UMASS

In a little over a year as the athletic director at the University of Massachusetts, Ryan Bamford has made a name for himself for a handful of reasons. Within a few months on the job, he announced the department was shelling out to cover additional cost of attendance fees for all scholarship athletes. Come the spring, no one was quite sure if UMass would (or could, financially speaking) pull the plug this year on a pair of floundering coaches for hockey and women’s basketball programs that had absolutely flatlined. The first-year AD hit the reset button on not one, but both fronts, firing John Micheletto and Sharon Dawley in early March. For better or worse, he’s laid some considerable ground work in his first year in Amherst. “I’m encouraged by where we’re going. I thought we had a really good year setting the tone for where we want to go,” Bamford said after the Senate meeting on April 28, during which he got up to speak both in defense of the program and his own good judgement in determining what’s best for the future of football at UMass. -Daniel Malone, MassLive, Read More