KREM Sports Director Brenna Greene sat down with WSU AD Pat Chun last week to discuss a variety of topics that have come up in his first full academic year on the job.
Q: At the beginning of the football season, the Jason Gasser situation breaks. How have your policies as an athletic department changed in terms investigations?
A: Well, they haven't. We always follow University policies and procedures. We have HR and Office of Equal Opportunity on campus that manages those processes for us. So like anything if there's an HR matter we will report it and let the process take its course.
Q: What are you guys doing to help educate incoming students and interns in terms of appropriate behavior between them and staff members?
A: Well, I think there's a couple things that have to happen. One, it's got to be pervasive and cultural within our athletic program. So if there's a message that we weren't communicating in the past, I assure you, it's being communicated now. One of those communications pieces is we follow all University rules and regulations so it's pretty black and white. We understand what the expectation is. I tell our coaches and our staff accountability is a great tool. If we know what the standard is, we know what the expectations are, if we know what all the rules are, all we have to do is hold ourselves accountable to those rules. That's a great bar to have at Washington State. Accountability is high at this institution. The expectation here is to do things the right way every day. So for us, it's just making sure that our staff, coaches, student-athletes, they all understand that that expectation really has not changed. We've got to do things the right way. The reality is there's accountability and history shows, or at least in the last year, we've had to hold some people accountable. Some of the things you did, you can't work at Washington State anymore.
Q: How are you as an AD looking to communicate to your people and demonstrate to your people that things like that are not acceptable here at WSU?
Well, like I said, we follow every rule and regulation on campus. So that is not even a mandate, that has to be cultural and pervasive, but we do talk about it. Expectations are expectations and we know what they are and we've got to follow them and when we've got to live up to them.