Florida A&M athletic director Bill Hayes has resigned his position effective December 31, 2009. The resignation comes just days after whispers began circulating about the pending dismissal of longtime sports information director Alvin Hollins and athletic marketing director Bob McBee.
I don’t know exactly what’s going on with FAMU sports, but they couldn’t have picked a worse time for the bottom to fall out of a program that, from the outside, appeared to be on the rise. The Rattler football is competing for a MEAC championship and a possible berth in the NCAA FCS playoffs. The basketball team is preparing to open a new gymnasium this fall.
But there were signs of trouble within the program as early as this summer. The men’s track coach resigned a week after his was hired, Bill Hayes was rumored to return to Winston-Salem State as its new athletic director, and many fans were anxious about Hayes’ true intentions to remain in Tallahassee.
Now the university is on the search to fill its three most critical elements of executive leadership. Again, we don’t know what happened, but this situation reeks of issues of relationships between President James Ammons and Bill Hayes. Who knows; maybe there were money issues, the debacle of the Walter McCoy hiring and resignation, or Hayes’ public flirtation with Winston-Salem State. According to some sources close to the FAMU athletic department, Hayes’ never had a truly amicable relationship with Dr. Ammons, and that relationship became chillier with the McCoy situation.
What is clear is that the internal working of Rattler sports have all been removed or are willingly leaving, and they are probably marching out to the tune of the same drummer.
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