AD History

The Gary Walters ’67 Senior Awards Banquet will be held a week from tonight, as it was originally scheduled to be held.

As with everything else in the Spring of 2020, it will be vastly different than what you're used to from years past. This time, it'll be all video, all online.

It makes for a completely different set of logistical challenges. TigerBlog has been impressed with the way his colleagues have pivoted away from what is ordinarily a huge undertaking to come up with something that hopefully will be very special for the Class of 2020.

The banquet is named, of course, for the former Ford Family Director of Athletics. Gary was the Princeton AD from 1994 through 2014, and his loyalty to Princeton dates back long before that.

Gary came from Reading, Pa., to Princeton in 1963 as a point guard in basketball. He would be a three-year varsity starter (freshmen were ineligible then), including on the 1965 NCAA Final Four team, and he would appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated along with teammate Chris Thomforde in 1967.

Before he ever came to Princeton, Gary played for Pete Carril at Reading High School. He then played for Butch van Breda Kolff at Princeton, coached under Carril at Princeton, coached Bill Carmody at Union and generally is as big a piece of the Princeton basketball tree as anyone has ever been.

It's amazing to TB that there have been an entire generation of Princeton athletes who have competed here since Gary Walters was the AD. In fact, the last class of athletes who were here when Gary was AD was the Class of 2017, which means that the current seniors are the last group who will have even competed at Princeton with teammates who were here when Gary was the AD.

That's correct, right? For some reason, this is really confusing TB. If Gary left in 2014, then the Class of 2017 would have been freshmen then. And the Class of 2020 would have been freshmen when the Class of 2017 was seniors. So yes. That works.

The list of Directors of Athletics at Princeton is not a long one. Princeton has had five (or possibly seven, depending on how you consider them) actual Directors of Athletics since the position was formalized in 1941.

It wasn't until 1937 that the athletic department existed as a University entity; prior to that, it was an independent association with a separate board to oversee the day-to-day operations. Going way back, there were no coaches, just team captains who ran each sport.

Asa Bushnell was the last head of the board of the athletic association and the first person to oversee athletics when it became absorbed by the University, but his title was never actually "Director of Athletics." Bushnell, interestingly enough, was not an athlete at Princeton (Class of 1921), even though 1) he would go on to have one of the great careers in athletic administration and 2) the Ivy League football Players of the Year win the Bushnell Cup.

The first person to hold that distinction was Ken Fairman, who served as actual Director of Athletics from 1941 through 1973, a 32-year tenure that is the longest of any Tiger AD. Fairman was also the head basketball coach before he became the AD, but he played football at Princeton, not basketball.

Fairman also left Princeton to serve as an Army officer during World War II. During that time, Howard Stepp was the acting AD. Stepp, it turns out, was a fascinating guy who was the head coach of the men's swimming and diving team and then the University registrar for nearly 20 more after that.

Stepp also started the Polish Olympic program and found himself in Poland just as World War II began, forcing him to flee that country. What TB hasn't been able to find out about Stepp is if he actually attended Princeton, but he'll get to the bottom of that.

Royce Flippen, a football player and 1953 grad, was AD from 1973-79, and then Robert Myslik took over from 1979 until Walters arrived in 1994. Myslik, TB always thought, was on the soccer team, but it turns out he was a baseball player.

Since 2014, of course, it's been Mollie Marcoux Samaan. She played soccer and hockey at Princeton.

And that's the entire list of people who have been Princeton's AD.