PirateCrew: Seton Hall Pirates Football & Basketball Recruiting
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By Colon Rajala
Trove: I wanted to start out with a question I saw posed from someone on the forum that I don’t think has ever been broached during past interviews with yourself or your predecessor Pat Lyons - how do you define success for Seton Hall athletics? What do those quantitative and qualitative metrics look like?
Bryan Felt: Absolutely. I think it's a great place to start. There's really a myriad of metrics. As a department we look at results as incredibly important and men's basketball results are at the top because it's our flagship program and when I talk about results, I mean what everybody sees that defines success, wins and losses.
Obviously when you work in athletics, wins and losses mean a great deal, but for me, success goes beyond that and it will always be our student athlete experience and the success of our student athletes that is most critical, because at the end of the day, that's who we are, we’re an educational institution.
Our student athlete GPA is 3.531 I believe, the highest in our history. So, there's a great metric we look at right there. We're at 85% of our student athletes with a 3.0 or above GPA, I think 60% of our student athletes are Dean’s List, which is a 3.4 or above GPA, so those are incredibly important metrics for us.
Our APR, academic progress rate, is higher than the division one average, which is another great metric we look at. I think performance results, as I said before on the court, or on the field or in the pool, wherever it might be, are one of the first and easiest ways to measure success because there are also things that are hard to measure. Your culture, our department culture specifically, is incredibly important and I think that defines our success a little bit.
I worry about culture all the time and I think it's so important. You have a real mixed bag of metrics that you look at, but I think at the end of the day, our student athlete experience has to be really strong and that means our student athletes are graduating, that means our student athletes are enjoying their experience here at Seton Hall and they're going on to become successful contributors to society.