When Todd Stansbury was hired by John Hitt in January 2012, it was a dark and tumultuous time for UCF Athletics.
The Knights were under NCAA investigation after the previous athletics director Keith Tribble was accused of flagrantly violating rules to help steer recruits to the Orlando school.
Hitt, who died Monday at the age of 82, saw beyond the sanctions facing UCF and, as he did throughout his nearly 30 years as the university’s president, remained supportive of the athletics department.
“He was a steady hand,” Stansbury, now a deputy athletics director at NC State, told the Sentinel on the phone Tuesday. “Early in my tenure, [I remember] him saying, ‘Todd, don’t worry. We will figure this out.’
“As an athletic director, knowing that your president is in the trenches with you goes an incredibly long way. I’ll be forever grateful that I had John Hitt as my president, especially at that time.”
Around the same time, the landscape of college athletics was changing as well. Amid conference realignment, UCF was aiming to join the Big East but the league collapsed and re-emerged as the American Athletic Conference.
Once in the AAC, things quickly turned around for the Knights, including the football program that won the league in its inaugural season, earning the team’s first bid to a BCS bowl game.
“Despite the issues that we were confronted with and the uncertainty in intercollegiate athletics in general, we ended up going to the Fiesta Bowl,” Stansbury said. “Everybody knows the story of Blake Bortles and coach [George] O’Leary going to Phoenix and beating a very good Baylor team.
“You just think of all that had happened prior to that, for us to get to that point … I credit that with Dr. Hitt’s steady hand and his support of wanting intercollegiate athletics at UCF to be as good as it could possibly be.”
Throughout his tenure, Hitt helped hire many UCF athletics administrators and coaches, including former athletics director Danny White.
“Transformational leader. Mentor and friend,” White, now Tennessee’s athletics director, wrote on Twitter. “Sad to hear about the passing of John Hitt, but grateful for the opportunity to serve & learn while on his team. His impact will be felt for generations. What a life! Prayers to Martha and their family.”
In 2016, White and Hitt hired men’s basketball coach Johnny Dawkins, who described the former president as a great man.
“Where we see UCF now and where it’s headed, he laid the foundation for that,” Dawkins said. “He’s the one that put it on an upward trajectory and you have to be an incredible man to pull that off the last few decades.
“Every time I interacted with him and visited with him, he was a wise man and a very good man. He’s going to be missed.”
In the weeks after Dawkins was introduced, Hitt helped hire former UCF women’s basketball coach Katie Abrahamson-Henderson.
“Dr. John C. Hitt was one of the first people I had the opportunity to meet when I was hired at UCF,” Abrahamson-Henderson, now the women’s basketball coach at Georgia, said in a statement to the Sentinel. “He was a great leader for the university for many, many years.
“One of my favorite memories with him took place at my introductory press conference. He said ‘Coach ABE, do you know how to spell fun?’ I said, ‘I think so – F-U-N.’ He said ‘No – W-I-N.’ I loved that he said that, and we hit it off right away. He will be dearly missed.”
When longtime UCF baseball coach Jay Bergman was fired in May 2008 amid allegations he harassed a team equipment manager, Hitt helped hire Terry Rooney, who spent eight years in Orlando and was named AAC Coach of the Year in 2014.
“It was an honor to have been hired and serve as head baseball coach under President Hitt’s leadership,” Rooney, now an assistant coach at Purdue, said in a statement to the Sentinel. “His support and desire to see all teams and student-athletes succeed were evident on a daily basis.
“As a coach, you wanted to run your program by the same example he did with the entire university, class and dignity.”
Hitt was a college athlete himself. He played tackle at Austin College in his home state of Texas. Linda Gooch, the head coach of the UCF cheerleading team and spirit program for almost 40 years, believes Hitt’s experience as a football player impacted his perspective as a university administrator.
“He understood the important role that athletics could play in the development of UCF,” Gooch told the Sentinel. “All along the way, he showed that athletics was a part of his overall plan. He was always very supportive. Our spirit program — both he and Martha were always very supportive.”
Gooch recalled how “Spirit Splash,” the annual UCF Homecoming event that’s become one of the most unique in the country, began organically in 1995 under the watchful eye of Hitt.
With students standing around the university’s reflection pond, some began to run into the water. With campus police standing nearby, Gooch turned to see how Hitt would respond.
“I looked over and he threw his head back and started laughing and then everybody ran in,” she said. “He wasn’t always that kind of fun-loving type of person but he knew when it was important to let it down a little bit and realized the importance of being spontaneous as well.”
The balance of Hitt wanting UCF Athletics to be dominant in competition while growing the university academically was key to UCF’s overall success nationally, Gooch said.
“We were so fortunate to have someone that was an academic but someone that had actually experienced being a college athlete and understood the importance that athletics could play not only in the growth of the university but also in the lives of the young people that were going to receive those college scholarships,” she said. “He lived that himself.”
Hitt’s work over the course of his presidency helped put UCF in a prime position to be an attractive option for an expanding Power Five conference.
That invitation came in September 2021 when the Knights were picked to join the Big 12 Conference, which they’ll officially join this summer.
“In my mind, he was somebody that saw the value that intercollegiate athletics can bring to higher education,” Stansbury said. “He was a big man and he had a big vision. When you look at his legacy and what ultimately UCF became over the 20-plus years he was there, it’s pretty incredible. His fingerprints are all over their success.
“I’m just so glad he was here to see UCF ultimately get its invitation to the Big 12.”
Email Jason Beede at jbeede@orlandosentinel.com or follow him on Twitter at @therealBeede.
