Under Barry Collier, basketball became the rising tide that lifted all boats at Butler
INDIANAPOLIS – Without Barry Collier, none of this happens at Butler. Not the 15 NCAA tournament appearances from 1997-2018, the six Sweet 16 appearances since 2003, the back-to-back spots in the national championship game in 2010 and ’11. Without Barry Collier, there is no spot in the Big East Conference. There is no Butler Blue I, II, III or IV.
There is no Butler Way.
Without Barry Collier, is there even a Brad Stevens? We’ll never know.
We do know this: There’d still be a Butler University. It’s been around since 1855, and done all right for itself. Tony Hinkle was here for a while. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Hinkle Fieldhouse would still be here, sunlight shining through those windows, but without Collier it’s hard to imagine the $1.3 million renovation to Clowes Hall in 2021, the multi-million-dollar Esports Park started in 2022 or the $100 million sciences renovation and expansion project announced in 2019 — the largest capital project in the school history.
What do you think paid for that?
Barry Collier didn’t write the check, no. He just built the bank vault.
By awaking Butler’s dormant basketball program — Hinkle’s baby, neglected for too long — Collier raised not just the university’s profile, but the quantity and quality of student applicants. Collier started that snowball rolling, and to this day it is picking up speed: more successful alumni, which leads to more donations, which leads to ongoing improvements at this glorious 209-acre campus on the northside.
Butler basketball is the rising tide that lifted all boats at Butler.
Without Barry Collier, there is no tidal wave.
Chris Holtmann: 'One of transformative leaders of our time'
Fifty years after he first stepped on campus, a transfer from his hometown Miami-Dade Community College in 1974, Barry Collier will walk away from Butler for good. On Wednesday, he and the school announced his retirement effective April 30, 2024.
“I am incredibly grateful for the opportunities afforded me as a student-athlete, coach, and director of athletics,” Collier said in a statement. “While it has been my privilege to be a member of teams at eight different institutions, Butler is the place that I have always called home.”
The younger generation might know Collier only as the school’s longtime athletic director — he’s been AD since 2006 — and if that’s all you know, well, it’s a lot. In that role Collier assumed control of Butler’s emerging basketball program, one of the country’s most feel-good stories when he arrived in 2006, and made it feel even better.
A year after Collier’s arrival as AD, basketball coach Todd Lickliter left for Iowa. Collier’s answer in 2007 was to promote one of Lickliter’s assistants, a former numbers cruncher at Eli Lilly named Brad Stevens. When Stevens left for the Boston Celtics after 166 wins and five NCAA tournament appearances in six years — including those Final Four runs of 2010 and ’11 — Collier promoted Butler alum Brandon Miller.
Miller lasted just one year before leaving for reasons that have remained his personal business, and Collier replaced him with Chris Holtmann.
“I genuinely believe Barry Collier will go down as one of the transformative leaders and athletic directors of our time,” Holtmann told me Wednesday in a text. “The Butler Way remains one of the most value-driven models for teams and organizations I have ever seen. His vision, honesty, candor and personal touch during the most difficult stretches for a coach were so important to me during my three years at Butler. He provided our family with one of the greatest honors of my life being the head coach at Butler. We will always be grateful.”
Holtmann won 70 games in three seasons from 2014-17, including four in the NCAA tournament, then left for Ohio State. By then the winning had beget winning, and it started before Holtmann, before Stevens, before Lickliter from 2001-07 or even before current coach Thad Matta’s first go-around as Butler coach in 2000.
Butler’s supernatural run of coaching started 11 years earlier with — yes — Barry Collier.
Doyel in 2017: Turns out, the walls at Hinkle Fieldhouse can talk
Doyel in 2019: Holtmann told me, 'There are some jobs you have to take.' Like Ohio State
Brad Stevens: 'Hard to fathom' Barry Collier’s impact
A Butler co-captain as a senior in 1976, when he averaged 15.2 points and 7.5 rebounds, Collier had been an assistant for Idaho, Oregon and Stanford when he returned to his alma mater as coach in 1989. He inherited a perennially losing program in something called the Midwest Conference, getting pushed around by the likes of Detroit Mercy, Loyola (Ill.) and Saint Louis, and within three years was winning 20 games and building a program he led to the school’s first three NCAA tourney appearances (1997, ‘98 and 2000) since its lone appearance under Hinkle in 1962.
Collier left for Nebraska in 2000, giving way to one assistant (Matta) and then another (Lickliter), then returned as AD. Along the way Butler rose from the Midwest Conference to the Horizon League to the Atlantic-10 to a dream nobody would’ve dared dream when Collier became coach in 1989: a spot in the Big East.
That ascension boggles the mind, and I’m asking Brad Stevens to make sense of it for me. He’s busy — leads the Boston Celtics — but if Brad wouldn’t mind, I’m asking him, “can you give me a sentence or two?”
This comes back:
“A couple sentences doesn’t do it justice,” Stevens says in a text. “When he took over as a coach in 1989, it would have been hard to fathom what all of his hard work has led us to today. It all starts with the values that he put on those walls. I’m so appreciative for the time, leadership and effort he’s given to Butler and of course, what he’s meant to our family.
“He’s had an amazing impact. I’m thrilled for him to get a chance to golf more, hang out with the grandkids more, and to get to enjoy a game again as a fan.”
All that winning since Collier took over in 1989, all that enhanced profile, has helped maintain a beautiful, constantly improving campus, and even led to one of the most recognizable live mascots in college sports. Blue was the first dog's name, introduced on campus in 2000 while the noise around Collier’s Butler basketball program was reaching a national crescendo. A year later, a Butler alum named Michael Kaltenmark did for Butler’s mascot program what Barry Collier had done for its basketball program in 1987:
Turned it into a national phenomenon.
Kaltenmark retired in 2019 after introducing the world to Blue II and Blue III — aka Trip, get it? — and today Kaltenmark’s successor, Butler alum Evan Krauss, has Butler IV.
Doyel in 2019: Butler mascot Trip and handler Michael Kaltenmark will retire
Doyel in 2020: I was there to watch Blue IV go home with Butler's Evan Krauss!!
“I’ve hardly known a Butler University without Barry Collier,” Kaltenmark told me in a text. “He was head basketball coach when I arrived as a freshman, and VP of Athletics when I left for IMS (in 2019). (His) fingerprints are all over Butler’s DNA and brand identity. What grew out of the men’s basketball locker room, The Butler Way, became a sense of purpose and distinguishing trait for the entire institution. There’s just a way of doing things at Butler, and he was a leading example of that.
“Of course, it helped that he was a dog lover too. That certainly made my role with Butler Blue a little easier.”
It fell to Kaltenmark, when Butler was looking to replace retiring AD John Parry in 2006, to ferry candidates to and from the airport.
“I distinctly remember picking up Barry and driving him to campus,” Kaltenmark says. “I was nervous. Tried to talk basketball, but really just wanted to tell him how much I was rooting for him to get the job.”
Seventeen years later, with college sports in chaos, Butler faces a critical hire. This is a school that has had to replace Tony Hinkle, Brad Stevens, Chris Holtmann and Michael Kaltenmark, and now it has to replace Barry Collier.
Find IndyStar columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter at @GreggDoyelStar or at www.facebook.com/greggdoyelstar.
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Butler basketball took off under Barry Collier the coach, then AD
