MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — It was a year ago WVU athletic director Shane Lyons, like many, didn’t know what the next steps were after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the sports world.
Beginning with the Big 12 and NCAA tournaments for basketball, the remainder of the winter and spring schedules were wiped out. Questions then moved toward the fall seasons and most notably, football.
Lyons played a critical role in helping the college football season start and finish as chairman of the Football Oversight Committee, and he also worked nationally with the NCAA Division I Council — on top of all his duties at WVU.
Because of his importance at the local and national level, Lyons was named one of four winners of the Athletic Director of the Year Award by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics.
“It’s a true honor,” Lyons said. “There’s a lot of fingerprints that go in to this award. Being an athletic director, you take the good with the bad, and this is the good. I have a lot of great people I’ve surrounded myself with from my senior staff to the entire staff at the WVU athletic department that have helped make this a reality and I can’t thank them enough.”
The award “highlights the efforts of athletics directors at all levels for their commitment and positive contributions to student-athletes, the campuses of their University and their surrounding communities,” according to a WVU news release.
Lyons, in his seventh year at the university, is WVU’s first recipient. The other three winners are Matt Hogue (Coastal Carolina), Tom Holmoe (BYU) and WVU alum Rob Mullens (Oregon).
Lyons credited his work with the student-athletes at WVU, and working with them helped him push forward through the pandemic to try and get sports back.
“My discussions with them were constantly, ‘We want to compete,’ ” Lyons said. “I thought it was my job to try and make that happen and in the safest way. We got the appropriate medical people around the table and asked how we can do this. We knew we may have to pause but we didn’t want to pull the rug right out from under us and say we’re not gong to compete.
“That’s what we did and that’s probably the most gratifying thing about this past year — we just kept moving forward and had a successful year.”
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