I first met Jon LeCrone at the Dayton /Detroit NIT game last year at the University of Dayton Arena. He agreed to an interview and gave me his number. Seven months later I called him and after negotiating some times with his assistant Dana Thomas and chatting with Horizon League Director of Communications Michael Ingberg I was good to go.

When I got there they rolled out the Red Carpet for me. The first person who greeted me, and she did it by name, was Dana Thomas (pictured standing at right, with Butler intern Molly Stearns). She gave me a big smile and showed me into the conference room. After just a minute Commissioner LeCrone came in and warmly greeted me. We chatted for a few minutes about my drive and earlier interview I had that day with UC's Associate Head Coach Dan Peters. I was amazed at how casual and at ease Jon LeCrone was.

Two and a half-hours later we were still going strong. He answered all the questions and didn't seem in a hurry to get on with running the Horizon League. I got the impression that if I needed another hour to complete the interview he would have given it to me.

I found his explanations of the Bracket Busters and League Championship for basketball to be most fascinating. Also the solid composition of the league membership and the core values of the league will interest many readers.

Also Michael Ingberg (pictured left) was an interesting guy. He has worked in sports communications in both pro and college ranks. His past included stints with in NBA, CBA, Big 10, and Gulf South Conference. He is a sports nut. I really enjoyed just talking sports with him. He has been everywhere and done almost everything. He is the kind of guy who would be fun to sit down with and watch a game.

So this is a peek into how this league works and to a lesser degree some of the people that make it go.

CigarBoy: The first question I want to get into is, what is the mission now of the Horizon League?

LeCrone: Well Cigar Boy, let me talk to you a little bit about our name change and how we got there, covering a little bit of background for you because that announcement was made on June 4th last year so we are about 14 months into our new name. It's gone very, very well. It's been very well received. I think the graphic element that some people may not have initially liked, is catching on. But the thing that is exciting to me is that people understand what it means. We might be one of the few athletic leagues where our name and the logo do represent what we believe in, which is a little bit different than something that is geographic or based in numbers. If you look at the Horizon League name, just the name that was selected for a specific purpose and so was the logo. The logo is a star figure and that is representative of the student as the center or star of our league and that's why we do this. That is a star figure, and it's also a star figure engaged not only in an athletic movement but a creative movement and we think that symbolized development. That's really is one of the things we believe in very strongly is working together to develop all these young people. Then you can see the star figure kind of paints the horizon, if you will, and that's another creative kind of movement. It's the student athlete as the center or star of our league, engaged in a creative, dynamic, moving athletic motion, but more than athletics, it's suppose to symbolize more than that. The word Horizon and the tag line 'raise your sights', you know if you think about the word horizon, the juncture between earth and sky, symbolically we chose that. We liked that because we talk a lot about the juncture between student and athlete. It is about athletics but it's also about, we think, a number of other things. It's about performing academically. It's about being responsible. We talk a lot about personal accountability and responsibility. Finally, we think it's about, while you're in college, but also a life long experience, that is given back. Now, that might mean giving back to your teammates, giving back to your team, back to your athletic department, or your school, or your city, or your region, or your state, or your country, or your world. We really don't care. If you are giving back to one person, we think that's important, but it's one of our founding principles. So what was important to me is that now, people are beginning to understand that 'raise your sights' does mean something. We are telling our students, here are expectations, and it's what we expect of you. We are telling our coaches that, and our administrators, and our officials so it's kind of a forward-looking, raising your sights...it is more about wins and loses, it is more about going to practice, it is more about playing the games and there's a lot more there. There are life-long learning kinds of experiences and we tried to capture it in what we call the Horizon League Promise. What we promise young people is this will be a holistic experience for you that hopefully will add value to your college education. But at the same time, you can carry that on into a life-learning type of thing. So when our young people come out the other side, we hope they've had a very high level, high quality national league, competitive, athletic experience. We hope they've learned a whole lot. We hope they've taken seriously and understood the role of role model, because that's what they are. That's what we believe and that's what we tell them. If you are a student athlete on a campus, people are watching you and you do have some standards to live by. And then finally, we what them to give some things back. We think those things are great foundations, life long learnings. So responsibility, accountability, that when they walk out the door, that makes them great teachers, lawyers, engineers, makes them citizens. What we've begun to talk about a little bit is more of the notion of the citizen athlete rather than the student athlete. The reason we talk about that is the citizen aspect of that responsibility piece, the outreach piece, and then as a great student and a great athlete, you kind of have the whole package. That's what we are really talking a lot about and trying to be serious about, and trying to do some more thinking about. All of that change was based on a pretty intense and involved research project that started about four or five years ago. Mike Cusack (Wright State AD) was a big part of that. He was certainly one of the driving forces behind the change.

CigarBoy: Did it start out talking about changing the name of the MCC and developed an identity, then you got into all the other stuff. What was the genesis to get this whole thing started?

LeCrone: Mike Cusack had a real role in that. We were at an Athletic Director's meeting 5 years ago and we began to talk about how we'd been together for a while and what did we really want to become. And Mike, I'll never forget it, he kind of pushed his chair back and he said, you know something we need to do, something to break away from the pack. We all do the same things and we just really need to do something to break away from the pack. So I took that idea to our presidents and had them think about that and debate that with us. What they asked me to do is to engage the services of a creative communications/public relations company that might help us with that. We took this out to bid and ended up with three finalists. At the end we selected a company from here in Indianapolis called Caldwell Vanriper Marc. What we asked them to do was really, go out and ask our external and our internal constituencies two fundamental questions: 1) Externally, who do people think we are? What do the name and the logo mean? What kind of identity do we have? 2) Then we kind of asked ourselves that. In other words, it was this balance of who do we think we are and who do people say we are. What we found out was there was very little knowledge in the marketplace, or value in the marketplace, of the name of Midwestern Collegiate Conference, the three letters MCC, and the logo we were using. We had student athletes who couldn't really tell us who was in the league, what it met, so that was pretty fundamental. Then we really heard loud and clear from our students. Here's what they believed in. They understand where they are in the world. They understand they aren't in the Big 10 or the ACC or the SEC because if they were that caliber of elite athletes, they'd be there. But, that is not to say that they don't really enjoy competing on a very high national level. They'd love to compete with the Alabama's and the Ohio State's, and the North Carolina's and think they can! At the same time, they also said in our interviews how important a college education was to them. So that was the genesis of it. We didn't say to Caldwell, please change our name, need to change our logo, need to change our identity. We asked them to do that research and say who are we? What do people say we are? So where we landed is in four big areas. 1) Absolutely, we wanted to compete at a high national level, where we could. We have some limitations. We have budget limitations, we have geographic limitations, we have facilities limits, but where we can, we wanted to compete nationally. 2) We were very serious about recruiting students and not people that are coming in to play for a year or two and go to the NBA. We think there's more value than that. 3) We heard loud and clear that people thought a lot about this notion of respect and responsibility and accountability, and they did want to be role models. They did understand their role. 4) We found out that they were doing a whole lot of work on community service that nobody even knew about. So those became our platforms. Then we had to be able to come up with something that represented all that. It was kind of our values that we started with first and then we went through a lot of names and we came up with Horizon that we thought represented very well, all of those. We actually, in a very deliberate way, chose League rather than Conference because there are very few leagues out there. We wanted to be different, we wanted to be distinctive. We wanted our name to represent what we were trying to do. Not where we were, or how many people were in our league or anything like that. That's what's so great about the logo. If you look at the 31 or 32 logos, I mean think about it. I'm not sure any of them, you can look at them and it really gives you an idea of what those people believe in, what they are trying to accomplish. But ours is different because what we believe in is the student at the center of our league. So that's why it all fits together, why it connects. When you tell people that and they kind of open their eyes up, they go, yeah, that's kind of interesting. That was the genesis and that took about 18-24 months for that whole process and now we are about 14 months into the whole name change and continuing development of our platform.

CigarBoy: You mention the Horizon League Promise, the Horizon League experience. How do you ensure that the Horizon League experience is the same at all nine schools?

LeCrone: Well, where the Horizon League experience should be the same is at our championships. I think we run 18 championship events and our first one this year will begin Nov 1, up at Loyola when we do our cross-country. So we make all the effort to ensure that at those championships, it's evident that we are doing what we believe in. For instance, at just about every championship last year, we organized/arranged some kind of either learning or outreach activity for everybody that came. Geez, we did everything from collect shoes, to food, to make hospital visits. So all those athletes that were coming into that community went out and did something in the community. That's one leg that is the same. Just last year, we had every one of our students, on all of our campuses, sign an ethical conduct document. Is that in and of itself something that is dramatic? Probably not, I would guess a lot of leagues do something like that. But why it was important to me was because we had our student's sign it, our administrators sign it, and now our officials are signing it this year. We think in our league, the way the Horizon League experience is the same all over is that you have to have buy-in from everybody who's participating in the competition, and that's the players, the coaches and the officials. They control it. They don't care what's going on up in the stands. There could be something not too sportsman-like going on in the stands, but the players and the coaches and the officials are handling things the right way. The coach can calm that stuff down. The players can calm that stuff down. But I'll tell you one thing, if things get ugly on the court, then you've got a problem. So that's what we want to tell all our young people. Say, wait a minute, you've got a responsibility here to your teammates, to your opponents, to one another, the officials, the coaches. Everybody knows their job and we are going to have a consistent experience across the board. One of the things we've tried to emphasize is that being a champion does not necessarily mean winning a championship. Winning a championship means you played better, but being a champion is about respect, how you play, how you treat one another, how you respond to a coach, an official. So we like to talk to our young people about behaving like champions. If you behave like champions, championships take care of themselves and it's through our championship system that we are able to, we think, emphasize those platforms. Sometimes they are very small things. At a lot of our championships we hold banquets or luncheons and what we ask our staff to do is start with the academic awards. Let's not bring Bill up and say hey Bill, you were the leading rebounder in the league. Everyone knows that. But what I want them to know about Bill is what his GPA was or other achievements. So I ask our staff, start with the academic stuff first. Then we also added a community service award, in terms of things we've done league wide. We added eighteen new awards this year. One for community service so as a league we awarded the team who did an outstanding service in the community. I went to a lot of those presentations and it might have been the women's tennis team that went out and worked at Habitat for Humanity.

CigarBoy: Is that for each sport?

LeCrone: Each school elected one team for community service. And then we asked each school to give one league-wide award for academic achievement. So we added nine for service, nine for academics. So again, what we have to do is emphasize and re-emphasize these platforms. We work everyday on competition. The coaches do, the athletes do. They're trying to be as good as they can possibly be. But where we try to help them grow is in the service area, the responsibility area, and the academic area to make sure they understand that we believe those things are important as well. They don't get that that's important unless we change some things. So when you come to one of our championships, it's just not about going out on the field and seeing who wins and who looses. Also, we have speakers come in and talk to our young people about leadership and leadership development, discipline, diet and those kinds of things. Those are all learning kinds of opportunities. That's why we hope to continue just to make our championship different.

CigarBoy: What does the future hold for the Horizon League? I guess when you think of the future, everyone always thinks of expansion. Can you talk about the criteria for expansion and what else the future holds too?

LeCrone: Well, I think a really sound league is built on a couple of things. I think first and foremost is membership. You have to have a solid membership base with members who are committed to one another. You have to have members who like being together. You like to have members who have a purpose together and I think we have that. That's taken a long time to get together. Secondly, you have to have what I call equity. I think equity is in two phases. To me, equity means you have to have some money in the bank. We've been able to build our financial foundation. When I came in ten years ago, now I'm on my 11th year, we literally had no money in the bank, no money in reserve and we were in debt. Successful organizations can't do anything, I don't think, if they are in debt. Finally, there's a brand equity here. There's building equity in these four platforms that we believe in. So as long as we continue to build equity and I think we are in the developmental stage right now, our league is going to be very, very solid for the future. As far as expansion goes, I think membership issues in most leagues are always at the forefront. I've put together a committee of Presidents and the chairman of our Membership Committee, who happens to be Mike Cusack over at Wright State. We are taking a real close look at what we are calling membership protocols. We want to make sure that we respond in a right way if there is a school out there who might be a member of another league, or an independent who might want to join us. There are certain ways to go about doing that. Then at the same time, we believe we are ready to expand and we want to go recruit a school. That school could be an independent or a member of another league. We want to make sure that we are consistent in those protocols. So it all goes back to our platform. If we would expand, it would be someone that has a geographic fit, academic fit, athletic fit, and really could help us build equity in our brand and that means a real commitment to those four platforms. Someone that's going to help us competitively, someone that could help us academically, help us reinforce the values of community and accountability/personal responsibility. So we are in the middle of developing those protocols now and that's pretty exciting and we'll see where that might lead us.

CigarBoy: What's the optimum number of schools that would work in this conference?

LeCrone: That's an interesting question because that is more easily answered if every one of your sports programs has the same numbers. For instance, take any one of our sports, people would presume that because we have nine members that in every sport we have nine schools sponsoring that sport. That's not the case. We are at nine for some, at eight for some, or seven at some. So pick a sport where you have eight. We add a team and go to ten, which puts them at nine. That may not be a good number for them. Take a sport that's seven and now move it two eight. Well, that might be pretty good. So you have to look at the whole matrix and we've actually developed a matrix. Any sort of expansion will be the right number for some sports and probably won't be the right number for others. One of the goals might be, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn't be working on expansion, but maybe we should be looking at expanding programs within our membership. See what I'm saying? So now, we say to our schools, we have nine members and every school is sponsoring the same number of sports. Now, we probably won't be able to get there because we have some geographic things. For instance, Green Bay, and rightly so, has chosen not to participate in baseball because it's problematic weather-wise for them. But Milwaukee has a pretty good baseball team so you think, hmm gosh if Milwaukee can do it, couldn't Green Bay do it? But then you have the issue of adding a men's sport right now in a time of Title IX, and you don't want to get out of balance, nor should we get out of balance from the equity standpoint. It's a difficult question because eight wasn't necessarily the right number for all of our teams. Nine wasn't necessarily the right number, ten, eleven, twelve might not necessarily be the right number because we are all over the place in terms of the sports sponsorship matrix. If that makes even sense?

CigarBoy: Yeah, I think the way fans look at is they look at basketball and they think well, basketball drives everything. They don't necessarily think of tennis or cross-country or some of the other smaller sports. Everyone looks at this is a basketball driven conference and geez if we had 10, it looks like it would work out pretty well. The other thing that I think would be part of the equation would be how do you insure yourself against a defection or two?

LeCrone: Well, the way you insure yourself against defection is make sure that your league is solid in the equity area and that everyone has buy-in. That's what we have. I think that's what really distinguishes our league right now is that these are the people that built this league. I didn't build it. They helped build it and I think that anybody that helps build a house is fairly hesitant to move out of it. So that's one thing. We really don't talk about that much. We talk about expanding and growing and moving on in what we want to do. If you look at this just from a basketball frame of reference, the basketball player point of view, you could even argue that moving from eight to nine hasn't been that helpful because Youngstown coming in the league, although it provided scheduling help that we needed, resulted in our league RPI dropping. People might argue that is one of the reasons Butler didn't get into the tournament last year. That may have been one of the reasons. I don't think that was the main reason. If you look at just the basketball frame of reference, then you would have to look at the kind of game that would help us competitively, strength-wise or at least have the potential to do that. But then at the same time, that's only one frame because we have men and women's basketball, now we have sixteen other sports to consider and take a look at. Those are all the things we take into consideration.

CigarBoy: Is there a balance of private vs. public?

LeCrone: You know one thing that we recognize? When this grouping of schools came together, I think one of the big, big concerns was, oh my gosh, how are these state schools and private schools going to be able to compete. Well, when you get right down to it, the budgets are about the same and that's why they are all able to compete. Look all over the country. The Big 10 has public and private. The ACC is public and private. The Big East, the Big 12, I'm not sure if the Pack 10....does the Pack 10 have any private schools?

CigarBoy: Stanford

LeCrone: Yeah, Stanford's private. There you go. Look across the country. There aren't many all-private leagues or all public leagues. I think league membership is driven more by geography, commonality, beliefs and budget. If the institutions are pretty similar in that way, they can find a way to compete with one another. Sure, there's a big difference between tuition at Butler and tuition at Cleveland State but that hasn't seemed to be a big problem for us. There's huge differences in graduation rates. The overall graduation rate at an institution like Cleveland State, which is more of an open admit kind of institution and serves a very fine purpose, is probably 35-40% but Cleveland State doesn't need to be embarrassed about that. That's the kind of institution they are. Their student population is completely different than Butler's. Now if Butler sitting there talking about a 35-40% graduation rate, when it's more of a typical residential institution that's problematic, but Butler's not. They are at 75-80%, which is where they should be. So those differences, we've been able to embrace and understand the difference in the institution. It's been real even competitively. I think that is always the bottom line. If there's not a big competitive disconnect or a big geographic disconnect, where you're travelling all over the place, then conferences usually stay pretty stable.

CigarBoy: So a criteria for membership in the Horizon League is based upon geography and a commonality with goals?

LeCrone: Yeah, and I wouldn't call it a criteria or requirement but what things would we look at in evaluating a possible member. Have to look at geographic because that impacts costs and scheduling. You have look at competitive strength and their competitive history. Have they been nationally competitive in sports? What do they bring to the table? You would want to take a real close look at their budgets. So there's a financial lens you would have to look at, making sure they would be in our range of spending. Too low makes them not able to compete. Too high, puts them maybe in a dominant position that we don't want to get to. So you have to look at that. You have to look at the academic profile of the institution. We would want them to be in our ballpark with graduation rates, particularly their student athletes. Certainly we would look at the community service their athletes are involved in. That's a platform we believe in. We'd look at their whole personal accountability. Do they have NCAA violations? Are they major or minor? Do their teams have any history or reputation of problems? Or their coaches? Again, what kind of people are we dealing with here. All these things are really, really important.

CigarBoy: Now let me do one other thing. So the Horizon League is not necessarily looking to expansion out, but they are open for it when the time is right?

LeCrone: As I said before, where we have to be is we have to be mindful of the issues, which we are. We have to be aware of the issues and then we have to be true to what we believe in. We are in pretty good shape right now after number nine so there's no rush here. There's not a huge rush to just run out and get another member. We've got to make sure we are ready for that. We've just come off the Youngstown State expansion and they've been with us a year now. We need to help them grow and develop their program. That's one of the things I've always believed in, and as a league we've continued to help one another grow our programs. That gets back to the equity because if our league continues to do what we believe in, there are lots of schools that want to be part of that. You'd be surprised, on a monthly basis, the calls we get in our office about membership, and I'm not exaggerating, it's one a month. My answer is, I really appreciate your interest and we'd be happy to consider that but we have a process and it takes time and here's the lenses we would be looking at, so on and so forth. The only thing of a definitive nature that I can say in regards to membership, it's something we do talk about but at this point, if there would be another member, we'd do it carefully and deliberately. We will do it in a delicate way to make sure it works for everybody. Those are the things we would look at.

CigarBoy: One thing I see when I look at a conference like the MAC, a very established conference, a pretty stable conference, a school may come or leave but their core's been there many, many years. What is the difference between the MAC or MVC and the Horizon League?

LeCrone: Well first of all the Mid-American is a great league. It's been around a long time, as is the Missouri Valley, as is the Mid-Continent, as is the Ohio Valley. We operate in the backyard of the Big 10 and Big 12 to some extent and those are all wonderful leagues. What we are trying to do is not compare ourselves to what other people are doing. We are trying to do what we believe in. If we do what we believe in, things will take care of themselves. We'd love to compete with the Mid-American's, particularly in basketball. We'd love to compete with the Missouri Valley, particularly in basketball. As you go back through the years, and look at the head-to-head competition we've done very, very well against both those leagues. I think last year we had a winning record against the MAC. I'm not quite sure we were the Missouri Valley, but we were darn competitive. So those are two leagues we really love to compete with, why? The schools are similar, similar geographics, it makes sense. So for Wright State to be playing Miami or Cleveland State to be playing Ohio U, or Detroit to be playing Eastern Michigan or Western Michigan, and for Butler to be playing Ball State. The Mid-American Conference and the Horizon League should be playing each other in a lot of sports. The Horizon League and Missouri Valley should be playing each other as well in a lot of sports. If you look at our schedules we do. So we love to compete with them but at the same time we don't really compare ourselves to what they are trying to do or what the Valley's trying to do, or the Big 10, or Mid-Conn, Ohio Valley's trying to do, we just want to be ourselves. We are comfortable with being ourselves. Things will take care of themselves and that's really what we like to be about. There are other leagues in our area that we really like competing against.

CigarBoy: Has there been talk about doing a Horizon League/MVC challenge like the ACC/Big 10 challenge?

LeCrone: We talked about it but one of the things that you may have read about recently that's pretty exciting for us is we've entered into an agreement with ESPN and the Western Athletics and the Mid-Americans and the Missouri Valley in what we think will be a really unique event on February 22, called bracket buster Saturday. The three teams competing from our league are Milwaukee, UIC, and Detroit. Two of our teams will be on the road and UIC will be at home. They'll be paired with a team from the Missouri Valley, the WAC, the MAC and maybe a Sunbelt school, Western Kentucky's in and so is UC Santa Barbara, which is out of the Big West Conference. But we have great opportunity because it will be a total of 9 games, all televised on some ESPN property, whether ESPN 1, 2, Plus, Full Court (which is a pay channel), and hopefully will add some of the air clearances to those we can. Those that wouldn't be on the national cable. So that's pretty exciting. That is a creative scheduling agreement, which is essentially what it is. Now the reason it's so creative is that we've asked our teams in our leagues, on February 22nd, to take their league game, let us deal with it here in the league office. This is a critical part of the league season. Then we are telling these teams, oh by the way, we'll let you know three weeks before you play who you are playing. Everybody is going, WHAT? They allowed us to do that. That's pretty remarkable to get eighteen coaches and eighteen AD's to do that. It's kind of a remarkable scheduling arrangement and that's what's driving it. ESPN thought it was remarkable enough to televise it. Those are the cooperative things we are doing with the MAC and the Valley. So this is our scheduling agreement and what I continue to work on right now before we have any other kind of event, a challenge series or anything like that, is I want to make Bracket Busters' Saturday just really successful. We think it can be absolutely gangbusters. We think it's going to be a good brand. We think it's a very sellable property. We think it's great for the students and that's why we are doing it. Because it's quality competition, a chance to be on television and kind of be on all day on a Saturday, and it's a chance for people to pay attention to... that's why we are calling it Bracket Busters. Most of these team have had phenomenal post season success: Kent, UIC, Detroit, Tulsa, Gonzaga, you think the teams that are in the field, they are all outstanding. They've all done very, very well in the post season so we are really, really excited about that.

CigarBoy: As we look at the Bracket Busters, how was it determined how many Horizon League teams would participate?

LeCrone: Well, the real founding fathers, you have to give credit where credit is due on this, is the Mid-American and the Missouri Valley Conference. Where they started was an event that could feature at least four of their teams. ESPN was a part of this from the very beginning and I think ESPN really expanded on the notion that this could involve lots of other teams and other leagues and even make it more attractive. We all also have an agreement with ESPN. So, I think ESPN was really interested in having us participate and then as we began to talk, as far as Commissioners, we wanted to put the best field possible together. Western Kentucky became part of the mix. We needed some teams on the West Coast for the late time slot but they also have some outstanding teams out there in the Big West. So that's how it naturally evolved from maybe only 12 teams to talking about 20 teams at one time. As the number got shifted, you have to keep in mind this is a scheduling arrangement first and foremost, we finally were able to convince 18 teams to do it. For whatever reason, we had teams identified as successful in the post-season, but then you have to add on top of that, who can play at home, who's willing to play away, and that's where teams kind of fall in and out. Butler chose not to do it because they said they couldn't work out the scheduling aspect and that's really what this is, is a scheduling agreement. UIC and Detroit were very willing to do it right from the on-set. So at one time it could have been UIC, Detroit, Butler and a Milwaukee, all four. But then Butler decided that they really couldn't participate and then we had some other teams drop out and it was easier to go to 18 at that point, 9 to 9 rather than look for 2 more teams. Had we opened up more slots, I think we would have pushed very hard for more Horizon League teams but I think having 3 in the event is pretty good. They are the 3 ranked teams. Detroit and UIC, if you look over the history of the league over the last 5 years, they've had pretty good post season success. People forget UIC has been in the NCAA tournament two times in the last five years. People look at our league and think about Butler and Detroit but UIC has been to the NCAA twice and that's pretty good. Then Milwaukee, there's a lot of interest in Milwaukee because a lot of people think they are going to be very good this year and they are looking for very competitive teams.

CigarBoy: That's the only school that doesn't have a great history in the NCAA.

LeCrone: Right and then there are some other schools like a Northern Iowa. If you look at the whole list, there are some schools that don't have a great, great history, but again, a lot had to do with scheduling and who was willing to do it. Just think of it, trying to put all of those things together. We hope in the future, that as different teams advance into the NCAA, we would absolutely want to involve them in the Bracket Buster Saturday.

CigarBoy: Let me ask you a little about officiating. Are you concerned with the way college basketball is officiated and if you are what's the Horizon League doing to ensure they are getting the best possible people refereeing their games?

LeCrone: Here's what I'm concerned with. As you know, the World Basketball Championship was played here in Indianapolis. They gave me an opportunity to see not only our team play, but to see the different teams from around the world play. This has to do a little bit with officiating, with the rules and style of play. It sets-up the larger issue. I think, what I saw in the international league teams were teams that had real premiums on passing, ball movement, screening, rebounding, the real fundamentals. They're unbelievable shooters. And even though there's a shot clock that's not at 35 seconds, it's shorter, I think it's twenty-four, they get the ball down the court quickly, get into an offense, then they run it. The lane is wider; it's triangulated so there's not as much physical play down there. Don't get me wrong it's physical, but the lane is wider open. So the big man's got to get away from the basket. As the big man moves away from the basket, it opens up the basket and it kind of forces your big man now to move better, face the basket, shoot the ball better, not just stand under there and take up space and be screeners, just bump people or bump defenders. That, in contrast to the way I think the NBA plays, which is kind of one on four, isolation, you know get the ball to the best player. Particularly when the shot clock is under ten everyone just either crashes the boards or that player isolates. That tells me that we need to take a serious look nationally at our rules. Triangulating the lane, moving the three-point line out, not to the NBA length but maybe in the middle. Maybe our line is too short. But what I saw was this really beautiful game that in contrast to the way our game is played, even in our league at the college level, it's become bodies on bodies, it's a lot of screening, it's become rougher, it's lost a lot of it's beauty. Now that's one man speaking. I don't think you cure that by officiating, well that's part of it but I think where you start is a real serious look at the rules. We could change the rules to improve our game and then to say to our officials, enforce the rules. If you are not going to enforce the rules we'll find somebody that will. The interesting thing is that the World Basketball is officiating with two officials. Not three, two! I'm not saying we go back to that, I'm not opposed to a three man system but I think we can make some rules changes nationally that would really help our game. Now, if we do that then we have to make some changes with our officials. They have to call these different rules the way they are meant to be called, so the game does change a little bit. I am interested in being part of that dialog. I'd love to have the opportunity to have it happen nationally but it's just a thought and reaction to what I saw take place at the World Basketball Championship. I hope the people on our national rules committee will begin to look at that. We have a person on the NRC. But to answer your specific question, I think the officiating in our league..... first of all, there's always room for improvement. I've never seen a perfectly officiated game, never will. It's an imperfect science. But the people who officiate our games night in and night out, I know we are focusing here on basketball, overall do a marvelous job. They make many more good calls than they do bad ones, by far, many, many, many! Even to the common observer, who would say, that's a bad call, once we review the film, it turns out to be the right call. So they make way, way, way more good calls than they make bad. It's the only profession where you are expected to be perfect every time you go out on the field. Well, you aren't going to be perfect. Just like players miss shots, and dribble off their knees and coaches make bad decisions and bad substitutions, get in wrong defenses, officials are going to make mistakes. They aren't going to be perfect, but, what I'm always hopeful is that our players, coaches, and officials work together, knowing that we are playing in an imperfect system. You're going to miss some shots, I'm going to miss some calls, and the coach is going to make mistakes. Let's live with our mistakes and move on, and by and large, our coaches do a pretty good job with that. They really do a pretty good job of saying to the official, OK, let's move on. I'm really proud of our officiating system and John Adams, who runs it, does a heck of a job. As long as our people are professional, courteous, good listeners, doing the best they can, I've got not problems with them. So I think our officiating will continue to improve but I'd really like to see us take a fresh look at the rules in college basketball. I think we can change it for the better.

CigarBoy: Bottom line, it would make it easier to officiate?

LeCrone: I don't think the game is ever going to be easy to officiate, ever. It's always going to be difficult to officiate because the players are so good, so big, and they are so talented that it happens in the blink of an eye. I'm not sure it would improve the game but......

CigarBoy: You're thinking if you open up that lane a little bit and get some daylight in there..... . .

LeCrone: It could improve the game. Let's give them a little daylight in the lane because right now it's tight inside. I think it would have to a lot of those combinations of triangulating the lane and moving the 3-point arc back.

CigarBoy: The Horizon League just signed a TV deal with the National College Sports Network. How's that work?

LeCrone: Here's the way it works. NCSN is a national company that hopes to do two things. They are trying to acquire rights to telecast certain athletic events. We are a rights holder. At the same time they are trying to get cable companies to pay for their service. If they can combine those with some advertising, then they have something they can go on. So what we have done is told NCSN, and this is a non-exclusive agreement, so it doesn't compete with any of our pre-existing television contracts, that we would give the rights to telecast, at their expense, any of our championship events if they would like to do it. That would be any basketball games that we aren't committed to on ESPN, and that's all of our championships. The other part of the agreement is that if we want NCSN to carry a game, let's say we all of a sudden wanted our volleyball championship on, I could go to NCSN and say we want you to put this on. They would carry it but then we would pay for the production costs. So it's kind of joint venture. So they are paying no rights fees, but pay us production so there's no cost to us to produce any of our games and at the same time, if we want something on their system, the we can get in on but we'd have to pay the production.

CigarBoy: Might that be a basketball game where, let's say Butler's on a roll again, they're knocking on the top 20, we are getting into the last weeks, and they are playing Detroit. Fox is not putting that game on for whatever reason.....

LeCrone: NSCN might come to us and say, we want that game on, and we say great! We'll try to make the arrangement to make that happen.

CigarBoy: A game like that, they'd probably want to do it because they could make money on it.

LeCrone: You would hope, and that's the key. If they can make money on it, they are going to run it.

CigarBoy: Where would that be televised?

LeCrone: Well it's a national network so it will be covered by a number of cable outlets across the country that carry the service. Who do you buy your cable from?

CigarBoy: Warner

LeCrone: Let's say Warner decides to take NCSN as one of your premium stations. So now it will come to you just like HBO, STARZ does, so you will go to the NCSN channel if Time Warner buys the services.

CigarBoy: Will they regionalize it or will it be national?

LeCrone: I don't know what their distribution system would be. They could probably regionalize it.

CigarBoy: One question that comes to mind is the whole NCAA conference system. There's always a lot of talk about the mid-west. People in mid-west about what goes on in the west, but there's always a lot of talk with Conference USA finally caving in with all the schools spread around the country, in different directions, are they going to be football or are they going to basketball. The Big East and A-10 swapping a few members. Obviously there's a domino effect. Do you see some major changes in conference alignment on the horizon, so to speak?

LeCrone: I think change is inevitable. I think you've got two things right now that are at work. In 2006 you have a new agreement with the BCS schools. To some extent, that could begin to force some re-alignment. But one of the things with Conference USA, Mid-American, the WAC, and the Sunbelt and some others who are 1-A but don't gain automatic birth into the BCS, they really want access. They want access. So teams that want that access might begin to figure out how to do that, either in their travel league or in another league. Number two, the NCAA has taken a pretty close look at Division 1-A member requirements. So there is going to be some kind of line drawn. Will everyone make it on the top half of the line? I'm not sure but those on the bottom of the line may have to quit conferences. I think it's like any other business, the one constant is change but I'm not a fortuneteller so I couldn't tell you what's going to happen. I couldn't tell you want's going to help you with a league like the ACC who has 9 members and maybe does need to get to twelve. I don't know. What I have to do for our league is be aware of those issues and try to speculate on how that trickle down might impact us. That's why we try to stay on top of many of the football related and membership issues as we can. Because, stuff CAN happen! (Chuckle) You've got to be prepared.

CigarBoy: Is it within the realm of possibility that a Horizon League, and it could be any league but we'll talk about this league, moves up until it gets right next to the major status. Major defined as a the six big conferences. Everything after that starts to be high Mid-Major, is there an opportunity to really bump up there in the RPI, in 7, 8 or 9 area?

LeCrone: Well we've been as high as 9 or 10 in the men's basketball RPI, so most of it is driven by budget, infrastructure and those kinds of things. It certainly would not be impossibility for us to get there. I think we could. We certainly have the coaches. But it takes a special group of young people, it takes special coaches because for the most part, our schools are competing not having the full complement of infrastructure if you will, that a Big 10 school might have. In a lot of respects, you are really talking about the fundamental mission of an institution. Ohio State is going to be Ohio State for years to come, barring any cataclysmic changes. What we need to do is pick out our niche. So as a Wright State, Cleveland State and Youngstown State, all those schools in the state of Ohio, they all have a niche. Can they compete against Ohio State? Sure they can but they have to pick their niche. In some years that might be a nationally prominate sport like basketball. In other years it might be volleyball, or softball, or this or that. We are fortunate in our league to have some pretty darn good nationally competitive teams in a number of sports. We just don't have the depth that a Big 10 might have. It's a pretty big mountain to climb but the thing that makes me feel good is we've got the coaches and student athletes who want to climb it. That's where it really gets down to special coaches and that special group of players who can get there nationally. When you think back to Butler and what they did to Wake Forest, Wake Forest has been a nationally competitive program. I happened to go there to school. I think it's great. They've got a lot to be thankful for. But for Butler to go with that team and that coach and win like they did was pretty impressive. So, that should tell everyone that's possible. It may not be possible day in and day out, but they can do it too.

CigarBoy: Tell me about the actual operation of the Horizon League here in the office. How many staff people do you have here?

LeCrone: We've got, oh boy, now you're making it tough on me now. I want to say we have 8 full-time people now. Isn't that awful? Yeah, I think we've got 8 full-time. We've got a number of part-time people. You can see our place here and I'll walk you through it and you can get a good sense of it. It takes about $2 million to run the office. Each year we are able to bring in more than we spend. That's how we are able to build up our reserve.

CigarBoy: What happens with those reserves?

LeCrone: A lot of times we give it back to the schools in the form of distribution. Generally we share it. We put part of it in the bank, just like we'd run our own homes. The rest we distribute out to the membership. For the first time in several budget cycles, this year there will be no net cost to any of our school to be a member of our league. So they get all the programs and all the services at no cost to them. So anything they pay in terms of dues or anything like, they get back out in terms of distribution and that's good. That's the way it should be. We should be a funding source for the schools. We should always be marching along towards funding our operation, not costing our nine members. That gives them a real value.

CigarBoy: I'm going to have you walk through your career path of how you became a Commissioner. If there is a young Johnny LeCrone saying, "I want to be a Commissioner when I grow up." How did you become a league Commissioner? Is there a career path in term of how someone does it?

LeCrone: I don't know. I don't know if I can advise anybody how to get here (laughing). I can only tell you how I did it and I'm not sure this is the ultimate goal anyway. I just landed here. I wanted to coach. That's what I really wanted to do.

CigarBoy: What was your sport?

LeCrone: I played basketball. I played everything but I wanted to coach either basketball or baseball. I really wanted to coach basketball but I ended up coaching baseball. So I started like a lot of people in the athletics business. I started coaching. I was a player. I played competitive athletics ever since I was 6. Ended up at Wake Forest. I did play baseball. I did play for two years, maybe three, that was when we had JV teams. It was so long ago. Freshmen weren't eligible then. So I played two or three years of JV basketball in a pretty good league. I found out through that you could make a career coaching in college and that's what I thought I really wanted to do. But, I had an opportunity to go work in professional baseball in Wichita, KS, which I did. Then I kind of learned, hey you can have a career as a professional administrator whether it's with a pro team or college. I ended up back on the Wake Forest campus as an Administrator. Then kind of by happenstance I got to know the League Commissioner who was a man by the name of Bob James at the time. Bob had an opening in his office and Bob knew me and I knew him. This is a time when all the women's championships and women's programs were coming into the NCAA, they were with AIAW. So they needed some administrators in our league office to help those. Then I stayed in the league office about ten years. To begin to say maybe the next career opportunity would be to run my own league. So I had this opportunity back in '92 and really haven't looked back. It's been great. Continues to be great. So I don't know how you get there. There isn't any formula but I hope that maybe, every place I've been, at least when I've left, has been better.

CigarBoy: What's a typical day like for you?

LeCrone: Oh gosh, the typical day is there is no typical day. So what I try to tell our folks here is we are a service organization and that goes nicely in with one of our platforms. What do we do? We are helping the 1200, 1300, 1400 people that come through our championships system, to add value to their college experience. That's what we do. That's why it's fun to come to work everyday. We are helping young people have a great college experience through competition. That's what we do so we work to support that every single day. We are serving the coaches, the administrators, and ultimately the student athlete so that's what makes a difference. That's what makes it gratifying. If you think about it, that's what we are really doing. I simply ask our people to be accessible, to be here, to be in touch, and we do quite a bit of travelling so they have to balance accessible with being out and somehow they manage to do it. They are great people.

CigarBoy: One question I have could have asked earlier. About a year ago, the media reported that Marshall was on verge of joining the Horizon League, maybe Conference USA for football. Walk me through that. How close were they to joining and what happened when they kind of backed off?

LeCrone: First of all, the Marshall people were wonderful. We really had a good connection with their athletic staff, their coaches, with their president. I would probably say it just happened too fast for us in that our Board was just not quite ready to expand at that time. That's really where it happened. I think our initial meeting with Marshall happened in August/early September and we were coming up for a meeting in October and that's really when they needed a decision.

CigarBoy: It was driven by football for Marshall, right?

LeCrone: Yeah and it was kind of a unique thing between us and the Conference USA. The timing of it was just difficult for us. We had just added Youngstown. That's not a comment on their school or their program but it just wasn't the right thing for us to do at the right time. That's why ultimately we decided not to expand. That's really what we decided because we thought Marshall from an athletic viewpoint could be a pretty good fit. At the same time they are in a good league. They are in the Mid-American Conference and that league serves them very, very well. So at the end of the day, I think the decision was more about us and our interest in expanding, than it was about anything specifically to do with Marshall.

CigarBoy: So it could be revisited a some point in the future?

LeCrone: Well, I don't know. It has to be revisited in a larger context of expansion. I think as we went through that, we decided that's one of the things we want to take a real close look at with all of our protocols. When people do approach us, what is the time frame, how does it work, those type of things. It's just the last thing you ever want to have happen with these kind of things, they are delicate things, and you just don't want the people, the institutions, to be embarrassed. You don't want the MAC to be embarrassed, you don't want our league to be embarrassed, and you don't want Marshall to be embarrassed. So I think that taught us a pretty valuable lesson that you have to work your way through these things pretty delicately, and quietly, and cleverly and in a timely way. Those elements just weren't in place for us then because it was on a pretty fast track.

CigarBoy: Last question, explain the new league tournament format?

LeCrone: It is a fascinating and creative way to answer the question of do you play your tournament games at home or do you play them at neutral sites. Where we kind of landed was, you do them both. So our real theme for this year is "bringing the championship home." We are calling this a championship which we think is a little different than a tournament. The reason it's a championship is that the tournament bracket kind of changes. It changes by the week. One of the special sections we are going to have on our website this year is called Tracking the Bracket. Depending on where you finish, that's where you are going to be on the bracket and that's going to determine whether you are home or away. Whether you get a bye or don't get a bye, the creative part of this is the field is seeded one through nine so it's inclusive. One of the things we believe in is, hey, everybody deserves a chance to play in this darn thing. If you finish one, two, three, four, five or six, if you finish in the top six in our league, you are going to have a chance of hosting a home game. So the way we've set this up is that the opening round, not the first round, but the opening round games will be played at home. The championship game will be played at home and in the middle, we are going to go to a neutral site. That's the creative part of it. The way we've set it up, in the opening games, the top two seeds, the teams who finish first and second get an automatic bye into the semi-finals. That's huge. The number three seed gets an automatic seed into what we call the first round. Then everybody else, the six remaining teams play in the opening round, which is kind of fun. So those six are reduced to three. Those three combined with the one (who got the semi-final bye) remember, now you've got four. Those four play down to two and those two play one and two. That's what's unique about this. On the opening round games, seeds four, five and six will host seven, eight and nine. So 4-9, 5-8, 6-7 will play. Seven, eight and nine will have to go on the road and four, five and six will get to host a home game. That takes place on Tuesday. Then those three winners will travel to a neutral site, and for this year, it will definitely be in Milwaukee, unless Milwaukee is not one, two or three, and has lost on Tuesday, then we'll go to the number one seed. It could be anybody. So once we are all there, once we have our six teams there, we'll play down to the championship game and we'll stay there if the host team is in the championship game or we'll move to play if the host team lost. We'll move to the site of the highest remaining seed. So the fun thing about it is you've got three opening round games. We could be in Chicago, Cleveland, and Dayton, all at 7pm, all playing. Then on the following Friday/Saturday, we bring six together and play, then on the following Tuesday we could be moving again. The fun part about this is we could be at five different sites. So the championship could be in five Horizon League cities, which is kind of fun. The thing that put me over the hump was talking this summer with basketball players. One of them happened to be Kevin Clancy at Loyola, great young man. I said, Kevin, tell me about last year's championship game, it was really a great game between UIC and Loyola, a great game. He said I would have really like to have played in front of more people. I said I would have too. I said if you had your choice of playing the game where it was, at Cleveland State or playing on UIC's home floor, knowing that they'd have had 8-9,000 but they'd all be pulling for UIC, what would you have rather done? He said, I'd want to go to UIC. That put said to me that this is the right thing to do.

CigarBoy: Wow! All that got me dizzy. How'd you get to this point? I guess you look at it every year or every couple of years probably? How'd you get to the point where you wanted to go this way instead of having at one location? Is it because there are only a couple of school that could host it and make money with it?

LeCrone: We've been studying it and I said to Bob Lovell at last year's tournament, that we are coming up on getting to one of our rotations. We are going to Milwaukee then we are going to Butler and we've been through the rotation. Everybody in the league, since I've been here, has had a chance to host. I said it seems to me it's time to decide if we want to keep doing this. We've been talking about this with our group for a while. We just started throwing a lot of format concepts together. We started with ten, got to 5.

CigarBoy: Is this the Executive Committee looking at this?

LeCrone: Yeah, yeah. So finally we put together a Basketball Issues Committee, we talked this with our coaches and AD's. Finally we put together four concepts that we thought had some merit. We thought we'll start one of these concepts or we'll stay the same and do that two-year from now. We took it to our AD's they got so excited about one that they wanted to do it immediately and that took some time to work through. They finally kind of convinced us. We said if you want to do it that bad, maybe we can do it this year so that's the way it happened.

CigarBoy: What do you do during all the games. It use to be easy for you to be in one location.

LeCrone: I might stay home and watch them on television. We'll staff the three opening round games. We'll have staff at every one of those games, because those are championship games, and then we'll do what the teams do. We'll travel probably. So on the three opening round games, I might stay at home and watch them all on television at a place where I can get all three games and then when we go to our neutral size obviously I'll be there for all those games.

CigarBoy: You mean you get to have all three on at the same time? With some potato skins, a cigar...........

LeCrone: I don't know about that. I'll be biting my fingernails to make sure everything's going well. But we think the opening round games are great for crowd interest and people are going to get excited. It's going to be different and we'll find out in a few years if it works or not. I think we've got to give it four or five years to work and see if this is the right thing. We'll tweak it along the way. It's not perfect and we'll learn something every time we do it and then we'll try to do it a little better.

CigarBoy: That was a good ending.

LeCrone: I think so!

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