The Lone Rock native and River Valley High School Class of 1986 alumnus was named University of Wisconsin–Madison director of athletics July 1 and formally introduced at Camp Randall Stadium on July 7.
The University of Wisconsin–Madison formally introduced its new director of athletics at Camp Randall Stadium on Tuesday, July 7, a week after announcing the hire. To much of the state, Shawn Eichorst is a veteran college sports executive arriving from the University of Texas. In the River Valley, he’s a Lone Rock kid coming home.
Eichorst grew up in Lone Rock, about 45 miles west of the athletic department he now leads, and he built his introduction around that distance. He is a first-generation college student, he told reporters at a July 1 media availability, from a village whose welcome sign along Highway 14 announces, beneath a polar bear perched on a red heart, that it is “the coldest in the nation with the warmest heart.”
“You guys have all seen the billboard, right? The coldest place with the warmest heart,” Eichorst said. “Not many people who grew up there aspired to go on to college, and the motivation for me was my high school football coach, who lived across the street.”
That coach was Howard Murphy. Eichorst named him at Tuesday’s welcome event and credited him with opening a door the young Eichorst didn’t know existed.
“Without athletics in my life, without a high school coach, Howard Murphy, living across the street, pouring into me — I didn’t even know that college was a thing back when I was growing up,” Eichorst said. “But him showing me the power of athletics and how you can leverage that in an academic setting, that’s real to me.”
The dream he did have as a boy in Lone Rock was smaller and closer to home.
“You wanted to play at the (UW) Field House. You wanted to play in Camp Randall. You wanted to do all those cool things,” Eichorst said at his July 7 news conference. “Well, I never was good enough to have the opportunity to do that.”
Several decades later, he is living out a version of it as the person who runs both those buildings.
“Coming back to Wisconsin is a dream,” Eichorst said. “It’s the destination. It’s the pinnacle, I think, of what we’re doing in college athletics. That’s how much I think about this place and what it’s done for young people.”
Interim UW-Madison Chancellor Eric Wilcots, who personally announced the appointment, made the hometown arc part of his own case for the hire.
“A little icing on the cake is he’s from Lone Rock,” Wilcots said at the July 7 news conference. “What can’t be lost is to be able to say to all of our students — first-gen college student coming from a small town in Wisconsin — what education and athletics can do for you. That’s powerful.”
A River Valley record
Eichorst graduated from River Valley High School in Spring Green in 1986, and the district’s own records — shared in a Facebook post celebrating the hire — describe a student who was busy well beyond just the field. He worked on the Yearbook and the Newspaper, belonged to the Science Club and the Math Club — serving as a Math Club officer and a class officer — and finished in the top 10% of his class. He was named Junior Prom King and represented River Valley at Badger Boys State. He played football — lined up at wingback, No. 25, for the Blackhawks — and baseball all four years, with a year each of wrestling and basketball. As a senior, he earned special mention on the 1985 Wisconsin State Journal all-area football team.
From Spring Green he went to UW-Whitewater, where — by his own account — he paid his own way to keep playing.
“I paid to play Division III football to extend my opportunity for athletics to blend with academics,” he said at the July 1 availability.
At Whitewater he was a three-time letterwinner and an all-conference defensive back, a team captain his senior year who helped the Warhawks to Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference titles in 1988 and 1990. He graduated magna cum laude with a business degree in 1990, and returned to his alma mater as its director of athletics from 1999 to 2003 — his first job running a department, and the beginning of a path that would take him across the country and back.
‘Potential Takes Flight’
The River Valley School District marked the news publicly and directly. In a statement provided to Valley Sentinel, Superintendent Loren Glasbrenner congratulated the district’s alumnus and tied his rise to the district’s own motto.
“Shawn’s appointment to one of the nation’s premier collegiate athletic programs is an incredible accomplishment and a proud moment for the entire Blackhawk community,” Glasbrenner wrote. “At River Valley, we believe that ‘Potential Takes Flight,’ and Shawn’s journey from our schools to one of the most respected leadership roles in college athletics is a great example of what’s possible through hard work, determination, and a commitment to excellence.”
In Lone Rock, the response was more personal. For Brian Gorman, a childhood friend, the news brought a rush of pride, he told WMTV15.
“Shawn and I were always sports fans, sports nuts,” Gorman said, as WMTV15 reported. “He was talented athletically, but even more so gritty, smart, and just a hard worker.”
A long way around
The résumé between Whitewater and Wisconsin is a national one. After a stop as a senior associate athletic director at South Carolina, Eichorst first came to UW-Madison in 2006, rising over five years to deputy athletic director and chief operating officer under legendary football coach and athletic director Barry Alvarez. He ran the department’s day-to-day operations and served as the sport administrator for men’s basketball before leaving in 2011 to become athletic director at the University of Miami.
From Miami he moved to Nebraska, hired in October 2012 to lead the Cornhuskers through 2017 — a tenure some national writers have characterized as rocky, and which frames Wisconsin, in the words of the Omaha World-Herald‘s Sam McKewon, as a “second chance.” He landed at Texas in 2018 as deputy athletic director and chief operating officer, and it is the Texas record UW leaned on hardest in making its decision. During his tenure the Longhorns won the Learfield Directors’ Cup — awarded to the nation’s best all-around athletics program — five times in six years, reached College Football Playoff semifinals in 2023 and 2024, and moved from the Big 12 to the Southeastern Conference, a transition Eichorst helped negotiate. He also helped build the operation Texas used to pay and manage its athletes under the sport’s new name, image and likeness rules, and oversaw more than $1.335 billion in capital projects.
Eichorst is the 11th athletic director in UW program history, and he arrives at a department under strain. He succeeds Chris McIntosh, who resigned in mid-April after less than five years to take a deputy commissioner post at the Big Ten Conference; senior administrator Marcus Sedberry has served as interim athletic director since. The Badger football team’s on-field results have slipped in recent seasons, the men’s basketball team has exited the NCAA Tournament early, and the department’s costs have climbed to the point that its budget — a record $203.263 million — for the first time leans on $14.6 million from state taxpayers.
A lawyer walks into the NIL era
Those taxpayer dollars are not paying athletes — the law that provides them expressly forbids it. But to understand why the state is suddenly helping fund Badger athletics at all, it helps to start with three letters that now shape everything in college sports: NIL.
Name, image and likeness — NIL — is an athlete’s right to be paid for the commercial use of their own identity: endorsements, autograph signings, social media promotion and the like. For most of the history of the NCAA, college sports’ governing body, that was forbidden, and a college athlete could receive a scholarship and little else. That changed in the summer of 2021, when the NCAA — days after a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court antitrust loss in NCAA v. Alston, and facing a wave of state NIL laws about to take effect — dropped its prohibition and let athletes begin earning endorsement money from outside businesses and booster groups. The ground shifted again in June 2025, when a federal judge approved a settlement in House v. NCAA that went further: for the first time, schools themselves can pay their athletes directly, sharing revenue up to a cap of roughly $20.5 million per school in the first year of the decade-long deal. What began as outside endorsement money is now a line on the athletic department’s own budget — an expense to be funded across dozens of sports, on top of everything else, and a fresh source of recruiting battles and legal questions.
That is the environment Eichorst inherits, and the state has already begun rewriting the rules around it. On April 8, Gov. Tony Evers signed 2025 Wisconsin Act 203, which appropriates $14.6 million a year in state general purpose revenue toward principal and interest costs on UW-Madison’s intercollegiate athletic facilities, with an additional $200,000 each for the UW-Milwaukee Klotsche Center and the UW-Green Bay Phoenix Sports Center and Athletic Field Complex. In the same bill, the Legislature exempted a broad range of records held by UW System athletic programs from Wisconsin’s open records law, codified at Wis. Stat. § 36.11(12)(i). The exemption covers both the terms of student-athletes’ NIL agreements and the “generation, deployment, or allocation of revenue generated by an intercollegiate athletic program” where competitive reasons require confidentiality.
The act draws that line deliberately. The Board of Regents may not use state general purpose revenue to fund athlete compensation — the prohibition is written into the law. But the same law repealed a provision that had required the athletic department to cover 40 percent of those facilities’ debt payments out of its own program revenues. The state now pays for the buildings, and the department’s own money is freed for other purposes — at the very moment schools have begun paying their athletes directly. Whether any of Wisconsin’s freed dollars flow there is a question the public may not be able to answer, because the terms of athlete compensation agreements and the department’s allocation of its revenue are precisely the records the new exemption shields.
McIntosh, Eichorst’s predecessor, testified in favor of the bill in committee before he resigned. The Wisconsin Newspaper Association, of which Valley Sentinel is a member, warned lawmakers that the records-exemption language was written broadly enough to reach beyond NIL agreements. Evers’ partial veto touched only appropriations wording; the records exemption passed through as written. The bill cleared the Assembly 95-1 and the Senate 17-16.
Eichorst steps into that environment with a background few athletic directors share. He holds a Juris Doctor from Marquette University Law School, earned in 1995, is a member of the State Bar of Wisconsin and a past member of its Board of Governors and taught sports law at Marquette as an adjunct professor. He also inherits a department active on both sides of the era’s early litigation: Wisconsin and its collective, VC Connect, sued the University of Miami in 2025 over alleged interference with a cornerback’s contract, while the university has moved to dismiss a suit brought by former women’s basketball players against the school, former coach Marisa Moseley and former administrator Justin Doherty, according to Wisconsin State Journal reporting.
Asked about NIL at his introductory news conference, Eichorst signaled he would talk about it differently than his peers.
“I think you’re going to hear from me a different message maybe than you’ve heard from others about how I think about it, because I think about it in the educational setting,” he said. “I don’t think about it in the professional or employment/employee setting. … I’m going to talk a lot about the value of a scholarship.”
He was blunter about the current moment.
“Now we’re in the House era. We settled that case. … I would say that that was bargained for, that was a very bargained-for, durable, 10-year settlement,” Eichorst said. “And we’re struggling to hold ourselves accountable to the terms of that settlement, and we’re asking other people to help us figure out our own business. … We are not professional (sports); it’s not what we do. We’re in education. Our distinction is education.”
Getting off the bus
If there was a theme to Eichorst’s introduction in Madison, it was relationships — a word the Wisconsin State Journal counted him using a dozen times across the welcome event and news conference. He returned repeatedly to the bus tours of his first Wisconsin stint, when Alvarez would take coaches like Bo Ryan to every corner of the state to meet fans, a practice Alvarez himself has said is inseparable from the job. “You’re asked to get out and raise money,” Alvarez said on ESPN Wisconsin’s “Wilde & Tausch” in the days after McIntosh’s departure, as the Wisconsin State Journal reported. “If you don’t want to do that, you probably shouldn’t be in the job.”
Eichorst framed it as a matter of walking the walk.
“You have to be accessible,” he said at the news conference. “If you’re going to talk the talk, you got to walk the walk. This is a special place, and they want to know who you are. … I found in my time here, 15 years ago, when we traveled the state, when you get off that bus, people just love to see the Badgers.”
He said he knows the state well enough to name it county by county — and rattled off proof from corner to corner.
“I know the state. I know there’s 72 counties, and I know where Chetek is, and Oconomowoc is, and Ashland is, and all those other sorts of places,” he said at the July 1 availability.
Some of those relationships are already close to home. Men’s basketball coach Greg Gard, whom Eichorst oversaw during his first tour at UW, grew up in Cobb — another small southwest Wisconsin town not far from Lone Rock.
“Greg Gard’s from Cobb, and I’m from Lone Rock, River Valley, so there’s a little bit of familiarity,” Eichorst said.
Gard, for his part, endorsed the hire in the university’s announcement, calling Eichorst “extremely bright and a man of great integrity and passion” who “brings the perfect combination of understanding what it means to be successful at Wisconsin while adding experience and wisdom from other top collegiate programs.” Head softball coach Yvette Healy, who worked under Eichorst during his 2006-11 stint, remembered him as “tough and smart as an administrator, always caring a great deal about growing our programs and creating a culture of success.”
On football — the sport that will shape how the hire is ultimately judged — Eichorst said he had come away encouraged from early conversations with coach Luke Fickell, without setting public expectations for the coming season.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program.”
Eichorst was joined at Tuesday’s introduction by his wife, Kristin — a lifelong Badger fan, by his own description — and their son Joseph; the couple’s other two sons, Jack and Bennett, remained in Austin.
For a man who once figured the Field House and Camp Randall were as far out of reach as college itself, the day ended where it began — on the idea of home.
“I’m thrilled to be home,” Eichorst said. “It’s great to come home.”
