New director of athletics Boo Corrigan found the perfect fit at NC State

It happened more than once, starting soon after he took the stage at James T. Valvano Arena. He admitted he may get emotional while speaking about his family’s athletic history, which is so closely intertwined with the area and conference he would be returning to with the new job.

“What did Jimmy V say? If you laugh, if you think and you cry in one day, that’s a good day,” Corrigan recalled. “I’m an emotional guy, so I think I fit in with that.”

His father, Gene, was the athletics director at Notre Dame and Virginia before becoming the commissioner of the ACC from 1987-97.

Therefore, Corrigan was carrying on the family tradition by working in athletics — starting as an “unpaid intern,” he jokingly clarified, for the ACC under his father, and eventually working his way up to athletics director at Army.

Returning to the ACC and the state of North Carolina, though, takes it to another whole level.

Thanks to a previous stop at Duke, Corrigan, his wife and their children have already spent time in the Triangle area, but there were more reasons besides just geography and familiarity that the job in Raleigh appealed to him.

One was the groundwork laid by predecessor Debbie Yow, who took the Wolfpack from No. 89 the year before she was hired in the Learfield Directors' Cup standings — an award that honors the best overall collegiate athletic department — to a school-record finish at No. 15 last year.

Even more than that, he and his wife, the daughter of a former A.D. at Vanderbilt, were both brought up as the children of athletic directors, and that was exactly what they desired for their three kids.

“Our goal when we got into college athletics was to raise our kids around a college campus,” he said. “[NC State student-athletes] have been role models for all the young people in Raleigh, and that’s what we want to be a part of. We want to have our children around that, and we’ve been very fortunate and very blessed to have the opportunity to be at a number of great schools.”

It was also impossible to bypass a return to the roots his father laid in the ACC when the opportunity presented itself. In the Corrigan household, despite all the changes over the last decade, those three letters still carry a lot of weight.

“My dad was the commissioner of the ACC … and it’s something in my life that’s always meant a great deal — to be involved with the ACC and what the ACC stands for,” he said. “It’s that commitment to academics, that commitment to doing things the right way, that was equally attractive to me with NC State and the ACC as something we couldn’t turn down.”

Corrigan has enjoyed unprecedented success at Army, on and off the field. His most notable hire was in football, where head coach Jeff Monken has led the Black Knights to numerous program firsts in five seasons, including back-to-back 10-win campaigns and three consecutive bowl bids, in addition to its highest finish (No. 19 in 2018) in the national rankings since 1958.

Thanks to the work done by Yow, there will be no grand rebuild required in any sport, but instead it will be about living up to the standards already in place and then exceeding them. Corrigan will officially take the reins from Yow May 1.

“What I hope in my time here at NC State is that we’re able to build on what Debbie Yow has done,” he said.

"Make no mistake … I'm running to NC State, I'm not running away from West Point."

Boo Corrigan

Corrigan noted that the job jumped out at him as soon as Yow announced she would be retiring at the end of her contract following the 2018-19 school year. Corrigan estimated that while interested it was not until a mere two weeks ago that he first made contact with NCSU Chancellor Randy Woodson, and he quickly recognized that was someone he’d like to work for.

It became a no-brainer from there, and the process progressed quickly — and behind the scenes — thanks to that fact.

“Make no mistake, I’m running to something — I’m running to NC State, I’m not running away from West Point,” he explained. “We were there for eight years, and it literally has been the adventure of a lifetime … but we thought it was time, and this was the place we wanted to be.”

Though the majority of Corrigan’s previous experience has come at schools different than NC State — whether they be private universities or service academies — he is quick to note there are “no challenges, only opportunities.”

“You have to see the success that’s occurred here, not only athletically, but academically and from a brand [perspective], from every aspect of the institution,” he continued. “It’s going in such a positive direction. … You want to be part of a winner, you want to be part of a place that does it the right way, and that’s what we were really looking at and why we were so interested.”

Army presented its own unique challenges, as every job does, but the athletic program found success across the board under Corrigan’s leadership. With more familiarity and a strong foundation already in place, he’s optimistic about what he can accomplish in Raleigh.

“I think there are a lot of commonalities [between West Point and NC State],” he said. “It’s a blue-collar type school, it’s a tough school, it’s a school that’s proud of who they are and it’s a school that’s about standards. I think if you set the standard, people will always reach that standard.

“I don’t think I’m landing on a foreign planet like I did when I went to West Point, where everything is based on acronyms and different words. I’m excited to come back to kind of the civilian world and be a part of what’s going on here at NC State.”

It's just another reason NC State was the perfect fit for Corrigan.