Meyers has confidence of many associated with NU
His next step in life uncertain, Paul Meyers suddenly heard a shout from the street.
A friend: “Hey, you got a job yet?”
No, no he didn’t. But Meyers was about to meet his professional calling.
It was the spring of 1993 and Meyers was closing the book on baseball. It wasn’t easy. He was a special player, a Husker All-America outfielder, a guy who roped base hits to the tune of a .350 average during his college career. A blessed left arm. A fourth-round pick of the San Francisco Giants in the 1986 draft.
But that chapter was over. Six years of playing in the minors had given way to three seasons of serving as an assistant coach for John Sanders-led Nebraska baseball teams.
And now Meyers’ wife, his high school sweetheart Laurie, was expecting the couple’s first child. He loved baseball and coaching, but it would cut into family time. A change was deemed necessary.
He was walking out of the doors of the baseball offices when a friend driving by called out and told him the Husker athletic department had an opening for a developmental position based out of Omaha.
It would be a job that revolved around communicating with donors, gaining trust, building relationships, fundraising. Meyers felt it right away: This was it. This was perfect.
Connecting with people is one of Meyers’ gifts, those who know him say. It doesn’t matter who he’s talking with: a farmer from Mullen, a businessman from Omaha, a baseball team owner from Arizona. People just seem to like him.
“I don’t know if you call it communication, or what you may call it,” Meyers said. “But I just treat people how I would like to be treated.”
It’s a philosophy that has served him well over the past 14 years, his professional ascent carrying him to his current title of associate athletic director for development.
Involved in virtually every major donation to the athletic department in the past decade, Meyers is someone Husker fans would be wise to keep on their radar screens.
Listen to the voices of power and you realize quickly Meyers could be a prime candidate to be Nebraska’s next athletic director, a position that will need filling sooner rather than later. There is no certainty that Tom Osborne would not choose to stay on longer, but for now, the 71-year-old’s contract runs through June 30, 2010.
Whenever Osborne leaves, if Nebraska looks to stay in-house, Meyers would seem to be among the leading figures getting a look. Marc Boehm, executive associate athletic director, and Bob Burton, associate athletic director, might also be on that short list.
It was Meyers’ brief departure from the department in October that added a significant subplot to the Steve Pederson saga, and it was his return only four weeks later that was met with jubilance by some major donors.
“I think we all sang hallelujah,” said Charles Myers, a major Husker donor.
Now, some of those contributors are in tune that Meyers would be a fine choice to follow Osborne as Nebraska’s AD.
“It could be that he’s the guy in the waiting for Tom’s job,” said Dale Jensen, a longtime and prominent Husker booster and a part-owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“He has the personality and the people skills. You can always hire someone to get the technical stuff done. You don’t need to be an accountant. You just need to know a good accountant. But most important is that leadership quality, that person-to-person connection of being able to take the pulse of the state.”
Myers said the possibility of Meyers eventually becoming NU’s athletic director “would not surprise me at all.”
And then there’s Howard Hawks, not only a significant donor to the Husker program but also an NU regent — certainly a big fan of Meyers, with whom he occasionally golfs. Hawks had a son who played on a softball team with Meyers. That’s how the Omaha businessman first met him. The two hit it off quickly.
“He’s always Paul,” Hawks said. “You don’t have to wonder, ‘OK, who is he and what does he stand for?’ That’s always paramount in him.
“Tom’s only going to be there two or three years, according to the current plan, and I know there are other people in the athletic department and at other schools. But I would hope that Paul would be one of the people Tom is mentoring as his replacement.”
Meyers said the praise is flattering, humbling: “I think if people felt I was right for the position for the right time, that certainly would interest me.”
***
As a ballplayer, he diligently moved up the minor-league rungs, working his way from a team in Clinton, Iowa, to a team in Shreveport, La., to a team in Phoenix — Triple-A ball, one step from The Show.
The son of a former Nebraska-Omaha football coach had a business degree that he’d put to good use, but the goal to be a major-league baseball player loomed large.
“I wanted to see baseball out as far it would go,” Meyers said.
Once, in 1989, Meyers’ team was taking it on the chin in a game in Las Vegas. The score got so ugly that the manager asked if anyone — someone, please — could pitch the last inning and mercifully get the club to the showers.
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” Meyers said. He had pitched at Omaha Westside, after all, “and one thing I could do was throw a little bit.”
Some scouts had stuck around. Meyers took the hill and made the radar guns light up. How’d he like to be a pitcher?
Meyers wanted to think about it. He had reached Triple A as an outfielder. He didn’t know if it was wise to switch positions now. He told them to give him some time.
Less than two weeks later, with the offer for a position change still on the table, Meyers was manning the outfield. Someone cranked one. Meyers sped after it. He sped into the wall, injuring in his left shoulder. Surgery followed. He came back to baseball, played another couple of years, but “you could pretty much see the end of the tunnel after the injury happened.”
By 1991, it was time to move on.
It wasn’t the last time he’d have to walk away from a job he loved.
***
The football season was in shambles. Nebraska fans were beginning to howl about Bill Callahan and Pederson. What’s going on over there?
More raised eyebrows came when Meyers, one man who did know what was going on, announced on Oct. 4. he was resigning from his position.
It might not have seemed major news to those at a distance. But to anyone close to Meyers, it was a stunner.
“When Paul left the job that was his love, so to speak, it was a bad signal for me,” Hawks said. “Because I knew he had the job he wanted to have.”
Said Jensen: “It was that seminal moment where you finally have had it, where you said, ‘Wait a minute. This is too good of a guy.’”
Meyers isn’t the sort to air dirty laundry on the particulars of what went wrong during Pederson’s tenure, which probably serves as an example of one of the reasons he seems to have such a fan club.
“It shows you his professionalism,” Myers said. “There would be some guys hanging on the street corner with a megaphone telling you about their problems. Not Paul.”
Meyers said his decision to leave was one of the most difficult he’s ever made.
“I just really felt in order for me to do my job effectively and ask people for their hard-earned money, I have to believe 100 percent in what we’re doing as a group,” he said. “And I didn’t feel that I could and therefore I felt, for my own reasons, that I needed to separate myself.
“And, really, I was looking at it in the overall good of the athletic department. Because in the position that I hold, that person needs to believe 100 percent in what we’re doing. And if they can’t, that person can’t be successful in that position. Nebraska needs that position to be successful.”
In the four weeks after his departure, Meyers basically spent breakfast, lunch and dinner meeting with donors and longtime friends, the future of the Husker department often in the conversation. He had left the job title behind, but he hadn’t stopped working.
Less than two weeks after Meyers resigned, Pederson was fired.
The day Pederson was let go, UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman said Meyers was one of the people whose information he used when deciding Pederson’s fate.
Osborne was announced as the new athletic director on Oct. 17, a day after Pederson’s dismissal.
Within a week, Osborne approached Meyers about coming back, recognizing that there were many people who saw his departure as a “major loss” to the athletic department.
“He’s very honest, very straightforward,” Osborne said. “He’s not pushy, but he lets you know what it is he’s trying to get done.”
Asked several months ago what he’d like to see in Nebraska’s next athletic director, Osborne said: “I think it’s important that they understand something about the state, the way people view the athletic department. I think that not everybody in the state is locked into the athletic department here, but there is a strong sense of ownership around the state.”
For Meyers, he felt the passion of the Husker fan base from the first time he watched a football game at Memorial Stadium. It was a tough day for Big Red. A week after shocking No. 1 Oklahoma, Nebraska lost 35-31 to Missouri that day in 1978.
Still, Meyers found it an amazing experience. He was hooked.
So when Osborne called and asked if he’d like to return to the Husker athletic program he had loved so long, the decision came easy.
“What I felt was that if Tom was telling me that Nebraska needed me to be back there, I felt some level of obligation to help,” Meyers said.
Osborne said he and Meyers communicate several times a week. The athletic director said Meyers is in the office about half the time, the other hours spent on the road.
His work is almost always behind the scenes. While affable when called, Meyers doesn’t seek media attention. Before a photograph was taken of him Friday afternoon, the Journal Star had no pictures of Meyers in its archives. Told that, Meyers laughed and said he was quite fine with that.
“I think from Day One, I’ve always put the program first in the sense that I want to do whatever I can possibly do to ensure that Nebraska is an elite program,” Meyers said.
Of course, there is time for the occasional joke while pursuing that status.
Osborne said Meyers will occasionally ask him why the former football coach didn’t give him a shot in college. He’s hardly serious. Meyers was only about 145 pounds out of high school, though he did play safety for former Husker assistant Dan Young’s undefeated Westside teams in 1981 and 1982.
They were great years. But Meyers seems to have bigger days ahead.
“I haven’t really met any type of individual that doesn’t seem to connect with Paul,” Osborne said. “I’m sure it could happen, but I haven’t met that person yet.”
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7439 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
A friend: “Hey, you got a job yet?”
No, no he didn’t. But Meyers was about to meet his professional calling.
It was the spring of 1993 and Meyers was closing the book on baseball. It wasn’t easy. He was a special player, a Husker All-America outfielder, a guy who roped base hits to the tune of a .350 average during his college career. A blessed left arm. A fourth-round pick of the San Francisco Giants in the 1986 draft.
But that chapter was over. Six years of playing in the minors had given way to three seasons of serving as an assistant coach for John Sanders-led Nebraska baseball teams.
And now Meyers’ wife, his high school sweetheart Laurie, was expecting the couple’s first child. He loved baseball and coaching, but it would cut into family time. A change was deemed necessary.
He was walking out of the doors of the baseball offices when a friend driving by called out and told him the Husker athletic department had an opening for a developmental position based out of Omaha.
It would be a job that revolved around communicating with donors, gaining trust, building relationships, fundraising. Meyers felt it right away: This was it. This was perfect.
Connecting with people is one of Meyers’ gifts, those who know him say. It doesn’t matter who he’s talking with: a farmer from Mullen, a businessman from Omaha, a baseball team owner from Arizona. People just seem to like him.
“I don’t know if you call it communication, or what you may call it,” Meyers said. “But I just treat people how I would like to be treated.”
It’s a philosophy that has served him well over the past 14 years, his professional ascent carrying him to his current title of associate athletic director for development.
Involved in virtually every major donation to the athletic department in the past decade, Meyers is someone Husker fans would be wise to keep on their radar screens.
Listen to the voices of power and you realize quickly Meyers could be a prime candidate to be Nebraska’s next athletic director, a position that will need filling sooner rather than later. There is no certainty that Tom Osborne would not choose to stay on longer, but for now, the 71-year-old’s contract runs through June 30, 2010.
Whenever Osborne leaves, if Nebraska looks to stay in-house, Meyers would seem to be among the leading figures getting a look. Marc Boehm, executive associate athletic director, and Bob Burton, associate athletic director, might also be on that short list.
It was Meyers’ brief departure from the department in October that added a significant subplot to the Steve Pederson saga, and it was his return only four weeks later that was met with jubilance by some major donors.
“I think we all sang hallelujah,” said Charles Myers, a major Husker donor.
Now, some of those contributors are in tune that Meyers would be a fine choice to follow Osborne as Nebraska’s AD.
“It could be that he’s the guy in the waiting for Tom’s job,” said Dale Jensen, a longtime and prominent Husker booster and a part-owner of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
“He has the personality and the people skills. You can always hire someone to get the technical stuff done. You don’t need to be an accountant. You just need to know a good accountant. But most important is that leadership quality, that person-to-person connection of being able to take the pulse of the state.”
Myers said the possibility of Meyers eventually becoming NU’s athletic director “would not surprise me at all.”
And then there’s Howard Hawks, not only a significant donor to the Husker program but also an NU regent — certainly a big fan of Meyers, with whom he occasionally golfs. Hawks had a son who played on a softball team with Meyers. That’s how the Omaha businessman first met him. The two hit it off quickly.
“He’s always Paul,” Hawks said. “You don’t have to wonder, ‘OK, who is he and what does he stand for?’ That’s always paramount in him.
“Tom’s only going to be there two or three years, according to the current plan, and I know there are other people in the athletic department and at other schools. But I would hope that Paul would be one of the people Tom is mentoring as his replacement.”
Meyers said the praise is flattering, humbling: “I think if people felt I was right for the position for the right time, that certainly would interest me.”
***
As a ballplayer, he diligently moved up the minor-league rungs, working his way from a team in Clinton, Iowa, to a team in Shreveport, La., to a team in Phoenix — Triple-A ball, one step from The Show.
The son of a former Nebraska-Omaha football coach had a business degree that he’d put to good use, but the goal to be a major-league baseball player loomed large.
“I wanted to see baseball out as far it would go,” Meyers said.
Once, in 1989, Meyers’ team was taking it on the chin in a game in Las Vegas. The score got so ugly that the manager asked if anyone — someone, please — could pitch the last inning and mercifully get the club to the showers.
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” Meyers said. He had pitched at Omaha Westside, after all, “and one thing I could do was throw a little bit.”
Some scouts had stuck around. Meyers took the hill and made the radar guns light up. How’d he like to be a pitcher?
Meyers wanted to think about it. He had reached Triple A as an outfielder. He didn’t know if it was wise to switch positions now. He told them to give him some time.
Less than two weeks later, with the offer for a position change still on the table, Meyers was manning the outfield. Someone cranked one. Meyers sped after it. He sped into the wall, injuring in his left shoulder. Surgery followed. He came back to baseball, played another couple of years, but “you could pretty much see the end of the tunnel after the injury happened.”
By 1991, it was time to move on.
It wasn’t the last time he’d have to walk away from a job he loved.
***
The football season was in shambles. Nebraska fans were beginning to howl about Bill Callahan and Pederson. What’s going on over there?
More raised eyebrows came when Meyers, one man who did know what was going on, announced on Oct. 4. he was resigning from his position.
It might not have seemed major news to those at a distance. But to anyone close to Meyers, it was a stunner.
“When Paul left the job that was his love, so to speak, it was a bad signal for me,” Hawks said. “Because I knew he had the job he wanted to have.”
Said Jensen: “It was that seminal moment where you finally have had it, where you said, ‘Wait a minute. This is too good of a guy.’”
Meyers isn’t the sort to air dirty laundry on the particulars of what went wrong during Pederson’s tenure, which probably serves as an example of one of the reasons he seems to have such a fan club.
“It shows you his professionalism,” Myers said. “There would be some guys hanging on the street corner with a megaphone telling you about their problems. Not Paul.”
Meyers said his decision to leave was one of the most difficult he’s ever made.
“I just really felt in order for me to do my job effectively and ask people for their hard-earned money, I have to believe 100 percent in what we’re doing as a group,” he said. “And I didn’t feel that I could and therefore I felt, for my own reasons, that I needed to separate myself.
“And, really, I was looking at it in the overall good of the athletic department. Because in the position that I hold, that person needs to believe 100 percent in what we’re doing. And if they can’t, that person can’t be successful in that position. Nebraska needs that position to be successful.”
In the four weeks after his departure, Meyers basically spent breakfast, lunch and dinner meeting with donors and longtime friends, the future of the Husker department often in the conversation. He had left the job title behind, but he hadn’t stopped working.
Less than two weeks after Meyers resigned, Pederson was fired.
The day Pederson was let go, UNL Chancellor Harvey Perlman said Meyers was one of the people whose information he used when deciding Pederson’s fate.
Osborne was announced as the new athletic director on Oct. 17, a day after Pederson’s dismissal.
Within a week, Osborne approached Meyers about coming back, recognizing that there were many people who saw his departure as a “major loss” to the athletic department.
“He’s very honest, very straightforward,” Osborne said. “He’s not pushy, but he lets you know what it is he’s trying to get done.”
Asked several months ago what he’d like to see in Nebraska’s next athletic director, Osborne said: “I think it’s important that they understand something about the state, the way people view the athletic department. I think that not everybody in the state is locked into the athletic department here, but there is a strong sense of ownership around the state.”
For Meyers, he felt the passion of the Husker fan base from the first time he watched a football game at Memorial Stadium. It was a tough day for Big Red. A week after shocking No. 1 Oklahoma, Nebraska lost 35-31 to Missouri that day in 1978.
Still, Meyers found it an amazing experience. He was hooked.
So when Osborne called and asked if he’d like to return to the Husker athletic program he had loved so long, the decision came easy.
“What I felt was that if Tom was telling me that Nebraska needed me to be back there, I felt some level of obligation to help,” Meyers said.
Osborne said he and Meyers communicate several times a week. The athletic director said Meyers is in the office about half the time, the other hours spent on the road.
His work is almost always behind the scenes. While affable when called, Meyers doesn’t seek media attention. Before a photograph was taken of him Friday afternoon, the Journal Star had no pictures of Meyers in its archives. Told that, Meyers laughed and said he was quite fine with that.
“I think from Day One, I’ve always put the program first in the sense that I want to do whatever I can possibly do to ensure that Nebraska is an elite program,” Meyers said.
Of course, there is time for the occasional joke while pursuing that status.
Osborne said Meyers will occasionally ask him why the former football coach didn’t give him a shot in college. He’s hardly serious. Meyers was only about 145 pounds out of high school, though he did play safety for former Husker assistant Dan Young’s undefeated Westside teams in 1981 and 1982.
They were great years. But Meyers seems to have bigger days ahead.
“I haven’t really met any type of individual that doesn’t seem to connect with Paul,” Osborne said. “I’m sure it could happen, but I haven’t met that person yet.”
Reach Brian Christopherson at 473-7439 or bchristopherson@journalstar.com.
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