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Dee has to come up here,
(Aside:) Alright so you have to sit on my right hand or stand on my right hand side.
When I was a
navy officer,
I didn't get along with the captain of my ship very well.
He was totally gung-ho navy.
So one day we were coming out
of the Azores, out of the island of São Miguel, and it was a horribly
windswept day and
the captain
[pause]
is getting real red-faced and is ordering the ship around,
and creases the side of the ship.
Do you all know what that means? He hits, the pier.
And under navy regulations you have to report it
to the secretary of the navy if you damage a vessel when it's underway meaning the ship
is in motion.
So I was the the officer of the deck and he said to me not to put it in the log
of the ship that he had damaged the ship.
So
in front of all the *** on the ship I said
I'm not putting that in the log.
So he said
Okay, why don't you put in the log that I damaged the ship. so I put it in the log. Now,
the reason I said that is that one of the most valuable things about being a leader is being
steady
when things are you know flying around and not
going from one side of the ship to the other and not going overboard on various things
and in
all of my time we had an incredibly steady and able leader
for the department of physical education and as athletic director, and shes standing to
my right,
but
beyond that she also was
fantastic
on this project and
I would say you know did we see eye to eye on everything?
Mostly, [laugh], yeah.
Maybe ninety-two percent,
and the other eight percent she was wrong.
She's just been really great in shepherding this from the beginning to the end.
She was also great
in the original inception of this, you know we had two facilities, and I wanna
be deferential appropriately to the past, that were really beloved,
we had a well beloved basketball facility,
and the PEC, although it had some
compliance problems, was for the day and age it was built, absolutely an amazing step forward
in athletic facilities. So, it was hard
to be honest, to let them go
and to envision a new future for athletic facilities,
but as Cesar and his staff knows,
there were other aspects to it other than the intrinsic worth of those older facilities
which was,
we needed the site
for darby and so
the idea was conceived to move this north of tenth. And we went through a variety of
designs
and at every stage
Dee was really fantastic at marshaling
a departmental consensus about what to do in the facility. I remember when we're deciding
what would be in phase one,
and I thought, will Dee come out of this alive? What coach
is going to say
the other coaches stuff should be
in phase one? Well,
it was pretty obvious what had to be in phase one because we had to take down old Darby
first so,
but she maneuvered that well and she really has done a wonderful job and she's been a great
friend to me.