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University of Tennessee at Chattanooga ’s Hart contacts coaching prospects

By: John Frierson
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University of Tennessee at Chattanooga athletic director Rick Hart has started making direct contact with prospective candidates to become the next Mocs football coach, a process that could take several weeks, he said Wednesday.

Hart will not discuss any specific candidates at this point in the search, but he said he has talked in the past couple of days with some of the coaches on his list and there are others that he will talk to as soon as it is appropriate — meaning when their seasons are complete.

The coaches that aren’t available now, he said, won’t be excluded from the search just because it might be a week or two before they can interview.

“I will continue to contact coaches, as it is appropriate, until I have had direct interaction with everyone I want to speak with about this opportunity,” Hart said.

The Mocs (1-10, 0-7 SoCon) wrap up their season Saturday against Samford (5-5, 3-4) at Finley Stadium. It will be the final game for the team’s 14 seniors and for coach Rodney Allison, whose career at UTC will end after six seasons.

One of the key components to finding Allison’s replacement is the compensation package, both in terms of the salaries for the next coach as well as his assistants. Much of that money will come from donors, Hart said, not from university funds — and it won’t come with any strings attached.

In other words, he said, the people that are giving money to the program won’t be doing so only if the candidate they want gets the job.

“Any private donations or external revenue sources that we plan to dedicate towards compensation, will all be no strings attached,” he said. It will go toward attracting and hiring “the best possible coach we can, regardless of who that is.”

Hart said Wednesday that he hoped to have a search firm hired by the end of the week to help with the search, doing things like background checks and other information gathering. He also hopes to soon have the field narrowed down to just a few top candidates, but that’s getting harder by the day, he said.

“Every day two or three more people pop up, one way or the other,” he said. “I’ve been very careful that everybody who has been presented to me or whom I have, perhaps, identified, to really give them careful consideration and to learn about them and to do research.

“I wish it would settle down, I wish it would get to that point, and I thought, perhaps, that I was there. ... There’s still a lot of activity — a lot.”

Allison said he has not discussed the coaching search with Hart, but he said he expects that some of the candidates will contact him to get his take on the state of the program and where it can go from here.

“I anticipate that happening,” he said. “I may know some of them, but they’ll also know that this is not a deal where I am leaving in a very hostile environment.”

Prior to Saturday’s game, both Allison and Hart will meet with the parents of UTC’s players in the Stadium Club. For Allison it will be a chance to interact with them one last time and for Hart it will be an opportunity to discuss the future of the program.

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