MSU President M. Peter McPherson will recommend Spartan hockey head coach Ron Mason to become the university’s next athletics director at a Monday morning press conference.
University officials made the announcement Saturday night while Mason’s team was playing Ohio State at Munn Ice Arena. The MSU Board of Trustees is expected to vote whether to approve Mason for the post at its Feb. 13 meeting.
He will replace current athletics director Clarence Underwood, who has said he will retire when his contract expires in June. Speculation is that Mason, college hockey’s all-time winningest head coach, will step down as MSU’s coach when he assumes the athletics director post after this season.
Former football coach George Perles was the last MSU head coach to hold the department’s top spot, but Perles, who was athletics director from 1990-92, did not step down from his coaching job.
After Saturday’s 5-1 win over Ohio State, Mason and the MSU players were reserved in their comments concerning the announcement. Mason deferred most of the pressing questions to Monday’s 10:30 a.m. press conference.
“This isn’t the time and this isn’t the place,” Mason said Saturday night. “That’s why we called a press conference on Monday to discuss all these issues and I’d like to leave it that way if I could.”
When asked if he would accept the job as athletics director, Mason said: “At this point, that’s the way it looks, yeah.”
Mason, 62, is in his 36th year as a college hockey head coach - the last 23 of which have been spent at MSU. He has compiled a career record of 916-376-81 while also coaching Lake Superior State and Bowling Green.
He is 627-266-67 at MSU and won his only national title in 1986. He won the Spencer Penrose Award as the national coach of the year in 1992 and earned his 900th career victory on Oct. 20.
Last year, he helped organize “The Cold War,” an outdoor hockey game against Michigan that holds the world record for the largest hockey game ever with a crowd of 74,554 inside Spartan Stadium.
Mason will become the 16th athletics director at MSU, and takes the helm after a decade of repeated turnovers to the post.
MSU trustees removed Perles from the position, and NCAA violations under his watch left the university facing sanctions. The university then hired Merrily Dean Baker, but she resigned from the post two years later. Merritt Norvell, the next athletics director, also resigned from the position. Underwood, a long-time assistant athletics director, then assumed the post.
Last year, MSU hired national search firm Spencer Stuart to seek out Underwood’s replacement.
The thought of Mason vacating the Spartan bench caught many people off-guard, including the Spartan players.
“I imagine they would be (shocked), that’s human nature,” Mason said. “But they’ll respond properly.”
Mason stressed that he and the team “will be together through the end of the year.”
The Spartan players had different ways of dealing with questions about their coach Saturday night. Some were tight-lipped and didn’t comment on Mason’s longer-than-usual postgame speech.
Some players, most notably junior goaltender Ryan Miller, left Munn Ice Arena without talking to reporters.
Others, such as junior center Troy Ferguson, expressed feelings of shock.
“Right now, I’ve got so much racing through my mind, as I’m sure everybody does,” Ferguson said. “I think we’re just going to let it digest and wait until Monday so we can let our thoughts sink in.
“When you have news like this, it’s a bit of a shocker. This is big news for Michigan State hockey.”
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