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After almost a decade practicing law, in 1988, Schemmel started as an assistant athletic director at his alma mater, Kansas State University, where he had been a four-time All-American track and field athlete coached by the legendary DeLoss Dodds. Three years after taking the Kansas State job, he moved to the University of Minnesota, where he climbed the ranks from Associate Athletic Director to Senior Associate Athletic Director. During his time in Minnesota, Schemmel directed a men’s basketball Final Four and also headed up a $3 million capital improvement campaign.

In 2003, Schemmel served as Arizona State University’s Director of Development for its fundraising group. And in 2004, he returned to athletics at Conference USA, where he was Associate Commissioner for Governance and Legal Affairs until he left for San Diego State.

During his time in athletic administration, Schemmel has served on several NCAA committees and currently chairs the Division I Championships/Sports Management Cabinet. In this interview, Schemmel talks about chairing the new NCAA committee, what he looks for in hires, the big issues currently facing Division I, and how important it is to maintain a healthy work/life balance.

AM: Why did you leave your law practice to become an athletic director?
Schemmel: I’m just one of an amazing number of attorneys now in the athletic directing business, and I think the number of attorneys in major college athletics is continuing to increase at a very fast rate. I use that experience every day in the way I conduct business and how the department deals with all kinds of legal issues—whether contractual or otherwise. I’ve never had a day when I haven’t been able to use some of those skills and experience in this job.

How does your background as an NCAA student-athlete affect the way you do your job?
My passion for athletics goes back to when I was five years old. Anybody who knew me as I grew up knows that I couldn’t get enough of sports and it didn’t matter if it was baseball, football, basketball, whatever. I couldn’t ever get my fill.

I don’t think there’s any doubt my experiences as a student-athlete influence how I think about things and handle situations. DeLoss Dodds, who was my college coach at Kansas State and is my mentor, had a profound influence on me. I think many of us would like to approach things the way he does and think about things the way he does. So along with my experience competing, I think I had a very good teacher in DeLoss and that certainly helped me.

What did Dodds say about your decision to become an athletic director?
It was a little bit tongue in cheek, but he said, “Be careful what you wish for in that profession.” This is the type of business that you must have passion for if you’re going to be effective in it. I think DeLoss was mostly testing my passion. He knew that I had a pretty successful law practice and that I was contemplating leaving and he just wanted to make sure I had thought it through.

How do you connect to San Diego State fans?
When I first got here, we had a piece on the Web site called “Ask The AD” in which we relied on people to e-mail or write in questions for me to answer. That particular piece morphed into me answering questions on video. We had the technology on campus and just thought, why not put it up in video form? We think it’s a little more personal that way. I like to be able to reach out and touch people with my face and my words, rather than just by writing a little two-sentence response to a question.

I also do a television show once a week that we put on our Web site. It’s a local morning show that has me as their guest for a 5- or 10-minute segment every Thursday morning. They broadcast it locally and then it goes on the athletics Web site. That’s a great way for me to talk about what’s happening on campus, embrace the issues, promote our university, and even talk about the tough stuff sometimes.

Can you talk about the new NCAA group you’re serving as chair of?
The Division I Championships/Sports Management Cabinet is the newest version of what we used to call the Division I Championship Cabinet. Things have changed a little bit under the new structure, but the duties are mostly the same. We oversee all of the Division I championships with the exception of men’s basketball, which is governed by another committee.

We have three meetings a year, and our first was in September. We spent some time orienting new members, Myles Brand spoke to the group about NCAA goals and strategies for the upcoming year, and each of the championship sports reported to our cabinet. Then we spent a lot of time talking about championship issues that have come up.

What sort of issues are you concentrating on?
Travel was a big topic, and will continue to be a top priority for us in light of the increasing costs of travel—particularly airline travel. It’s kind of a two-headed monster because not only is travel more expensive, but there is also increasingly less availability as airlines cut back on flights. With many NCAA championships, it’s not known who’s participating until the week before. Trying to make team travel plans within a week of an event is a huge headache.

We did implement a new policy that basically extended a previous rule. Any travel for championships that were within 350 miles of your campus was mandated to be by bus. We extended that radius to 400 miles, so that will save us some money as we keep teams on the ground and out of airplanes.

You directed the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four in 2001. What was that like?
It is a huge event and all the committees and sub-committees that go into a final four are so numerous and so immense. The key—just like with any organization—is to select the right people to head up those committees.

Whether it’s the transportation committee figuring out all the logistics with hotels and practice times, the committee handling all the surrounding clinics, or the committee that organizes all the hoopla going on at the convention center for the fans, they’re all incredibly important. You just have to select really good people who are knowledgeable in each of those areas and can take the bull by the horns. We had really great people in Minneapolis who did those sorts of things and I know that I’m very proud of us and what we accomplished.

What do you look for in hires?
It all starts with our philosophy here at San Diego State, which is also my own personal philosophy: to have success both in graduating our student-athletes and on the field. I won’t accept anything that’s less than that, and the people here have to believe in both of those things.

If that philosophy is embraced by each person I’m considering hiring at a position, then it comes down to their leadership skills, and ultimately, if they’re good people who treat those around them very well. Hiring people who care about others gets lost in our business sometimes. All other things being equal, I look for that quality more than anything else.

What are your goals for San Diego State athletics?
The goals are pretty simple, and hopefully we talk about these enough every day that they are ingrained in everything we do as a staff. The two things I talk about are number one, that we should graduate 100 percent of the athletes who finish their careers with us. The number two goal is to bring our entire department—all 18 of our sports—to championship levels. We’ve still got a ways to go to do that for all of our sports, but we’re not going to rest until we get there.

What are the big issues currently facing Division I?
Budget issues, for one. The ability to finance what we’re all trying to accomplish clearly dominates the Division I landscape. There are a handful of the 119 schools that are self sufficient, but most of us are not. There are two related questions: What is the model that we should all go by? And what should a university commit to successful athletics? The answers really have to be backed up with a funding model that the universities participate in. For the great majority of us, that’s the issue we talk about most.

A continued concentration and focus on gambling issues for our student-athletes is also really important. Not only for student-athletes, but for officials, too. There is so much money bet on major college athletics each week that the temptations are there and people are there to tempt student-athletes and officials. I think that’s an issue we have to stay right on top of.

The third big issue is amateurism. We still need to develop a consistent system of dealing with when student-athletes can professionalize. Once they make a commitment to an institution, how long is that commitment good for? I’m an advocate of the system we have in baseball in which an athlete can sign out of high school and good luck to them, but if an athlete commits and enrolls in an institution, they are thereby obligated for three years at that institution. That system gets kids well into their degree requirements and hopefully very close, if not graduated, before they leave, which goes back to our big goal of graduating our athletes. It also eliminates this one-year-and-out phenomenon that I think is damaging to men's Division I basketball in particular.

How do you help your staff keep a good work/life balance?
We’ve come up with what we call our Principles of Success, and each one of us in the department carries around a card that lists 10 of those principles. One of those is that family comes first.

In our business, we tend to live, eat, and breathe our work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We work very hard, so I demand that our people get away from what we do sometimes. They must take vacations, put their cell phones down, and take a break from e-mails. We try to enforce that so our people can recharge their batteries and make sure that their family and friends are coming first.

When we’re all done being in this business and we look back on our careers and the important things in our lives, it’s probably not going to be some championship win, but family and friends we remember, and I think it’s good to remind everybody of that. A great thing I once heard was to write your own eulogy and work backwards from there. And I believe that very much. I think what you want people to say about you at the end of your life is where you should work from.

Abigail Funk is an Assistant Editor at Athletic Management.