One of our own

IU Athletics Director Fred Glass received his undergraduate degree in political science in 1981. He graduated again in 1984 with a degree in law.

But his ties to IU began long before that. Cream and crimson have flowed through his veins ever since he can remember.

“My mom went to IU,” Glass said. “We always had IU stuff around the house. She always had IU games on the radio and TV and always talked about IU and who won and what was going on.”

Those ties brought him to campus often in grade school as family friends took him to games. He watched a lot of IU football, including the 1968 Rose Bowl.

“That’s when I got that little ball that’s in my office, which was a real connection to IU,” he said. “With all of the different moves that I’ve made in college and after college and here and there, for some reason, I’ve always kept hold of that Rose Bowl ball.”

He recalled rolling down the hill in the South End Zone, watching and listening to IU basketball games and the passion it sparked within him for the University.

He remembered pretending to be Jade Butcher, a wide receiver on that Rose Bowl team. He reminisced about the time he played hookey to welcome back the IU men’s basketball team after they won the NCAA national championship in 1976.

For a fifth grade art project, he cross-stitched the IU logo with yarn into a frame made of an egg carton.

“It was kind of like listening to the Indianapolis 500 on Memorial Day afternoon,” Glass said. “It was just part of growing up.”

Those ties to the University made his college choice easy.

“I was pretty much set on going to IU, in some ways, my whole life,” Glass said. “When I was a junior in high school, I came down and visited an older brother of a friend of mine and just fell in love with the rest of campus. We stayed over in his room in McNutt and had a really fun weekend. From then on, it was pretty much for sure that I was going to IU.”

While at IU, Glass went to all the football and basketball games. However, he said he regrets not being as integrated in the University as he could have been.

“I wasn’t as involved as maybe I might have been in University events like homecoming or things like that,” he said. “That’s kind of why I’d like to highlight those and make those special and available to all students. I’m hopeful that we can create some traditions and awareness to maybe get the people that are normally less engaged to get more engaged.”

Before the Ohio State football game Oct. 3, Glass rode around the tailgates in his smart car to speak to fans and make his presence known to the Hoosier faithful.

He met with some women, who laughed with him, saying, “You must have been sitting behind us for the last 20 years at football games because all the things that we’ve talked about, you’re doing.”  Glass took that statement as a compliment and credit to the thoughts he had of what could be improved while he sat in the stands all those years.

“Now, I’m in a role where I can actually do something about that and what I’m finding is that it wasn’t so much because I was so smart or anything ... It’s just that I’m an IU person, and I went to IU events,” Glass said. “One of the wonderful things about this job is I get to try some of those things, and I think part of the reason a lot of them have been well-received is they are not inconsistent with a lot of the observations that other people who have been going to the games all these years have as well.”

Glass then spent time in the student section talking to the younger members of Hoosier Nation, a duty he sees as a necessity for his job and a great deal of fun.
“It’s really rewarding, and it makes me feel like the time is well spent and that I’m doing my job,” Glass said.

A game-day proposal

Glass has been attending IU football games since he was a young boy.

The ties to IU athletics have been a family affair for Glass. In college, he sat in the corner of the student section near the end zone. That’s where, during his junior year, he met his wife.

“We were up there in the corner where we always sit, and we had common friends, so I met her there,” he said.

A few years later, Glass sat in the stands during the IU-Michigan game, “nervous as hell.”

“I knew I was going to take her over to Brown County State Park and propose to her after the game,” he said.

He did, and she accepted.