New A.D. in place at CHC

by TOM UTESCHER

A week after his 30^th birthday, Bill Stiles realized his longtime ambition to become the athletic director of a collegiate sports program.

Stiles, an assistant athletic director and assistant baseball coach at Ursinus College for the past five years, officially became the new A.D. at Chestnut Hill College on July 19.

Chestnut Hill, a traditionally all-women’s college which became a coeducational institution last fall, fielded only a men’s basketball team for the 2003-2004 academic year. This year there will be male athletes competing in soccer and tennis, and a men’s and women’s cross country program is being introduced, as well.

“It was an appealing opportunity to me because you’re really building a new program, instead of just running something that’s already been in place,” said Stiles, who grew up in Douglassville, PA, just west of Pottstown. “The people I’m working with here are great - enthusiastic and hardworking. It’s a young athletic department; it’s growing and changing, and so is the college.”

Stiles was a baseball catcher both for Ursinus and for Daniel Boone High School in Berks County. He majored in communications at Ursinus, and then earned a Master’s degree in Athletic Administration from Temple University.

He coached briefly at Alvernia College, then spent several years in North Carolina, coaching and working in the athletic department at Chowan College.

Utilizing his communications degree, he was involved in the sports information department at Chowan and later at Ursinus.

He learned of the opening at Chestnut Hill last January while attending the NCAA convention in Nashville, where he spoke with CHC vice president Art Goon, and with Shawn Ferris, who is an assistant athletic director and director of soccer for the Griffins. Back in Philadelphia, a conversation with the college’s president, Carol Jean Vale, SSJ, sealed the deal.

“I enjoyed listening to Sister Carol talk about her vision for the college and for the athletic department, and it made me want to be a part of that,” he related. “It’s good to know that there’s support from the top.”

Stiles says that Chestnut Hill’s women’s sports teams will remain in the Atlantic Women’s College Conference for two more years. Another AWCC school, Hood College, also began accepting men in 2003, and if the conference dropped both of the newly-coed schools, it would no longer have enough members to qualify for an automatic bid in the NCAA Division III playoffs.

The Griffin men will be playing in the North Eastern Athletic Conference, a new outfit which includes Baptist Bible and Keystone College (both near Scranton, PA), Philadelphia Biblical College, and Penn State Berks County.

Villa Julie, in Baltimore, and several schools in southern New York State are also members. The new conference affiliation should help to raise the profile of CHC’s fledgling men’s teams.

From his prior work in sports information and communications, Stiles knows that good public relations is a key to attracting quality student athletes to CHC.

“I really want to upgrade our web site,” he stated. “For many prospective students these days, that’s going to be their first impression of the college. They’re going to search us out online and see what we’re about, so I feel you can’t have enough information on the website, you can’t make it user-friendly enough.”

Stiles also knows that, ultimately, the best advertizement for Chestnut Hill College will be the kind of graduates it produces.

“I determine the success of an athletic program in terms of the experience of the student athlete,” he explained. “Are they having a valuable experience, something that’s going to contribute to their education, that will instill some values that they can take with them when they leave here?

That being said, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to win, because I’m very competitive. But I don’t want to sacrifice the mission, integrity, or character of the college in order to do that. There’s a way to do it right.”