997 to the fall of ’98 he worked as a fund-raiser in the Huskers’ athletic department.
“I got to experience Tom Osborne’s final year and the first season of Frank Solich,” James said Wednesday from Orono, Maine. “Wow! It was an incredible environment.”
The memory of that never left the man who took charge of scheduling Maine football games, either. And so when the Black Bears had a school pull out of an agreement to play this season, James let his fingers do the walking, trying to entice a NCAA Division I-A school to put Maine on its schedule.
After another deal fell through, he eventually ended up speaking in December with Tim Cassidy, Nebraska’s associate athletic director for football. By coincidence, both schools had an open date on Sept. 3.
“I caught Nebraska on the right day. From that point, it moved pretty quickly,” said James, who sealed a $350,000 payout to his program for playing the Huskers.
“For us, it’s significant. It allows us to be successful at our level — (helping pay) for scholarships, travel budgets, salaries.”
Nebraska’s athletic department budget is $62.6 million. Maine, which fields a I-AA football team, has a budget of $11 million.
James, 36, has been in his current position for the last month. He was promoted after former Maine athletic director Patrick Nero accepted a position as commissioner of the America East Conference.
James had served as Maine’s senior associate athletic director for two years and oversaw marketing, ticketing, retail operations and athletic development, along with men’s and women’s track and field, cross country, men’s soccer, men’s basketball and baseball.
Previously, he worked in athletic development at Providence and in corporate sales and athletic development at Miami, Fla., with Nero.
At Nebraska, he worked under Jack Pierce, who was in charge of athletic development. James just missed crossing paths with NU’s current athletic director, Steve Pederson, who had left a position similar to the one now held by Cassidy, to become AD at Pittsburgh.
“One of the first few weeks I was (in Lincoln), Nebraska was facing Iowa State and it was a cold, rainy day. I think the score was something like 63-7 at halftime, but the place filled back up in the second half,” James recalled. “Somebody looked at me and said ‘What do you think the difference is between Nebraska and Miami?’ I said, ‘Look at the fans.’”
James estimated the Black Bears will have 400 to 500 fans in Memorial Stadium for Saturday’s game.
“Our little blue will probably be lost in the sea of red, but I’ll go out in the stands for a bit,” he said. “It’s such a great spectacle.”
James likes to refer to the Black Bears’ program as a miniature version of Nebraska.
Like NU, Maine is the only program in its state that fields Division I teams. There are no professional athletic teams. And even the state’s two populations are comparable: Maine has 1.2 million residents, while Nebraska has 1.7 million.
A game against the Huskers still seems somewhat surreal to James and coach Jack Cosgrove.
“I’m a guy who knows a lot about Nebraska’s history. I know as a kid growing up in the ’60s and ’70s (about) Johnny Rodgers and Jerry Tagge,” Cosgrove said. “The names could roll off my tongue, so for us to be able to go out and play at that school is really almost hard for me to comprehend.”
This will be Maine’s fourth game against a Division I-A opponent. Last year, the Black Bears got their first win against that level of opponent by knocking off Mississippi State.
Cosgrove knows part of Maine’s plan is to try and play a I-A opponent each season (Boston College is on next year’s schedule), but kidded he would’ve been smarter than James and not bothered checking with Nebraska.
“This is one where the football coach kind of said OK,” Cosgrove said. “The fact of the matter is we get to go and do something that we wouldn’t have normally been able to do, and try to test ourselves to the maximum amount of our levels and abilities.”
Added James, “I think people think it’s an incredible opportunity for us. To be able to go into a program like Nebraska’s — the tradition, 75,000-plus fans, the passion, the pageantry of game day — for our players and fans to experience that is special.”
Kind of like a first trip to kindergarten with your daughter.
Reach Curt McKeever at 473-7441 or cmckeever@journalstar.com.
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