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Nevada AD Stephanie Rempe on new initiatives, NIL and facility gains, season-ticket growth


Stephanie Rempe, far left, is entering her first full summer as the Wolf Pack's athletic director. (David Calvert/Nevada athletics)
Stephanie Rempe, far left, is entering her first full summer as the Wolf Pack's athletic director. (David Calvert/Nevada athletics)
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Nevada's Stephanie Rempe is entering her first full summer as the Wolf Pack's athletic director after being hired last June (her first day on the job was July 18). With Nevada's athletic season winding down this week with the outdoor track and field NCAA West Preliminary, Rempe stopped by NSN's studios Friday to discuss a number of topics, including the school's "Nevada's College Town" initiative; Wolf Pack Fridays; name, imagine and likeness efforts; facility improvements coming this summer; football season-ticket sales; and game-day experience efforts. You can see the full interview below or read a portion of the conversation underneath that.

On new "Nevada's College Town" initiative

"This is something that I've continued to hear about from the time I arrived. Everybody talks about, 'Reno should be a college town. How do we make it a college town?' And so, that's what we've been thinking about, talking about. I don't even know who actually came up with the idea of just saying, 'Nevada's college town.' And so we really captured that. We're rolling it out this summer with a variety of different pieces to it, and we really want the people in this community to get behind a Division I, Tier One research institution in this community, so we're excited."

On rolling out "Wolf Pack Fridays" this August

"Wolf Pack Fridays has been around for a while. We want every business to wear Wolf Pack gear and blue on Fridays and kind of embrace that idea. We want people to get excited about that. Obviously, it helps in a variety of ways, but it makes people talk about the Wolf Pack. And one of the things I've also noticed, even though we want to enhance the idea of a college town, you do not see very many other schools when you're walking around and living in the Reno area. You see a lot of people wearing Wolf Pack stuff, which is great. I do feel like people are open to that. Our logos are great, our colors are great. We feel really good about that. So really enhancing that on Fridays. And our Nevada's College Town and Wolf Pack Fridays is really an opportunity to get local businesses involved. It's basically $100, which is completely reasonable we feel like, and you get a flag and a bracket. If you own your business and you have a storefront, you put a Wolf Pack flag out on Fridays or you could have it out all the time, and then there's a welcome package and there's other ways to get involved. Whether it's a CPA firm or Brothers Barbecue, we're encouraging those businesses to also offer a discount for people when they come in and wear Nevada gear on Fridays."

On Nevada's efforts in name, image and likeness

"In the last month, we hired an individual named Austin Clutts. Austin is 100 percent full time involved with name and likeness. He is not paid by the athletic department because if you're paid and in the athletic department, there's certain things you can and can't do. By having him paid by a third party, he's arms distance from us, so he really can do anything. He is working with our student-athletes, he's working with our coaches, he's working with donors and he's working with the business community in addition to working with our sports properties, which is our multi-media rights holder that has the rights to sponsorships. So you might have a Wolf Pack sponsor and they can come in and sponsor us through the athletic department. They might have the rights to the marks and then they could go hire student-athletes to do some name, image and likeness deals. Austin is touching all of those areas. It's a very big job, but he's been fantastic. I feel like we have a program that is absolutely sustainable that can compete for sure across the board with all of the schools in the conference, both financially from the collectives but also in terms of our ability to get out in this community."

On the importance of NIL in recruiting

"You are allowed to use name, image, likeness in recruiting. You're not supposed to say, 'Hey, you come to my school, I'll give you an extra $10,000.' The way the coaches are able to talk about it is saying, 'This is our team. This is the kind of deals that they've had.' The thing we feel we have really strongly going for us is everything our student-athletes signed up for in terms of name, image and likeness compensation, they received. You hear stories all over the country, and obviously coaches hear things that aren't public, but if a student-athlete came here and they knew they were going to get compensated for this amount of time at this amount of money, that's all happening. Our coaches can stand behind that and feel really good about that. Our student-athletes can then tell recruits, tell their teammates, 'Yes, I received exactly what I was told' because there are schools across the country (where that doesn't happen). Obviously you read the stuff in the paper, and they're crazy numbers that are out there, and I always say, 'Do you know for sure that amount of money really got into the pockets of the student-athletes?' We've navigating it the best we can."

On facility improvements this summer

"We are putting a shovel in the ground in June for the Lannes basketball building. We're really excited about that. The Cashell Fieldhouse locker room project, which is soccer, track, football locker rooms, that will be done this summer, which we're really excited about. We still need to raise $3 million more for that. We still need to raise $4 million more for the Lannes building. But they are moving and going. The softball facility's completed. But we still have to continue to raise money for the softball project. We're always fundraising. We're always talking about that. We know Joel Bitonio came with the wonderful news about that project, donating $1 million dollars for the weight room."

On football season-ticket sales

"We've got to sell tickets, and our staff has proven that we are doing that. We are rolling in that space. Feel really good about it. We are less than 100 tickets away from reaching last year's season-ticket number for football, which is remarkable. It's May. We're still going to be selling June, July and August, and so we're super excited about that because that's where we put in so much time and effort as of August last year. And it's paying dividends because they're being trained, they have goals, there's a good dynamic. When you have people selling tickets, there's some competitive stuff in there. Obviously, we feel good that people are excited about next year and the program and a lot of the transfers that came in with Coach (Ken) Wilson and everything he's been able to do. So we're really excited about selling those tickets and continuing that through the summer."

On game-day experience improvements

"We're spending a lot of time figuring out how to ensure the gameday experience is exceptional. We're spending some time on traffic. We're spending time on the experience of walking in the gates. We have all new scanners because those have been an issue. We're making sure people are going to the right seats, and there's been some issues with that. We're working with Sodexo on getting more points of sale (for concessions). And we've spent a lot of time and money on the infrastructure of our video boards. There is some equipment that we have been short, which is what happened, and we all saw it at basketball when our video boards had their issues. We have purchased a lot of different pieces of equipment, and then we're working with our campus on the IT infrastructure to make sure everything's connected. We can't let that happen again. We can't talk about the gameday experience and then not be able to have an event where the video boards work and the sound system's working."

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