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John B. “Jack” Swarbrick used to sit in USA Gymnastics board meetings and ideas popped into his head. So he’d scribble it down on a note and pass it along, another of his ideas placed on paper.
Swarbrick, whom multiple media outlets are saying will be announced as Notre Dame’s next athletic director today, is a big-picture guy.
“That’s the beauty that Jack brings to just about everything,” said Steve Penny, the president of USA Gymnastics and recipient of Swarbrick’s notes. “We’ll sit in board meetings and he’ll pass these little notes about big picture ideas to take USA Gymnastics bigger than where it is now.
“He’s a big picture thinker. He’s a very, very, very strategic thinking man.”
The evidence is everywhere. He helped relocate the NCAA offices from Kansas to Indianapolis and placed the Midwestern city in the consistent rotation for the NCAA Final Four. A partner at the Indianapolis law firm Baker & Daniels, LLP, he was the Vice President of the 2012 Super Bowl committee that helped lure the game to Indianapolis, has served as general counsel for USA Gymnastics and USRowing and was on the executive committee of the Indiana Sports Corporation.
Locally, he was a consultant from the beginning of the Harrison Square project, which is being tabbed as an innovation to help revitalize downtown Fort Wayne.
Swarbrick had initially been brought in by the city to assess how it could bring more visitors to town using amateur sports and its current venues like Hefner Field and Spiece Fieldhouse.
“He has a great approach,” said former Fort Wayne mayor Graham Richard. “He goes and looks at what is happening in your city and doesn’t give you a cookie-cutter approach.”
Richard said his work with the city evolved from amateur sports to what venues would work downtown to, eventually, Harrison Square. What stood out to Richard was Swarbrick’s ability to bring people together by looking at underlying issues in arguments.
And one of Swarbrick’s suggestions to the city was to create a marketing campaign to display the various venues Fort Wayne can offer.
“Jack is one of those guys that would do well in just about anything but there is no question that organized athletics and sports and what lead to it is part of his practice,” said Tim Haffner, the managing partner of the Fort Wayne office of Baker & Daniels. “I’m not surprised that, if he’s chosen (as Notre Dame’s athletic director), a school like Notre Dame would look to him.
“Jack probably wouldn’t be happy at any place other than a school with national rankings like Notre Dame. Jack likes to be challenged and a school with a high-profile program presents the right challenge.”
Few schools are as high profile, especially in football, as Notre Dame.
The 54-year-old Swarbrick, a 1976 Notre Dame graduate and 1980 Stanford law grad, would be taking over for Kevin White, who left to become the athletic director at Duke on May 31.
While Swarbrick has never been an athletic director before, his name has been linked to high-profile jobs in the past. He had been a finalist for the NCAA presidency when the organization hired Myles Brand and his name had been linked in media reports as a candidate at previous openings at Ohio State and Arizona State along with the current vacant position at Indiana.
In hiring Swarbrick, Notre Dame continues with its history of hiring alumni. Of the 11 athletic directors prior to Swarbrick, only two were not Notre Dame alumni – Gene Corrigan and White.
Three of the past four athletic directors, including Swarbrick, enter the position without experience as an AD. Dick Rosenthal, a former banker who led Notre Dame from 1987-95, helped to broker the initial television deal between Notre Dame and NBC. Mike Wadsworth, the AD from 1995-2000, was an ambassador.
A story in the Indianapolis Star on April 27, 2005, reveals why Swarbrick would take the Notre Dame job. While at Notre Dame, he was a classmate of current Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins.
“For ADs, the relationship with the president is everything,” Swarbrick said in the Star. “There are very few of these that I would consider.”
He also said in that story that if he ever became an athletic director, “it’s because I really want to change that paradigm.”
Swarbrick did not respond to telephone messages sent to him Tuesday from The Journal Gazette.
Those who worked with Swarbrick all described him as a leader and someone who would fit well at Notre Dame.
Along with his experience in Indianapolis, of which Penny said “when Indianapolis developed a vision for sports, Jack Swarbrick has been at the heartbeat of that effort,” he’s also worked on many NCAA committees.
Haffner and Penny, though, said they had not spoken with Swarbrick about the Notre Dame job.
Swarbrick also chaired a combined task force with the NCAA and the United States Olympic Committee to research the decline of traditional Olympic sports in colleges.
“He wasn’t afraid to express out of the box thinking,” said Kyle Kallander, the commissioner of the Big South conference and a member of the task force. “Ideas of how we could approach the issue. He didn’t hesitate to say these are things we need to look at and deserve consideration.
“That’s leadership.”
It’s also what Notre Dame is hoping he’ll bring to South Bend.
-- Michael Rothstein, The Journal Gazette
