After guiding their respective teams through disappointing 2014-’15 seasons, Mike Eaves and Bobbie Kelsey have both been put on notice by the UW Athletic Board.
Though the board voted Friday to retain Eaves as the men’s hockey coach and Kelsey as the women’s basketball coach, they declined to extend their contracts for another year. Both coaches’ contracts run until 2019.
The board also voted to retain but not extend men’s and women’s swimming and diving coach Whitney Hite, whose contract runs until 2017.
Alternatively, the board decided to roll over the contracts of both men’s basketball coach Bo Ryan and women’s hockey coach Mark Johnson, which both run until 2020, and the three-year contract of wrestling coach Barry Davis, which runs until 2018.
One-year rollovers are standard protocol for Wisconsin coaches whose programs produce results deemed satisfactory by the athletic board.
However, UW Athletic Director Barry Alvarez and the rest of the board clearly felt such a move wasn’t appropriate in the case of Eaves or Kelsey.
In his 13 seasons at the school, Eaves has compiled a 259-206-58 record and guided the Badgers to a national championship in 2006. But UW has missed the NCAA Tournament three times in the last five years and went 4-26-5 this past season, the worst record in program history.
Assistant coaches Gary Shuchuk and Matt Walsh were both fired at the end of the season.
“Nobody’s happy with what happened and you want to see a competitive team on the ice,” Alvarez said after the meeting. “You can’t reward someone for a season like that.”
The Wisconsin women’s basketball team also struggled in 2014-’15, finishing with a 9-20 record, including a 5-13 mark in Big Ten play.
In four seasons under Kelsey, the Badgers have gone 40-78 overall, 16-50 in conference play and have failed to make a postseason tournament.
“As you go along, you want to see improvement,” Alvarez said. “I don’t think we saw enough improvement where she was satisfied or we were satisfied where we thought that performance merited a rolling contract.”
When asked whether board members considered firing either Eaves or Kelsey during the evaluation process, Alvarez declined to give a yes or no answer.
“I wouldn’t talk about that if we did,” he said.
Though the athletic board didn’t make any changes, it sent a clear message to Eaves and Kelsey.
“That’s their jobs—to figure out the issues and correct them,” Alvarez said. “We’re giving them opportunities to get their job done.”
