Wendy McManus has been hired by SUNY Oswego as the director of intercollegiate athletics after an almost two year vacancy in the position. 

McManus, who has worked all over the United States, started her career as a volleyball coach at University of the Southwest in Hobbs, New Mexico. 

“I think I just fell into coaching,” McManus said. “I actually wanted to be a forensic psychologist out of college, my bachelor’s is in psychology.”

After one semester of assistant coaching, McManus accepted the head volleyball coach position as well as the university’s sports information director. She later moved to work at Texas A&M and was there for five years, before moving to Oklahoma. 

McManus, who is Canadian, said she then decided to move closer to her family that still lived across the border and ended up at Minot State University in North Dakota, where she went “full into the business side” of athletics. 

She was at Minot State for three years before taking her first director of athletics position at Elmhurst University in Illinois. Then, she took the job at SUNY Oswego. Though she is not coaching teams anymore, McManus said her job as director has many similarities. 

“I still coach but it is more like coaching the coaches rather than the student athletes,” McManus said. “I get the great opportunity of providing them with leadership development, mentorship and all of those things [like] how to handle sticky situations or how to celebrate.”

In her position, McManus works in strategic planning, business operations, fiscal management, student athlete welfare and many other aspects of the athletic department. As she has been at SUNY Oswego for less than two months, McManus said she is still working to learn about the specifics of the school and what changes may need to be made. 

“I want to come in and learn as much as I can, [I want] to be that sponge … so I can see maybe where some deficiencies are and where I can make an immediate impact,” McManus said. 

A major part of McManus’s job is to work directly with all coaches and their athletes to know how best to help them succeed. 

“Coaches do what they need to do … they are worried about their program … my job is to be concerned with all of them,” McManus said. “I’m really looking from a 30-thousand foot level, where coaches may be looking for from a 10-thousand foot level because that’s what they’re supposed to do; they’re supposed to do what’s best for their program and I’m supposed to do what’s best for the department.”

Michael Holman, the head coach for men’s and women’s swimming and diving, said McManus has done a great job of meeting teams and “showing her face” since she arrived in August. 

“She’s learning all of our sports,” Holman said. “Our histories, our needs, where we are, where we are trying to go, and it’s a lot, it’s 20 plus teams.”

Despite COVID-19 restrictions and cancellations making all sports related activities unpredictable over the past year, Holman said McManus has been doing well during this unusual time.

“I think she’s done a great job,” Holman said. “She jumped right into a pretty big fire and I think she’s working hard to tackle a lot of different issues.”

Though McManus is still taking time to educate herself on the needs of each individual sport, she still has a few goals in mind for all athletic teams.

“I want us to be competitive within the SUNYAC conference,” McManus said. “I want us to be competitive regionally and nationally and … most importantly I want us to be the model Division III institution that other schools look up to.”

McManus hopes to work with Oswego State athletics to  “elevate us as a whole” as she continues to learn the ropes of being a Laker. 

Image via oswego.edu