Becoming an athletic director was always in the cards for Kimya Massey.
Massey was a 25-year-old graduate assistant in Michigan State’s life skills department when he told his boss and mentor, Jim Pignataro, that he had dreams of one day running his own department.
Pignataro told Massey to write his goal down. And so Massey did, scratching his future dreams onto a notecard and carrying it with him daily.
The card followed Massey from Michigan State to Indiana to Memphis to Central Florida to Oregon State.
It was stashed safely in a backpack in Corvallis, Ore., on Friday, when Massey was introduced as the University of San Diego’s new athletic director. Massey replaces Bill McGillis, who left the department Nov. 1 amid a civil lawsuit and internal investigation into hazing within the football program. Ky Snyder has been serving as the Toreros’ interim AD, and will stay in the role until Massey starts this summer.
Conference realignment and the advent of name, image and likeness money means there may not be a more difficult time to be a mid-major athletic director.
Massey, who comes to USD from Oregon State, where he is deputy athletic director and COO, doesn’t see it that way.
“There’s ups and downs, but it’s really exciting because you can impact so many people,” he said. “Five hundred student-athletes, all your staff, you can build great collaborations with the campus, you can build the community.
“I’ve always felt my job and my purpose is to help impact others. This, to me, is an opportunity to do that on a higher level.”
Here are five things to know D’s new athletic director:
• He was a Spartan, for starters. A left-handed pitcher, Massey was a four-year letterman as a pitcher on Michigan State’s baseball team. He remains part of a text chain some 20 Spartans deep. In fact, Massey’s teammates were the first to know he had been hired at USD.
Massey said the lessons he learned playing college sports serve him well decades later.
“There’s ups and downs. There’s losses, there’s wins. There’s tough coaches, right?” he said. “You learn from adversity. There’s so many lessons … that I take with me to this very day. When things get tough, I literally think back to when I was in the weight room carrying somebody on my back in a fireman’s carry down four flights of stairs. I literally think about those moments. And they’ve really shaped who I am.”
• He knows USD .. While at Oregon State, Massey worked with the West Coast Conference to secure a place for the Beavers and Washington State to play basketball. The two schools will play USD and others as starting next season.
A search firm helped connect Massey and USD as the Toreros narrowed their pool of candidates.
“I felt like I had a pretty good understanding of who they were,” he said. “And then as I learned more, I just really fell in love.”
• … and that the Toreros have NIL needs. Massey championed Oregon State’s ExpOSUre NIL program. What did he learn? “It’s the wild, wild West,” Massey said with a smile.
It’s unclear exactly how involved USD (and its boosters) will be when it comes to NIL, though the ability to pay some student-athletes is imperative if the Toreros hope to compete.
USD President James T. Harris said Friday the Toreros “don’t know where NIL will end up in the NCAA landscape.”
“We think that we have to participate in the level that’s appropriate for us and in our conference,” Harris said. “And so if that’s the landscape, we want to be as competitive as possible. We will compete there.”
Massey plans to develop what he calls “an infrastructure” for NIL at USD, a Catholic college with high-minded ideals.
“We need to be competitive with that, but you still need to do it within the values of the university and you still need to do it in a way that you’re emphasizing the student-athlete experience first. And there’s ways you can do that,” he said.
“I think that’s one thing I learned at Oregon State: You can find ways transformationally to help your student-athletes succeed using NIL where it’s not transactional. That’s a really important distinction.”
• He s USD’s discipline. Massey said he’s looking forward to getting to know football coach Brandon Moore and digging deeper into what he called USD’s “unique” situation — the Toreros play nonscholarship Division 1 football in the Pioneer League.
Massey said he was briefed about the Toreros’ allegations of hazing, which led to disciplinary action against half the team, and was “feeling great about how President Harris and Coach Moore handled that.”
• He needs a name. Massey and his wife, Rose, are expecting their first child — a boy — in May.
They have yet to pick a name. “I’m the hard one (to convince),” Massey said.
They’ll have a decision — Kris? Bryant? Harbaugh? Egan? Fizdale? Fowler? — by the time Massey starts his dream job.
