Wake Forest AD John Currie Interview

If you work harder in the business than John Curry, Wake Forest AD, yesterday I was chatting with him and I had joked, hey man, when are you going to get down to Tampa?

And he told me he was already in Tampa, even though I just saw him hours before that at the Joel Coliseum. I'm trying to be like you, John Curry, as the Wake AD joins us this morning on Triad Today. I'm doing my show in the afternoons and I'm doing the morning show.

Find somebody who can do both, John. Hey, you know, Josh, I got the best AD job in America. We've got great coaches, great student athletes, great logistical support, so got to see a great win over Duke, our Big Four arrival on Tuesday night. And then by Wednesday afternoon, our charter had gotten down here and got over to practice and watched our guys work out at USF.

Now we're getting ready for this game on Friday. I am interested in the behind the scenes of lining up a bowl matchup like tomorrow's Gasparilla ball, Wake Forest playing Mizzou. How long before the final regular season game in Durham were you in touch with bowl officials? How much say does the league have and where you go?

Just paint the picture for us. Well, our league has a really good collaborative process and Michael Strickland is our senior associate commissioner with Salem native and does a really good job of communicating. Coach Klassen and his staff and our teams have built a great reputation with bowls. We always, you know, we run into bowls when we have the ACC meetings during the off years and their representatives always talk about how Wake Forest under Coach Klassen and our student athletes really set the standard of participation and engagement at the bowl site. So I think we've built a strong reputation in that regard and then our fans have been incredible.

You know, this game, even though it's tough for people to get down, you know, on the day before Christmas Eve and all that kind of stuff, we sold out our pregame fan party earlier in the week, had to move it to a bigger place and sold out again. So those kinds of spirit and enthusiasm and reputation that we built makes Wake Forest a desirable partner for any bowl. John Curry with us here joining us from Tampa, the site where Wake Forest will be playing Missouri tomorrow. Sam Hartman has made it known that tomorrow is going to be his final game at Wake Forest and he'll have some decisions to make for what's next for him after that. But considering the history in front of him in his final game tomorrow and all the winning you guys have enjoyed with him at quarterback, how far are you willing to go in assessing how much he's meant to this program? Well, Sam Hartman is an incredibly special player and I think everybody at Deacon Nation appreciates how much he's poured into our program and the bond that he has with his teammates is incredible and if you think about what we've accomplished in his five years at Wake Forest, it's really quite remarkable. We've got the second longest bowl streak in the ACC.

If you look at a program that's won 18 games in the last two years, hopefully we can make it 19 tomorrow and we want to see Sam break that record too. We heard from Dave Claussen a couple of days back talking about some of the challenges with tampering and NIL and what's going on with the transfer portal. It's been a crazy month for coaches.

Yesterday was National Signing Day or the start of the early signing period, I should say. Jack Brown has said that he knows two programs offered a lucrative amount of money for Drake May to enter the portal and try to get him to go to another school. Your job as an AD is to try and best help your coaches. How powerless do you feel as an AD at times when it comes to other schools breaking NIL rules by tampering with players who aren't yet in the portal and also it doesn't seem the NCAA is enforcing the rules that are on the books?

Well, Josh, the reality of it is you just have to, you know, it is what it is. There's always been tampering and recruiting going back for all of time and now it's just a lot more public and so you just got to acknowledge it. We're going to follow the rules and we're going to do the things the right way, but I can tell you this, one of the things I get to do as an AD and I've always done is I do in-person eggs interviews with a good sampling of our student athletes. And in talking to our student athletes in multiple sports this year, their appreciation for what Wake Forest provides for them is second to none. And it is really refreshing to sit down with a young person who's completed a degree about to go on a bowl game again and so appreciative of everything that they've received and invested as part of this process. So I said it before and I'll say it again, the Wake Forest of the world will be just fine with all this stuff because we're going to focus in on what's most important. And I think the way our coaches continue to focus on building relationships, investing in young people both on and off the field, the continuity we've had in our coaching staff. Jane Caldwell told me the other day that this is the best, one of the best academic semesters we've ever had at Wake Forest from an athletics perspective across the board. So we're going to keep focusing on what we're great at and in the meantime 18,000 people applied to Wake Forest last year and only 1370 got to be part of this year's freshman class. So the opportunity to come here on athletic scholarship and be part of this enterprise is pretty doggone special and there's a whole bunch that won't get that opportunity that would like to.

And it does make fit important though too. See, Clawson was right to point out that there aren't a lot of guys in that portal that credits will transfer or can get into the school with the academic side of it, how great of a school it is. The good news is what you're talking about. There aren't many guys who are entering the portal to try and leave Wake because the fit's so good and the school and the experience is as great as it is. But does it concern you at all the financial piece of this where Wake is also not the program that can replenish its roster should guys get poached?

Well, again, I think that you've seen the contrary happen. I mean, that may be the assumption that we can't replenish our roster. But, you know, in football we had a bunch of student athletes who came as grad transfers this year, whether it's Kobe Turner or Brandon Harris on defense, you know, two guys that came to Wake Forest that fit right in and did a great job for us. And you can go on down the roster looking at the impact players who transferred to Wake Forest. One of the best things about transfer student athletes that I've experienced since we've been able to increase the numbers of transfers accessing Wake Forest. I think our transfer student athletes appreciate the advantages in the experience at Wake Forest more than any athlete we have because they've experienced something different when they chose Wake Forest. Wake Forest AD, John Curry. I think it really turns into a positive because the student athletes experienced something else.

And now they experience what we provide and they see what we provide is still what it's supposed to be all about. John Curry is joining us. Wake Forest, director of athletics. The Demon Deacons are in action tomorrow against Mizzou.

It's the Gasparilla Bowl and it is a 6.30 kickoff time that you can watch that game. John, while I got you here, got to talk about that basketball win the other night for Steve Forbes's group. You win the game at the Joel, which puts them in a really good position after getting left out on Selection Sunday earlier this year. I know it's really soon to be talking about resumes and things like that, but given how the ACC performed in the tournament after seemingly not getting the respect many felt it deserved and the strength of these wins at Wisconsin, at Duke, how confident are you the air quote narrative surrounding the strength of the conference and specifically your team is going to be different this time around?

You know, Josh, I can't control any of that. What was important about our great win against Duke on Tuesday night was the fact that it was the next game after we had had a tough loss. It was a home game.

It was an ACC home game and it was a big four rivalry. And then for me personally, you know, to win, and I know Coach Ford feels the same way. You know, you win that game on December 20th and our student athletes who've worked so hard, they don't play again until December 31st, right?

So they have a much deserved break off and a break like that is a lot more fun when you win that last game than if you lose it. So I was delighted to see we had great crowd, great enthusiasm, competitiveness, and to come back and have the strength and resilience to come back from a, you know, a really tough stretch of tough games. Our schedule is a really tough schedule. Obviously, Duke's going to be a good team and be highly ranked and all that kind of stuff. And the key thing now is for us to continue to build, as Coach Ford likes to say, you know, stack wins. We got another great opportunity next Saturday, the 31st, you know, New Year's Eve at noon at home against Virginia Tech. Virginia Tech's really good. That's a great opportunity for families to get over to the Joel faculty staff appreciation game for our Wake Forest faculty and staff.

So that's a great opportunity for the defense. John Curry, last thing for you. I know where you're going to be tomorrow. I know where you're at right now. How will you be spending Saturday, Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on Sunday? Well, before we talk about that, we got to talk about two o'clock this afternoon when we play Rhode Island in women's basketball at the Joel.

Right. So you got time to get over there. So that's what I'll be doing this afternoon. I'll be watching that game on ABC Network Extra. We were we're going to play the play the football game on on Friday night. Like I said, we got a great crowd, representational crowd. We'll get back on midday on the 24th and looking forward to just being with our family and relaxing a little bit.

Megan Gebbia's group, 8-4 start to the season and her first season. John Curry, you do a great job keeping tabs on all of it. That's why we really do appreciate you squeezing in time and your busy schedule for us. Have a very Merry Christmas and thank you for all that you do for Wake Forest. Thanks, Josh.