K-StateOnline's Derek Young recently sat down with Kansas State athletic director Gene Taylor for an expansive interview that will run in three parts at KSO. The first part, below, runs today, followed by Part II on Wednesday and Part III on Friday.

DY: Are there any improvements to facilities on the docket? Do you plan to make any changes to anything football facility-wise? Anything you want to do personally?

GT: One of the things I have talked about is having a facility master plan. What’s next? Does it involve football? Obviously our most immediate thing is our baseball and soccer project we have been working on. We have been fundraising for that quietly before I got here. We will get a little more detail out about that publicly.

We want to take everything we have talked about and put it on a piece of paper and say ‘Is this everything? What’s next? What’s the priority? What’s missing?' It’s all piece mail right now, and a little uncomfortable for me because I want to get it all on one piece of paper and see what it looks like. I want to see what is realistic and what is not. Between our facility staff and senior staff and coaches, I want to bring someone in, like an architect, and have them walk through the planning process of that. What they do is sit down with our coaches and ask them what their wishes and desires are, where would they like to be, what’s missing, and if you had this, what would it look like?

It will probably take several months to put that together. Next spring we’ll have our strategic plan for facilities. Then we have to figure out how we are going to attack that. Then a price tag will be put on that collectively by each facility. Then we go out and figure out if we want to raise money for it, or if it’s just a dream, or a reality. Some will be realities, and some will be immediate. We have to work through it. That’s where I’m headed with that.

DY: You were involved in some improvements at Iowa, a major school. Does that help moving forward?

GT: I have been involved with facilities for a long time. It’s one of the first things I had to when I eventually got through the Naval Academy. I oversaw facilities and capital improvements. Then we did a lot of that at North Dakota State. Our biggest project that we did was the renovation of that arena. At Iowa, the north end zone project was a big project. I got on at the tail end of the new football facility project at Iowa.

I have a lot of experience with facility projects from the vision to actually making it a reality. Hopefully that will help. We have a lot of talented people that are way more talented than I am that do it on a daily basis now. But I kind of pull from all that to see what we have.

I talked to the coaches and they have talked about facilities. I’m like, ‘Whoa, okay, let’s get it all on paper and see where we are.’

DY: What is something fans will see from you? What will your influence be? What key things are you taking from the other jobs you’ve had?

GT: Less overt than people are expecting or seeing. I’m a little bit more of a 'sit back, watch and listen' kind of guy initially. That’s what I’ve been doing since I started. I literally visited with every staff member and with donors. I have more donors to see. I wanted to get all their thoughts on the programs, their desires, what they want us to do and the direction they want us to go. Generally, the message is to keep pushing forward, and the need to keep making sure our facilities are a priority and making new upgrades. That’s what our facility master plan comes from. We want to position ourselves to be in a position of strength for whatever may happen with the Big 12 down the road, if anything at all. There’s a desire to not sit on our hands and be OK with where we are. There’s a real desire to keep pushing forward and getting better. We have to figure out what we do to position ourselves to continue to compete for and win Big 12 Championships. All of our coaches want that. It’s about how we do that with budgets we have, facilities we have, and staff we have.

The other thing I want to focus on, and another message, and a really nice message, is we do more with less. That’s really a source of pride - that we are an efficient department. And that’s great. I don’t want to necessarily say that we’re going to go out and overstaff. But there are some departments that could use some more staffing, and if we don’t fix that, that there may be some stress points at some point in some departments. Some departments are fine. Some need additional staffing. We need to figure out which ones those are.

DY: Were there any immediate challenges?

GT: There was nothing major. I would say the biggest thing was the patience that I asked the staff to have because we had some leave before I got here, and when I got here, particularly on the development side. That’s a critical piece of our athletic department. We worked short on staff for a while. They’re finally getting up to speed. We’re finishing the hiring process to get them up to where they were before. That’s good because fundraising is a big piece of our budget. It doesn’t mean necessarily that is where they will stay.

All the notes I’ve taken and all the meetings I’ve had, I want to put it into a concise plan, by department, some of the priorities. I want to work together and come out with a strategic plan and say, ‘OK, this is where we are headed.' One is staffing, one is revenue generation. How do we find ways to push our revenue? How do we find ways to grow our Ahearn Fund? How do we find ways to grow our fundraising on an annual basis, not just for facilities?

DY: The transition from Iowa, the experience from Iowa - was there overlap and did those experiences aid you when you arrived here?

GT: I would say the North Dakota State role was smaller but similar to here. In terms of two land-grant states, very similar types of people between North Dakota State and here, there’s a lot of similarities between the North Dakota State fan base and the passion and desire to be successful like it is here. You can take western Kansas, and western North Dakota, and you could interchange them and it would be the exact same people, and the exact same industries. That has been fun for me.

The Iowa experience helped me understand the massive budget there is to deal with, and the high-profile coaches and really understanding the visibility of a 'Power Five’ program. The example I give is (former Iowa basketball player Adam Woodbury) poked a guy in the eye, and it was a seven-day story. I was like, 'Wow!' That was an eye-opener for me, and as I watched (Iowa athletic director) Gary Barta manage through that situation and how he managed those, that was good for me. I never experienced that at North Dakota State. Maybe our local paper picked it up. That was a real eye-opener for me to see Gary Barta manage through those tough situations. Again, how big was that? In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big, but someone liked to talk about it. Those experiences were very helpful. So was taking a step back from being an athletic director to a deputy athletic director. I was getting different perspective, from coaches, administrators, and I was not the final decision-maker. But I could sit down with Gary Barta and say, “Gary, this is what I think.’ It was great to see how he relied on us, and I was realizing that I can’t do it all by myself.

I think I was very fortunate to walk under a real experienced staff here that really gets it. That is why I didn’t bring a lot of people in from the outside - because there’s a lot of good people here. I just re-shuffled the deck, so to speak.

DY: Are Bill Snyder and Kirk Ferentz similar?

GT: There’s a lot of similarities between them. Obviously, Coach (Snyder) has been around a lot longer. Actually, Kirk (Ferentz) is longer because of continuity because of Coach’s break. There’s a lot of things we do here that obviously they got from Hayden Fry. There’s a lot of similarities in how they are structured and the types of kids they recruit. There’s a lot of similarities, no question.

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