Fred Glass Hiring Report Card: Todd Yeagley

This is the first entry in what will be a series of posts breaking down each major hire that IU Vice President and Director of Athletics Fred Glass has made during his tenure. You can find future series entries here.

As far as hirings go, IU athletic director Fred Glass could hardly have been given more of a softball than his first one on the job. Glass had been on the job for a little more than a year when he decided not to renew the contract of men’s soccer coach Mike Freitag following what was arguably the worst season in the program’s history. The 10 losses suffered in the season were a program record and the third-round exit from the NCAA Tournament was the fourth time in five years the Hoosiers had lost in the third round or earlier.

Glass and a search committee narrowed the field down to three candidates: Wisconsin head coach Todd Yeagley, son of legendary head coach Jerry Yeagley, Illinois-Chicago coach John Trask and Alabama-Birmingham coach Mike Getman. Three former players and three former assistant coaches within the IU program.

The decision, though, was hardly a difficult one. After a series of on- and off-campus interviews, Glass and the search committee came to a unanimous decision to hire Yeagley after just one season with the Badgers.

The rest, as they say, is history.

It took Yeagley three years to build the Hoosiers into a title contender, winning his first national championship in 2012. He’s returned to the College Cup twice more, the national championship game once and reached 100 wins in 2017. Yeagley has brought home two regular season and two conference tournament titles and has had multiple players earn All-American honors. One of his players finally won the MAC Hermann Trophy, college soccer’s highest individual honor, in 2018.

Trask and Getman did not have nearly the samer success Yeagley did. Trask took over for Yeagley at Wisconsin and led the Badgers to a conference tournament title in 2017 and two NCAA Tournament berths in 2013 and 2017. Getman has stayed at UAB through present day but has won just one conference title since 2010 as well as earning four NCAA Tournament berths.

Neither produced at the level of Yeagley, helping to make this arguably the best hire by Glass even if it was his first.

Grade: A+