Yesterday’s entry highlighting the Wolfpack Women’s big win in Chapel Hill over the weekend reminded me of a recent conversation that I wanted to share with the community to see if any of our community members had any insight to share.
It started last October when I wrote this entry actually complimenting and praising Lee Fowler for making a coaching hire that I had the balls to call a success before the first jump ball of Coach Kellie Harper’s career. The praise can be summarized as follows:
One issue where Lee Fowler deserves some legitimate praise is in his hiring of Kellie Harper earlier this spring as NC State’s women’s basketball coach. I was shocked at the time that some people were giving Fowler grief for not hiring Stephanie Glance, and now that Coach Harper is here I am more convinced than ever that she is the perfect fit to bring NC State’s Women’s Basketball program back.
The commentary on the topic summarized as:
Please note that this praise is confined to Fowler’s choice of Kellie Harper as Head Coach; it does not extend to the overall management and guidance of the women’s basketball program. From a macro view, one cannot ignore the obvious that the Women’s Basketball program was allowed to significantly deteriorate from a top flight program to an also-ran throughout Fowler’s decade in Raleigh.
It also ignores that Fowler couldn’t find the energy, motivation or competency to hire Harper in March (instead of late April) and thereby allow her a fighting chance to do some recruiting. Whatever the excuses and rationality for moving painfully slow without an ounce of urgency are unacceptable and serve to reinforce the obvious conclusion that Fowler & NC State seem to never be able to understand the consequences of each of their actions.
Both of the aforementioned items exemplify why Fowler is so incompetent and rudderless as a ‘leader’ of a $40 – $50 million business. But, on the ultimate hiring of Kellie Harper I think the man finally got something right.
The catalyst for today’s entry was a conversation I had with a friend a couple of weeks ago that served to turn my ‘praise’ completely around on me. My friend indicated that he had heard that the reason for the inexcusable delay in hiring Coach Harper was that Lee Fowler actually wanted to hire Stephanie Glance and there were ‘others’ in the leadership at NC State that refused to let that happen.
Honestly, hiring Glance was exactly what I expected would happen; and, I was (obviously) very pleasantly surprised that scenario did not play out. Hiring Glance was clearly the path of least resistance and uarguably the ‘easiest way out’. And that is exactly why it was my expectation of what would happen. What better describes Lee Fowler and more appropriately describes his (lack of) work ethic than taking the easiest way out on the way to exerting the least amount of energy on anything other than chewing a cigar, playing golf or playing on the lake?
So, I throw this confusion out to the community this morning to seek some guidance and education on this issue?
Thanks so much
