Meet Big Sky Commissioner Tom Wistrcill (Video)

With more than a decade of experience as a conference commissioner, seven years in senior leadership positions for Power 5 athletic departments, six years as a Division I FBS athletic director, and numerous significant NCAA committee appointments to his credit, Tom Wistrcill is as experienced, connected, and prepared as anyone in intercollegiate athletics to navigate its ever-changing landscape and to usher in its modern era. And thanks to his extensive resumé, national network, and aggressive vision, Wistrcill has been propelling the Big Sky Conference forward toward its stated mission to be a national leader and the premier FCS conference.

Wistrcill, who at the time of his hiring by the Big Sky was one of just two Division I commissioners that also had been a Division I FBS AD (the other was Bob Bowlsby of the Big 12), began his Big Sky tenure in the fall of 2018. Just two years into Wistrcill’s tenure, the league’s Presidents’ Council awarded him a two-year contract extension for the unprecedented heights he led the Big Sky in student-athlete programming and advocacy, competitive success, revenue generation, media exposure, and brand development, among other areas.
 
“On behalf of my fellow Big Sky presidents, I am pleased to recognize Tom’s outstanding and significant work with this well-deserved contract extension,” Andy Feinstein, the president of the University of Northern Colorado and the current chair of the Presidents’ Council, said upon announcing Wistrcill’s extension. “Tom’s tenure as our conference’s leader has been marked with myriad milestones demonstrating a strategic focus on our most important priorities. He has conscientiously developed sincere and meaningful relationships with all our constituents while faithfully performing his duties, and in doing so has elevated not only what we have achieved but also how we are perceived. We eagerly anticipate additional extraordinary benchmarks that the Big Sky surely will reach due to the collective and ongoing efforts of Tom, his staff, and our athletic administrators.”
 
The conference’s marketing mantra under Wistrcill, #ExperienceElevated, speaks specifically to the aspirational nature of the Big Sky, and the league’s longstanding and renewed commitment to the growth, development, and excellence of those who it serves will remain his focus moving forward.
 
As his fourth academic year as the Big Sky’s commissioner concludes, Wistrcill already has made an indelible impact in the conference and around the country. His recent appointment to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee will provide him, and thus the Big Sky, with a voice on the most prestigious and influential board in college athletics. In June 2021, the Big Sky announced a landmark media rights deal with ESPN – the largest ever for an FCS conference – quadrupling both the league’s television revenue and its national linear exposure while maintaining regional rights for Big Sky markets to broadcast games on local television stations, which remains a critical historical precedent within the conference’s footprint. The enhanced relationship with ESPN also places the Big Sky women’s basketball championship game on national linear television for the first time in league history while upgrading the audience available for the men’s basketball championship contest.
 
And under Wistrcill, it’s not just on television where Big Sky content is more readily available than ever before. Thanks to a completely revamped approach to social media with a strategic focus on engagement, the Big Sky has eclipsed one million impressions in every month since September 2021. When Wistrcill took over the league, it often ranked in the bottom quartile of all 32 NCAA Division I conferences for engagement on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram; since the start of the 2021 football season, the Big Sky has been in the top quartile of Skull Sparks’ conference standings every month, usually besting all of the Group of 5 FBS conferences and regularly topping some of the Power 5 conferences such as the ACC and Big Ten. 
 
He and his staff have conducted a year-long strategic planning process during the 2021-22 academic year to outline the future focus of the conference, with six pillars – Student-Athlete Empowerment and Well Being; Academic Excellence; Athletic Excellence; Inclusive Excellence; Leadership Excellence; and Revenue, Marketing and Media – supporting all of the league’s initiatives. Simultaneously, each of the conference’s 16 sports will have a customized plan to forecast the best path forward for further success, with each head coaches’ group taking a leadership role in drafting those concepts. The Big Sky also has actively engaged in the process its most important constituents by conducting surveys for all current and former Big Sky student-athletes. In addition, Wistrcill has continued his COVID-created practice of hosting virtual captains’ huddles, where one or two athletes per team convene via Zoom for sport-specific conversations and to afford them with an additional opportunity to offer feedback directly to him and the conference office. 
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The conference’s Men’s and Women’s Basketball Championships moved to Boise, Idaho, for the first time in March 2019, resulting in record-setting figures for attendance, ticket sales, and other revenue generation, including sponsorship and merchandise. The Big Sky was pacing to surpass all of these figures until the 2020 Basketball Championships were cancelled halfway through that event due to COVID. When fans were allowed to return to the stands of Boise’s Idaho Central Arena in March 2022, they did so in record numbers, eclipsing the league marks for a neutral-site tournament in attendance and ticket sales.
 
In the spring and summer of 2019, Wistrcill steered the process of relocating the conference’s headquarters to Farmington, Utah, located just 20 miles from the Salt Lake City airport, to facilitate the opportunity to host in-person meetings on site for the first time. A large office suite designed to the Big Sky’s specifications occupies half of the first floor of a new building whose fascia features a 26-foot-wide backlit sign with the conference’s logo overlooking eight lanes of traffic on nearby Interstate 15. The office — branded throughout with the conference’s members, history, and strategic plan — features an executive conference room as well as a larger group meeting space, individual offices for every staff member, plentiful designated storage, and a dedicated media studio with new video and podcast equipment to streamline the content creation process.
 
To prioritize that initiative, Wistrcill revamped the conference staff’s organizational chart, reallocating within the current headcount to establish a new position, Director of Broadcast and Digital Media, dedicated to creating new content, interviewing players of the week, and hosting live coverage on ESPN Plus. Major conference events such as its annual Football Kickoff and Big Sky Courtside, a show providing wraparound coverage around all 20 women’s and men’s basketball championship games that debuted in March 2022, have become premier productions with the Big Sky generating the amount of on-site content unprecedented among its peers and matching if not exceeding the Power 5 conferences.
 
Wistrcill also sought to provide a stronger and more tangible voice for the Big Sky’s student-athletes by formally adding the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee leadership to the conference’s governance structure. The Big Sky’s Spring 2019 Meetings saw the conference’s SAAC president for the first time in league history cast votes on legislation, doing so alongside the schools’ presidents, faculty athletic representatives, athletics directors and senior woman administrators.
 
The Commissioner has made a concerted effort to visit personally with student-athletes, creating forums in which they can directly provide feedback to and ask questions of the conference’s leadership. Pre-pandemic (and to be resumed afterward), Wistrcill’s “Competing Against the Commish” video series showcases him participating in different sports each month with Big Sky student-athletes. So far, Wistrcill has pitched in softball at Sacramento State, thrown the shot put at Idaho, practiced volleyball at Portland State, did the weight throw at Montana State, and played HORSE with the Montana men’s basketball team. As life reverts to normalcy regarding travel and interpersonal interaction, Wistrcill is eager to return to these practices to engage the students.
 
To further their growth, a robust amount of programming featuring panelists from the conference’s member institutions, including faculty members and sports psychologists, have been added in the past four years to offer student-athletes, coaches, and staff with educational opportunities around important and timely topics such as mental health, social justice, race relations, and stress management. A Mental Health Subcommittee was created to spearhead these efforts, working in conjunction with the conference’s recently established Health & Safety Committee to produce hour-long forums, 20-minute podcasts, and 5-minute mini-webinars designed for social media.
 
Additionally, to further advance its leadership initiatives in a dedicated manner, the conference launched “Big Sky U”, a first-of-its-kind conference-wide leadership and professional development curriculum for its student-athletes, coaches, and administrators. Four different cohorts from the Big Sky membership -- the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee 22, Aspiring Coaches and Athletics Administrators, Aspiring Head Coaches, and Aspiring Athletics Directors – are nominated to engage in customized courses for leadership education and career advancement preparation. Big Sky U debuted during the 2020-21 academic year, and the programming was enhanced for 2021-22.
 
On the field of competition, a memorable 2019 football season demonstrated the Big Sky’s position as the strongest FCS conference, top to bottom. Four Big Sky teams earned top-8 seedsand thus byes into the second round of the FCS Championship, the first time a conference has done that in FCS history, with two schools advancing to the national semifinals. In 2021 a Big Sky-record five teams received berths into the playoff field. Over Wistrcill’s four years, six different football programs have qualified for the postseason, with two teams (2018 Eastern Washington, 2021 Montana State) advancing to the FCS national championship game in Frisco, Texas. Meanwhile, the dynastic Northern Arizona men’s cross country team has captured five of the last six national championships, and its men’s indoor track and field program earned the conference’s first No. 1 national ranking in that sport. 
 
These achievements and those of others are celebrated regularly with the naming of the Commissioner’s Team of the Month, complete with a classic wrestling champion’s belt presented to a deserving squad from around the conference. Historical figures also are being honored under Wistrcill like never before with the establishment of the conference’s first Hall of Fame, which will induct a 14-member inaugural class in July 2022. Another unique initiative under Wistrcill’s watch was the conference entering the emerging world of esports with its first of many competitions among all of the member institutions’ student organizations.
 
On a national level, Wistrcill has been actively involved to represent the Big Sky in numerous leadership capacities and made it a priority for the conference to increase its representation as such. Prior to being named to the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee, he was asked to serve on the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Competition Committee, a group tasked with developing strategic principles regarding student-athlete health and safety, sportsmanship and integrity, game operations and presentation, technology, and statistical trends. 
 
Other national appointments for Wistrcill during his first two years with the Big Sky include his being one of five Division I commissioners selected for the Steering Committee for the National Letter of Intent program run by the Collegiate Commissioners Association, which helped streamline the number of signing dates across college sports; one of five Division I Commissioners to serve on the NCAA’s holistic review of officiating for all sports; one of two FCS commissioners being chosen for the College Football Officiating Committee, run by the College Football Playoff and serving alongside all 10 FBS commissioners; and serving as the chair of the Marketing and Public Relations Committee for FCS Football, through which he initiated a weekly in-season show, FCS ALL IN, to focus exclusively on those conferences’ football programs. 
 
Prior to the Big Sky, Wistrcill spent three-plus years as a Senior Vice President at Learfield, where he helped to develop new collegiate relationships within the company’s University Partnership Group. Wistrcill returned to Learfield after previously serving as the General Manager in charge of its Badger Sports Properties team representing the University of Wisconsin athletics department from 2002 through 2006. Expertise in these areas led Wistrcill to forecast the future and serve as an outspoken voice for years advocating for the NCAA to allow and properly manage student-athletes monetizing their Name, Image and Likeness.
 
Wistrcill served as the Athletic Director at the University of Akron from 2009 through 2015, during which time the Zips won the 2010 NCAA Division I men’s soccer national title, the first team national championship for a Mid-American Conference school in more than 40 years. Both of the Zips’ basketball teams also flourished during his six years, as the men advanced to two NCAA Tournaments and one NIT while the women won their first conference title and made their maiden appearance in the NCAA tournament. Wistrcill hired Terry Bowden, who took a football program that had qualified for just one FBS bowl games in its 30-year history at that level to two such appearances in three seasons. Women’s tennis, women’s swimming and diving, indoor track and field, and rifle also each won conference titles during his tenure.
 
All told, Wistrcill has more than 25 years of experience in college athletics, including at the University of Minnesota as a Senior Associate Athletics Director from 2006 through 2009, during which he helped plan and fundraise for the Gophers’ new on-campus football stadium and served as the school’s primary liaison during the launch of the Big Ten Network. In addition to the extensive tenures he held in leadership positions on multiple FBS campuses, he also brings to the Big Sky a breadth of conference office experience, having spent a combined seven years working as the commissioner of the Northern Sun Intercollegiate and Rocky Mountain Athletic conferences.
 
Wistrcill graduated from St. Mary’s University in Winona, Minn., where he was a captain of the basketball team while earning a Bachelor of Arts in Media Communications. He later earned his Master of Arts in Educational Leadership with a focus in Athletic Administration from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., while interning with the University of Minnesota athletic department.
 
Wistrcill and his wife, Kelly — who swam for Minnesota before graduating from St. Mary’s, where she was a soccer student-athlete — live in Murray, Utah, and have two sons: J.T., a May 2022 graduate of the University of Utah, and Jack, a rising freshman on the Northern Arizona men’s basketball team.