Search to find new athletic director launched, hopes to find replacement by spring

The Office of the Vice President for Campus life has launched a new website designed "to keep the Princeton community informed” about the search for a replacement for Athletic Director Gary Walters ’67, who announced before the school year began that he would step down from his post at the end of the 2013-14 school year after 20 years.

A 12-person committee, chaired by Vice President for Campus Life Cynthia Cherrey, has been formed to find Walters’ replacement. The committee consists of two coaches, two student-athletes, two faculty members,two administrators and three alumni. The coaches are men’s basketball head coach Mitch Henderson ’98 and field hockey head coach Kristen Holmes-Winn.

The website states that the committee will be speaking in person with a wide range of people in its efforts to find a successor to Walters and includes a “Comments & Suggestions” section where visitors are encouraged to tell the committee what they would like to see in the next Director of Athletics. At press time, 29comments had been submitted.

In addition to the website and one-on-one meetings, Cherrey said that multiple open forums would be held to further discuss the search, with the dates and times to be announced on the website.

The website specifically said the decision would be made in the spring of 2014.

Walters discussed the challenges his replacement will face in an interview with The Daily Princetonian earlier this month about his retirement.

“We are very thinly staffed, administratively, compared to some of our league competitors, and I worry about the issue of burnout for the people who work for me,” he said.

“There are no days off,” he added. “And we could definitely use more administrative support. Those’ll be [the] challenges for the next AD.”