Xavier Nation Magazine Feature: Begin With The End In Mind

Hiring Pete Gillen as coach was a huge step in the ascent of Xavier basketball, and so was hiring Skip Prosser to replace him.

Moving XU's home games to the Cincinnati Gardens was a significant step in the process toward prominence; so was leaving the Gardens to come back to campus to play in a glorious new Cintas Center.

Playing BIG EAST basketball? It wouldn't have happened if nobody had first helped position Xavier to join and thrive in the Atlantic 10.

It's been said that success has many fathers. A great many have had a hand in the success of Xavier athletics, particularly men's basketball. But don't overlook the contributions of former athletic director Jeff Fogelson, who died in February at age 71. "He's sort of an unsung hero in the story of the development of Xavier basketball," Gillen says. "He was very shrewd. He didn't get rattled and he always looked at the big picture."

Fogelson, Xavier's athletic director from 1984 to 1998, passed away as the Musketeers were amid a remarkable season that included their first BIG EAST men's basketball championship and first No. 1 NCAA Tournament seed in program history.

When Fogelson arrived on campus in 1983—as assistant athletic director, to take some of the administrative load off basketball coach Bob Staak, who at the time also served as AD—those kinds of achievements seemed unfathomable. Xavier's basketball homes had been aging Schmidt Fieldhouse and the low-profile Midwestern City (later Midwestern Collegiate) Conference.

By 1984, with Fogelson as full-time AD, XU moved its MCC home games to the Gardens. The move paid immediate dividends when XU hosted and won two National Invitation Tournament games, including an overtime win over Ohio State.

"Jeff Fogelson oversaw that move," says Andy MacWilliams, former Xavier play-by-play broadcaster and WLW-AM sports director. "And those NIT games were watershed games."
MacWilliams said Fogelson helped XU secure its first substantial local TV contract and entrench the Musketeers on 50,000-watt WLW-AM, its radio home to this day. "Perception is reality, and Xavier really expanded its footprint," MacWilliams says.

Xavier's momentum could have stopped in its tracks when Staak left for Wake Forest. But Fogelson hired Gillen, a Notre Dame assistant who in nine seasons would take Xavier to seven NCAA Tournaments and leave with the school record for coaching wins (since supplanted by Chris Mack).
"Jeff was a good man, always honest, always a straight shooter," says Gillen, now a TV analyst for CBS Sports Network. "You might not always like what he said, but he'd give it to you from the hip. I appreciated his candor."

When Gillen moved on to Providence, Fogelson kept XU moving forward by hiring Prosser, a former XU assistant who had taken Loyola University Maryland from 2–25 to an NCAA Tournament in his only season as head coach. Prosser would lead the XU program into both the Atlantic 10 and Cintas Center.

From fund-raising to networking, scheduling to support, Fogelson checked many boxes while ruffling few feathers. "He was like a good basketball game official in that he made really good decisions and didn't make it about himself," MacWilliams said. "He wasn't out there looking for plaudits. He worked behind the scenes and he did his job well."

Less than a week before he died, Fogelson met Gillen and MacWilliams for breakfast. Gillen was in town to work the UC–Houston game, and the three met at a Frisch's near Northern Kentucky University.

"We had some fun," Gillen says. "He was upbeat. He didn't look robust, but he looked like he was OK. He was a great guy, and I miss him."

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