By John Reagan
November 5, 2018



The following appeared at HoyaSaxa.com on November 5, 2018.

Francis X. Rienzo, the longest serving athletic director in Georgetown University history, and one of the co-founders of the Big East conference, died Saturday at the age of 85. In a 49 year record of service to Georgetown that stretched over disparate roles from coach to athletic director, from a dedicated volunteer to a trusted voice on the state of intercollegiate athletics, Rienzo was front and center leading the changes that fundamentally transformed athletics at Georgetown University and those whose lives were further enriched by it.

In his later years, Rienzo was often introduced at Georgetown athletic events as "the Godfather", a term of endearment but also a nod to the underlying respect with which the New York native was seen by the entire University community.

EARLY YEARS
Francis Xavier Rienzo may have left New York for Washington in 1969 but New York never left him. One of seven children raised in the Bayside neighborhood of Queens, he attended Sacred Heart Academy on 38 Ave. and was accepted to Xavier HS in Manhattan in 1947. A letterman in track and field, he graduated there in 1951.

In later years, few knew that Rienzo's collegiate years were spent not in athletics, but the seminary.

"I went directly to the Maryknoll seminary [after high school]," Rienzo said in a 2003 interview. "But I guess I wasn't listening to God close enough, so I left after five years."

The confluence of academics and athletics followed the young Rienzo in his first job after the seminary. In 1956, he was hired as a teacher at Bishop Loughlin HS in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. A month later, he was offered a part time job coaching track at St. Ann's Academy, a high school at 76 St and Lexington Ave in the upper east side of Manhattan. Rather than choose between the two, Rienzo took both jobs.

"I went from Bayside to Brooklyn to St. Ann's and back to Bayside," Rienzo said. "Long hours, but I enjoyed what I was doing."

A year later, the Marist order announced it would sell the St. Ann's campus and move to a new location in Briarwood, Queens. The school soon offered Rienzo a full time position as a English and Latin teacher. At the time, Rienzo was one of two lay faculty at the recently renamed Archbishop Molloy High School, the other being its physical education teacher, Lou Carnesecca.

Molloy became of the city's top track programs and Rienzo one of the city's top coaches, winning 13 CHSAA track titles in 13 years. He probably could have retired at Molloy but instead learned of an opening for a track coach at Georgetown University, which was beset by controversy around track coach Steve Benedek and the school's attempt to cancel the 1969 track season due to Benedek's battles with the administration.

"It was a touch decision to leave Molloy," Rienzo said. "One of the main reasons I left was that there was only coaching involved...doing both [coaching and teaching] became too tough."

Before long, coaching would be the least of Rienzo's duties.

ARRIVING AT GEORGETOWN
Frank Rienzo arrived in Washington in the fall of 1969, a tumultuous time for the school in many ways, but none moreso than in athletics. Sports had been deemphasized by the University for nearly two decades since dropping major college football in 1951. Three men's sports (baseball, basketball, and track) accounted for the majority of athletic spending, while numerous other programs existed as self-organized clubs with little oversight. Just three women's sports even existed, previously run out of the Nursing School and with minimal funding.

The retiring athletic director, Jack Hagerty, had been kept in check by the university administration and was given little authority to add or enhance sports. In his place was an energetic Bob Sigholtz, who quickly got into disputes with his own coaches.

By contrast, Rienzo stabilized the track program and rehabilitated its image. In a 1969 article, Rienzo told the HOYA that "I'm willing to work as long and as hard as necessary to make the program go. The key now is student interest. It will take a lot of manpower to make the program a success."

Success followed, and track at Georgetown flourished.

Three years later, athletics faced a firestorm. After a 3-23 season in the 1971-72 basketball season, head coach Jack Magee was gone, and Bob Sigholtz was right behind him in the exit line. With a need to stabilize the department, the 39 year old Rienzo was named interim director of athletics, and soon got the job as no one else stepped forward. There he met the new basketball coach, John Thompson, and things were about to change at Georgetown.

Rienzo needed to build a team around him. One of his early hires was Joe Lang, a 32 year old math teacher and coach who had run track at St. John's. Lang would teach and coach track at Georgetown, while later providing Rienzo valuable assistance in running the department. Other names would follow: Denis Kanach, Dave Partin, Patricia Thomas, Lorry Michel, Brian McGuire, Pat McArdle, Pan Fanaritis, Jim Gilroy, Jim Sullivan...the Georgetown athletic department soon saw people with 10, 20, or more years of service, growing as a family as its basketball team did the same. And when it came to athletics, what happened in the family stayed within the family. Rienzo expected loyalty and gave it back in return.

One of Rienzo's first additions to the athletic department was novel for its time: he introduced a statement known as the Georgetown Philosophy Of Athletics, which sought for the first time to place athletics in context at the University. Rienzo sought to define and distinguish sports at Georgetown across four distinct plateaus: intercollegiate, intramural, instructional, and recreational; Rienzo admitted that the last three barely existed at all at GU but needed definition for future growth. (Not included in this hierarchy: club sports, which Rienzo felt were more of a liability and not a viable area for the department to manage given its resources.)

The statement was circulated among University deans and department leaders in the summer of 1972 for their review and approval. Typical of the times, after six months no one had returned any comments whatsoever, and University president Robert Henle, S.J. approved it outright in January 1973.

The Philosophy of Athletics helped govern the department for the next three decades. The "national" sports of basketball and track were prioritized, but the creation of "regional" and "local" classifications helped set funding and program expectations when none existed before, and in doing so strengthened their potential for success.

THE "REC-PLEX"
One of Frank Rienzo's greatest achievements goes unnoticed by many.

If the Philosophy of Athletics introduced the campus to the concept of intramural, instructional, and recreational sports, it was prescient. The 1970's would see an explosion of interest in participatory sports in colleges nationwide, with more men (and now women) than ever on campuses like Georgetown. Interest in such activities was everywhere at Georgetown, but there was literally no place to put them. Scheduling midnight intramurals at McDonough was not the answer and the school had never created space for non-intercollegiate sports.

Plans for a recreational facility had been formally proposed as early as 1971 and went nowhere, largely due to three factors which have long been anathema to planning at Georgetown: 1) space, 2) cost, and 3) other priorities that always get ahead of athletics.

Seeing how recreational athletics could quickly overwhelm the day to day operations of the athletic department, Rienzo helped build interest in a massive 140,000 square feet recreational facility on the campus, which would be funded through a $30 per semester student fee and be built under Kehoe Field. The plan would repurpose the area above the center as a multipurpose field and open the land below it to host a running track, tennis courts, locker rooms, squash and racquetball courts, recreational space, and two swimming pools. It was the most ambitious athletic project in 30 years at Georgetown.

The concept won student support in 1976 and construction started the following year. When completed, the as-yet unnamed "Rec-Plex" was ahead of its time for space planning on a college campus and quickly became the most popular spot for campus activity. (Its namesake, Gerard F. Yates, S.J. was not affiliated with Athletics, but was named in his honor shortly before his death in 1979.)

With the exception of swimming, Yates was never meant to be an intercollegiate facility but to serve the overall fitness needs of a rapidly growing on-campus community that doubled in size over a generation. Forty years later, Yates remains not only a popular gathering place for students but one of the largest employers of students on campus. Its mission statement reflects the goals of those needs of the 1970's and those which followed, namely, that Georgetown is "committed to the cultivation of the whole person; the training not only of the intellect and spirit, but also the body. With this in mind, the Yates Memorial Field House was built to meet the recreational, instructional, and intramural sport needs of the entire University community."

THE BIG EAST
By 1978, Georgetown was ascendant in men's college basketball. Two NCAA and two NIT bids had been earned within four years for the program, along with its first national rankings in the sport. Storm clouds were on the horizon, however.

For most its prior seventy years, Georgetown had competed as an independent in basketball. Changes proposed by the Eastern College Athletic Conference (ECAC) in 1978 would have assigned Georgetown to a regional scheduling model that would have ended a number of long-time rivalries, such as St. John's, Seton, Hall, or Boston College, to be replaced by teams such as Navy, Richmond, and Virginia Commonwealth.

"In the spring of 1978, only a few months after my arrival...Dave Gavitt, Jack Kaiser and Frank Rienzo, Athletics Directors at Providence, St. Johns and Georgetown respectively, gathered to discuss newly imposed NCAA men's basketball in-season scheduling requirements," wrote former Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel in 2001. "These requirements forced independent institutions like the four of us to align and schedule schools with whom we had no interest or tradition."

A series of closed meetings held at an airport hotel outside New York served as the starting point to a new conference without the glare of the press (or other athletic directors) in the way.

"Self determination was far better than being told who your partners would be, and so the four of us met for countless hours in countless sessions to determine the make-up of our new conference to be," Crouthamel said.

The four schools were committed but needed a minimum of seven to move forward. Boston College was in. Holy Cross and Rutgers declined the offer, while Seton Hall promptly stepped up in Rutgers' place. A more regional program, the University of Connecticut, received Gavitt's strong recommendation; he called it a "sleeping giant". By the summer of 1979, the seven schools withdrew from the ECAC and after shuffling through a number of awkward names proposed for the league (reported concepts included the "Presidential Conference" and the "Seaboard Seven"), consensus was quickly reached under the name of "Big East", and the rest is history...literally.

Rienzo's role in the formation of the Big East cannot be understated and Georgetown's early role in that development (winning the original 1980 men's basketball tournament and four of the first six) was the beneficiary. The success of the Georgetown program elevated the conference overnight and with it, its awareness in the basketball lexicon. An early TV contract with the emerging cable network of ESPN brought the young league to homes nationally that may never have heard of Georgetown before, and within a few years, the Big East had reached heights only seen by the established major conferences. Were Rienzo not in those formative meetings, Georgetown basketball today may well have been consigned to the present day Colonial Athletic Association, foretelling a much different future for athletics across the University than it enjoys today.

The Big East was born as a basketball conference but soon began adding other sports. One notable sport not in the Big East's canon was football. In 1979, only two of its original schools played major college football (Boston College, Syracuse), four played varying levels of small college football (Connecticut, Georgetown, Seton Hall, and St. John's), and one (Providence) did not play it at all. There was no consensus to force any members up or down in the sport.

Frank Rienzo was not a fan of making the Big East a football league at the expense of men's basketball. In 1982, Penn State athletic director Joe Paterno applied for membership in the conference, despite Penn State's long held indifference to basketball. Rienzo was not on board with adding Penn State and Georgetown was reported as among three schools to block the bid as a result, but when Paterno sought to recruit BC and Syracuse into a new all-sports conference he would lead, the Big East leadership then invited Pittsburgh, which neutered Paterno's concept.

Some sportswriters suggest in hindsight that if Penn State had somehow joined the Big East, realignment would have never occurred, but this is highly speculative and these schools would still have been vulnerable; or, perhaps they would have eventually voted out smaller schools like Georgetown which did not commit to football at this level.

It was basketball, not football, which would drive Georgetown's golden age in athletics.

In 1981, with aging McDonough Gym regularly sold out for the Hoyas, Rienzo swung for the fences and arranged for games to be moved to the 19,500 seat Capital Centre in Landover, MD.

The arrival of Patrick Ewing and the ability to schedule national competition in an NBA arena was a leap of faith for the program, especially one which had never drawn more than 4,200 a game in its history. With John Thompson's support, 11 of 14 home games moved to Landover for the 1981-82 season, and the program never looked back. Attendance doubled with one year and by 1983, Georgetown's average was in the top 15 in the nation.

Frank Rienzo was not trained in business but knew a good deal when he saw it. In 1982, Rienzo worked with a Virginia-based sports promoter, Russ Potts, in what became known as a "Game of the Century", when #1 Virginia met #2 Georgetown that December. Georgetown was coming off its Final Four season with sophomore Patrick Ewing while Virginia featured the nation's top collegiate player, three time All-American Ralph Sampson. Turning down offers from the three broadcast networks, Rienzo insisted the game be played at Capital Centre. A $550,000 deal with "Superstation" WTBS was the first major basketball game of its kind broadcast on subscription television and changed the way basketball was seen by millions of fans nationally. A Capital Centre crowd of 19,035 (at the time the largest home crowd in school history) saw Virginia prevail, 68-63. In the end, Georgetown prevailed, proving that with a larger arena and a city-wide promotional effort, it could reach fans in Washington that were not aligned with Maryland or other college teams.

Rienzo's model didn't win friends at networks or even Sports Illustrated, which criticized him as "stubborn and pedantic" during the TV negotiations for the game. But a reader to the magazine called SI to task.

"It's too bad none of the CBS officials had studied Latin under Rienzo at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, N.Y...," wrote one SI reader. "If the CBS men had had either of these experiences, they would have known before they walked through the door that their efforts were a waste of time. Thank you, Frank, for remaining the same stubborn, ethical s.o.b. that you were when you were teaching us of Caesar's conquest of the Helvetians."

By this point, Rienzo knew the ins and out of the television game, but also the ability to navigate the administrative bureaucracy at Georgetown, where it was difficult to get funding for any new projects, but an easier track to get things done if it were self-funded. Ticket and TV revenues began to make its impact at Georgetown in the 1980's, and the athletic department put the revenues to good use. Slowly but surely, revenues allowed Rienzo to add full time coaches across each sport, followed by scholarship increases, academic resources support, and, in the absence of facility upgrades, to make incremental improvements to the state of McDonough Gym. Full time coaching allowed Georgetown to be competitive with its peers and for the first time compete for top students nationally across many sports, not just basketball and track.

Where there were just two full time coaches among eight teams when Frank Rienzo arrived, upon his retirement there were full time coaches at each of Georgetown's 28 athletic teams.

"The president of the NCAA was explaining how much money colleges spend on athletics, and we're so far off the screen they can't even see us, yet we're competing," said Joe lang, Rienzo's sucessor as athletic director. "And everybody wants to beat Georgetown. We represent excellence and success."

And his department could also develop its own revenue streams. In 1984, the athletic department asked Georgetown University to seek trademark protection for the word "Hoyas" and the image of its mascot. Jack the Bulldog. To be fair, no one had seen the need before because, well, what was to be gained with a trademark on a mascot?

Rienzo and his team foresaw the growth of college sports merchandising, and there was no hotter name in college sports at the time than the Georgetown Hoyas. Within five years, Georgetown was the #1 college brand worldwide, with a steady stream of royalty revenues now coming back to the school for every hat, shirt, or jacket being sold with its name or mascot as a result of trademark protection and its alliance with what is now known as the Collegiate Licensing Company. Soon, however, larger schools got into the merchandising game as well, and Georgetown's market share inevitably declined. To this day, however, Georgetown still ranks among the top 70 schools nationwide and one of only a handful not playing football at the major college level. These royalty revenues continue to support the student-athlete experience in a way that could only have been dreamed of three decades ago.

The salad days of basketball at Georgetown could have easily overwhelmed the entire athletic department, but Frank Rienzo made sure it did not. John Thompson has said in the past that Rienzo deflected a lot of the heat that he faced for his coaching style and program alignment, while never trying to be a part of the story itself.

"Whatever I accomplished at Georgetown," Thompson told the Washington Post in 1999, "I would not have been able to do it without [Frank] and particularly the way he stood up with me during the hard times."

WOMEN'S SPORTS AT GEORGETOWN
If there is one part of the Georgetown University experience that is a direct beneficiary of the Rienzo era, it is women's athletics.

Women's athletics at Georgetown was once confined to three minor sports, then known colloquially as the "Hoyettes". The arrival of Title IX in 1974 led Georgetown to take on the difficult challenge of meeting the needs of women in athletics without dropping men's teams to do it. The existing women's teams had no full time coaches, no scholarships, and little or no space of its own at McDonough Gymnasium, but interest was building for a University commitment in women's rowing, track, tennis, and golf.

"Here on the Hilltop, the Athletic Department for years has been anticipating the arrival of something approximating a Title IX, and has responded in fine fashion," wrote The HOYA in 1975. "As Athletic Director Frank Rienzo says, "we've been expecting something like this, and years ago made the crucial decisions that other schools are now faced with."

It took over a hundred years for Georgetown to field 11 men's sports. Frank Rienzo added 11 women's sports in just 18 years and these sports today are among the most decorated programs in the university: cross country, lacrosse, golf, and soccer, to name a few. By maintaining the tiering of sports by national, regional, and local expectations on a program by program basis, Georgetown was able to fully fund those with the greatest opportunity to succeed and still provide opportunities to women which were not only rights under the law, but the right thing to do.

"We're not in the business of athletics," former president Rev. Leo O'Donovan told USA Today. "We have a director of athletics, Frank Rienzo, and basketball coach John Thompson...who are, in the first place, educators. They think of the welfare of their young people. They're not here to run professional teams; they're here to implement athletics programs that I think are indispensable at a good university."

HONORS AND RECOGNITION
Frank Rienzo turned over day to day administration oft the Department of Athletics to Joe Lang in 1995, receiving the title of Senior Director of Athletics before retiring in 1999. But as noted earlier, Rienzo's days with Georgetown weren't through.

"Georgetown became the principal location for the physical, psychological, emotional growth of my entire family," he said in 1999. "Not only is it where I worked, but my wife and children became a real part of Georgetown."

In retirement, Rienzo became a volunteer spokesman for the need for need based scholarships at Georgetown, offering to talk with anyone and everyone about the need for affordable options for education to bring the best students into the Georgetown experience. In 2004, he was called out of retirement to assist the late Jim Higgins (B'70) with the search committee which hired John Thompson III as head men's basketball coach.

"The goal that I established for myself was to see if we couldn't make the athletic program as excellent as the academic programs at Georgetown," Rienzo said in a 2007 interview with The HOYA. "It was my feeling that a university such as Georgetown needed to pursue athletics with the same dedication and intensity as education."

The ability to fund 29 sports on the Division I level with just one revenue sport is as much art as science, and the ability to do it well is nothing short of remarkable. Frank Rienzo was justly honored by his peers and by his University.

Among his many honors, the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) named Rienzo its Athletics Director of the Year in 1998 and six years later adding him to its Hall of Fame. He was chairman of the Big East Executive Committee for nine years and received the ECAC Distinguished Service Award. In 2011, he was named to the Stanner Hall of Fame by the alumni of Archbishop Molloy High School.

He was honored in numerous ways by Georgetown, beginning in 1987 with the presentation of the Patrick Healy Award in during the John Carroll Awards in New Orleans, the University's highest honor for an non-alumnus. In 1993, he received the Alumni Admissions Program Board of Advisors Award for meritorious service to undergraduate admissions and was later inducted to the Georgetown University Athletic Hall of Fame. A number of donors raised funds to endow the athletic director's position at Georgetown in his honor; as such, Lee Reed holds the Francis X. Rienzo Chair in Athletics as a result.

In 2000, Georgetown University was awarded the athletic program of the year by the ECAC. In accepting the award, Joe Lang reflected back on the legacy left by his predecessor.

"For us, in a lot of ways, it's a culmination of the work that Frank Rienzo started when he came here many years ago," Lang said. "Our programs were not very renowned, yet we've had continuous growth over the past quarter century. It's not because we have a lot of scholarships, because we don't. It's not because we've got phenomenal facilities, because we really don't. His whole method revolved around finding good people."

The HOYA put it as well as any. "Frank Rienzo was a sportsman - not a dean, not a provost, not a president - and he has dedicated his life to making Georgetown better for its students through what he does best."

---

We acknowledge the details on Frank Rienzo's early life from the Tablet, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brooklyn, which inteviewed Rienzo in 2003.