New AD Desireé Reed-Francois makes strong first impression

New Arizona athletic director Desireé Reed-Francois met one-on-one with local media groups Monday, and I’m just going to belt out my first impression after she talked with PHNX Wildcats:

This is a woman who is not afraid to tell hard truths and doesn’t seem willing to suffer fools.

In other words, she’s perfect.

At the minimum, Reed-Francois is here to clean up the Arizona athletic department’s financial house, find creative new revenue streams, and made hard efficiency decisions … all while continuing momentum in the football and basketball programs.

Oh, is that all?

“I know there’s a bunch of challenges. I get it,” Reed-Francois said in an interview with myself and Mike Luke.

“But nothing great is ever easy. You know, there’s going to be challenges everywhere, but we’re going to build a strong infrastructure and we’re going to take those challenges head on and we’re going to be aggressive in our approach.”

What we knew from her recent introductory press conference is that her decision to come to leave as Missouri’s athletic director to come to Tucson was grounded in the love she felt for the university and the city during her time here in law school, graduating in 1997.

“This is a heart move for me,” Reed-Francois said. “It’s not necessarily a head move. It was just for heart.”

The hard decisions ahead will require her head. She’s done this before, as AD at UNLV and Missouri. And now, after her first week on the job, we have a little bit of an idea of how she is going about the process. She has a playbook. She has a history of success.

Reed-Francois: She stands for excellence

“When we took over at Missouri in August 2021, 74 percent of our staff felt that Mizzou stood for mediocrity,” Reed-Francois said. “They felt that we had silos and a lack of communication. Fast forward to December of ’23 — 82 percent of our staff felt that Mizzou stood for excellence and momentum.

“How we were able to do that was through people. You’ve got to make sure that you have people of high character. And in my experience, high character is selfless, smart, hardworking. That’s what I look for — high character, low ego, high outcome and energy.

“So I have to make sure at Arizona that I to get to know the people.”

Yep. That’s what she’s doing. She already has three binders full of SWOT assessments from staffers, who filled out their personal analyses of their Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. She is also asking for everyone’s opinions about what they want the athletic department to stop doing and what they want it to continue doing. She is asking everyone, “Who are the three people that are absolute all-stars that are go-to people?”

(That would be fun to know.)

Reed-Francois is arranging and conducting 15-minute meetings with each staffer – longer for head coaches – getting to know them by listening to their stories and then probing for their insights, their advice.

It’s a fact-finding mission and a trust-building exercise. Because having a new leader can make a lot of folks uncomfortable for a lot of different reasons.

“I have to earn their trust and vice versa,” Reed-Francois said. “But you’ve got to constantly evolve.

“It is an ever-changing landscape and you have to embrace the changes coming. You can’t bemoan it. If you just spend time bemoaning it, that’s wasted energy. I don’t have a lot of tolerance for that. And I don’t have a lot of tolerance for nonsense. I told our staff that when I first got here.

“I was like, ‘Listen, I’m really simple. This is what my expectations are. This is what you can expect from me. This is where we’re at. This is what we’re what we’re going to do. This is the process.’”

That first impression I had? This is a woman who is not afraid to tell hard truths and doesn’t seem willing to suffer fools. I ran that by a Missouri athletic department staffer I know, and the staffer concurred: “Spot on.”

It’s no time for the meek. No time for half-measures. Amid a budget crisis, a conference change and national chaos in the world of Name, Image and Likeness, Reed-Francois is ready to tackle Arizona’s high-level tasks: balancing the budget, building a sustainable business model, evaluating the athletic department’s infrastructure.

“I’m going to listen a lot, and what worked at Mizzou may not work here,” Reed-Francois said. “But this process I think is a pretty sound one.”

Sounds good. Can’t wait until she makes her second and third, and lasting, impressions.

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Top photo: Desireé Reed-Francois with university president Robert C. Robbins at her introductory press conference. (Arizona Athletics)