North Carolina State University Athletics
ATHLETIC ACHIEVERS: Charlie Cobb
6/27/2005 12:00:00 AM | Pack Athletics
June 25, 2005
• The first in an occasional series of former Wolfpack athletes who have worked their way up to other top jobs in college and professional athletics, either in coaching, administration or some other facet of operations.
BY Tim Peeler
RALEIGH -- Charlie Cobb doesn't enjoy disappointing people, especially those who have believed in him throughout his career in athletics and in administration.
So when he begins his new job next week as the athletics director at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., the former all-ACC football center won't be motivated out of a fear of failure. It will be out of his desire not to let down any of the people who believed that he could handle these new responsibilities even though he's one of the youngest athletics directors in NCAA Division I.
"Fear doesn't bother me," said the 37-year-old Cobb, whose last day as NC State's Senior Associate Athletics Director for External Operations was on Friday. "Disappointing people, that bothers me.
"From a professional standpoint, I have worked for a number of people who have prepared me and given me the ability to do this."
That list starts with former NC State football coach Dick Sheridan, who recruited Cobb out of West Columbia, S.C., and watched him develop into a second-team All-ACC offensive lineman, not to mention a three-time ACC Academic Honor Roll member and a 1990 Academic All-ACC. (The former starting center not only won the ACC's Jim Tatum Award as the senior football with the highest GPA, but he was also granted a Bob James Post-Graduate Scholarship by the league.)
"Charlie is so capable, so smart, such a good person," Sheridan said. "When I was talking to the people at Appalachian State, they asked me what Charlie's strengths are and I told them what I thought. Then they asked me what I thought his weaknesses were and I told them that I didn't see any major weaknesses. But I did say that there might be something they thought was a weakness: his age.
"I told them that Charlie has always been a very mature person, and that age was just a number. I told them that I hope his young age be a negative factor, because he is about the same age as I was when I got my first head coaching job (at Furman University). A couple of years after that, I was an athletics director at a Southern Conference school too."
The list also includes former Wolfpack basketball coach and athletics director Les Robinson, who brought Cobb back to Raleigh as an administrator after Cobb spent six years in Atlanta as the associate executive director of the Peach Bowl and the Atlanta Sports Council. Cobb was also the sales manager for the Georgia Dome, which gave him experience in working with contracts and agreements with professional franchises.
That the experience Robinson was looking for as NC State prepared to move its men's basketball program into the Entertainment and Sports Arena (now the RBC Center) back in the fall of 1999.
"He had done all of those things you need to work out - luxury suite sales, ticket sales, concessions, parking, all those things we had never really had to do before with Reynolds," said Robinson, who is now the athletics director at the Citadel, another Southern Conference school that will be competing against Cobb's Mountaineers. "He was worth his weight in gold.
"And if you know Charlie, that's a lot of gold."
Finally, current NC State athletics director Lee Fowler believes that Cobb has a bright future among the ranks of athletic administrators.
"Charlie is a very bright guy with a lot of ideas," Fowler said. "Appalachian State has someone who is on the rise in our field."
 Cobb was a second-team All-ACC center in 1990 for the Wolfpack  |
|
One day while on vacation in 1998, Cobb and his wife Lindsay, a former All-ACC goalie for the NC State women's soccer team, were running on the beach near Charleston, SC. They saw a guy walking along the beach, pushing a young child in a plastic wheelbarrow. They stopped when they recognized it was Robinson, who he had gotten to know while preparing the Georgia Dome's bid to host the ACC men's basketball tournament.
They made plans to have an informal dinner later that week with Robinson and his wife Barbara.
Before he even really knew he was being interviewed, Cobb was offered a job to return to his alma mater. Cobb never said yes or no. He just packed up the car two days after his son's first birthday and showed up in Raleigh.
During his tenure at State, Cobb helped improve the marketing and ticket sales for football and men's basketball, as the school moved into the new arena and expanded the seating for Carter-Finley Stadium. Since 1998, combined ticket revenues have increased more than 86 percent, adding some $6 million into the athletic department's operating budget.
"I think the NC State athletics department is in a very stable situation," Cobb said before he left. "We are on great financial footing. The facilities have been unbelievable. One of the things that has helped me in this job is the increase in the revenue we have been able to generate from tickets that have helped fund the facility projects that were so desperately needed.
"I got a great sense of satisfaction in the last few years of driving around Raleigh and Cary and the whole state of North Carolina and seeing more NC State stickers, more NC State hats. There is a pride and a swagger of being an NC State fan. That's something we are going to miss. It's been awesome to be a part of."
The Wolfpack family not only loses Cobb, but also his wife, Lindsay, who was an assistant women's soccer coach for Laura Kerrigan, and two of the biggest Wolfpack fans in the Triangle, 8-year-old Harrison and 4-year-old daughter Branan.
"The hardest part about taking the job is leaving here," Cobb said. "We have a lot of personal friends and professional friends here. It's a very comfortable existence. The ability to be around the other coaches and staff here, the athletes, especially with Lindsay and her team, those girls are like family. That is a tough, tough situation. It also shows the character of Lindsay and what she means to that program.
"Harrison, I jokingly tell people Harrison is the greatest NC State fan I know. If we only had 100,000 more just like him, marketing the program would be really simple. He is excited to know that he can be an App fan but that he can also be a Wolfpack fan."
"We all have a lot of mixed emotions. We are excited, sad, nervous, overwhelmed. But the reality of it is nothing ventured, nothing gained."
And, Cobb hopes, no one disappointed.
You may reach Tim Peeler at tim_peeler@ncsu.edu.
