Lords and Ladies welcome five new coaches

The Kenyon athletics department begins the academic year with a handful of new names to add to its coaching ledger. Of the fourteen head coaches directing the College's twenty-two varsity programs, five are starting their first season here.

Ted Stanley sees action soon as the Lords new head football coach. A 1993 graduate of Grinnell College, Stanley coached for two seasons as an assistant at the University of Chicago. Since arriving on campus in February, Stanley has helped build the football program up from twenty-eight to fifty players.

Matt Croci, a former assistant coach at Capital University, was selected as the Lords' new head basketball coach. Over the past three seasons, Croci helped guide the Crusaders to a combined record of 61-21, including a 22-6 record in 2002-03. He is a 1994 graduate of Wittenberg University.

On the soccer field, Kenyon fans will notice that Kelly Walters, a former Kenyon assistant, has now taken over the Ladies' head coaching duties. Walters was an assistant coach at Kenyon in 1998, before she accepted the head coaching position at North Carolina Wesleyan, her alma mater. Her four-year stay at Wesleyan resulted in a combined 56-24-7 record and three conference championships.

Pam MacPherson, a former National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I player at Duke University, was hired as the Ladies' interim head volleyball coach. She was the Blue Devils' starting setter for three seasons and was named to the Atlantic Coast Conference's Athletic Academic Honor Roll all three seasons. She went on to start her coaching career as an assistant at Northwestern University.

The most recent hire in the athletics department is Brendan McWilliams, a 1998 Colorado College graduate who takes over the Lords' lacrosse program. McWilliams arrived in Gambier after serving as an assistant coach at the University of Vermont and at Tufts University. He was also the head coach at Cherry Creek High School in Denver, Colorado, where he guided his team to a 16-2 record and a state championship.