Focus on Sports
Bill Cords Retires
While Bill Cords led athletics the university built Valley Fields, the outdoor athletic complex, and established the Blue & Gold Athletic Scholarship Fund.
For most poignant memories, Director of Intercollegiate Athletics Bill Cords reaches back to 2003, after Marquette beat Kentucky. “When I was hired, there were a lot of people who weren’t sure if we’d ever make it back to the Final Four,” he says. “On that day in Minneapolis I saw some of those people, and they were crying.”
And there were other moments. “At the Final Four game when we saw all that gold up in the stands, that’s what athletics should be about, bringing people together,” he says.
The opening of the Al McGuire Center also ranks at the top of his list.
Cords is retiring after 20 years of presiding over Marquette’s athletics programs, a tenure that President Robert Wild, S.J., says “helped create athletic programs that are not only successful in terms of wins and losses but, most importantly, are successful in helping young men and women succeed well as students and as human beings.”
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