Richie Grimsley – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Richie Grimsley was eight years old the first time he understood that a football stadium could feel like a living thing. His father taught physical education at East Carolina University, his mother worked in a business office across campus, and most weekends the family ended up wandering the concourses of whatever campus was hosting a game. Grimsley remembers less about the scoreboard than about the hum underneath it — the crews resetting concessions, the grounds staff smoothing the turf, the small army that made a Saturday possible before the players ever ran out. He didn’t have a name for that world yet. Today, he runs one of the biggest versions of it in the country.

Grimsley arrived at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to play baseball and stayed to build a career that has now stretched almost three decades. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a founding member of the Atlantic Coast Conference, fields dozens of varsity programs that have combined for 26 national championships since 1999. As Associate Athletic Director for Capital Projects and Facilities, Grimsley oversees the construction, renovation, and daily upkeep of the buildings and fields that make those championships possible, leading a team of roughly 30 people that includes turf managers, maintenance technicians, and facility staff spread across the department’s venues.

A foot in the stadium door

Grimsley earned his undergraduate degree from UNC in exercise and sport science before adding a master’s in sport administration, both markers of a student-athlete who knew he wanted to stay close to competition even after his playing days ended. He joined the UNC Department of Athletics in 1999, spending three years in the ticket office before moving into football facilities management. A two-year stint running facilities and event management at UNC Wilmington rounded out his early résumé, and he returned to Chapel Hill in 2008. He stepped into his current role in 2013.

“For me, this was a way to have a competitive career not on the field,” he says. “I get to help out a team, so I feel their pain and their joy.”

That perspective has carried him through some of the department’s most visible projects. Grimsley points with particular pride to the simultaneous construction of an indoor football practice facility and a soccer and lacrosse stadium, a pairing that touched nearly every sport on campus at once. A full renovation of the outdoor tennis courts replaced surfaces that had gone unaddressed for 25 years. A new golf team building equipped with simulators, force plates, and motion-capture cameras is nearing completion, and the century-old football stadium is getting new video boards and sound systems this summer.

Keeping up with the competition

The projects themselves have always mattered, Grimsley says, but the reasoning behind them has shifted. Five years ago, the department’s priority was straightforward: improve facilities, build new ones, close the gap with rivals. Now the calculation includes name, image and likeness compensation, a relatively new and constantly moving variable that touches every recruiting conversation.

“It is all pretty new to everybody, and it is changing all the time,” he says. “Rules are changing, the state of play is changing, and we’re doing the best we can at the current moment.”

Facilities decisions still come down to need — whether a building requires basic upkeep or a full catch-up with a competitor — but Grimsley is candid about the pressure of an arms race playing out across college athletics. Recruits, he says, still want to be wowed by where they’ll spend their time, even as financial packages dominate the conversation. UNC’s Nike affiliation, including several programs under the Jordan Brand umbrella, gives the department a selling point it leans on with both athletes and their parents. A philosophy the department calls Recruiting Ready keeps that pitch sharp: facilities are expected to look presentable at any hour, because a recruit or a parent might walk through the door unannounced.

Coaching changes add another layer of complexity. UNC has seen turnover in some of its highest-profile positions in recent years, along with the arrival of a new athletic director, and Grimsley’s team has learned to treat each transition as its own negotiation.

“We are fortunate to be a destination for student-athletes and coaches,” he says. “A new coach comes to our school with a game plan that works, and we’ve hired them because we want that game plan to work for UNC.”

New coaches rarely arrive with demands on day one, Grimsley notes, but most develop a list of facility priorities within their first year to eighteen months. His team’s job is to balance those requests against a longer view — coaches come and go, but the athletic department remains, and any changes need to serve the programs beyond a single tenure. That means building flexibility into spaces from the start, since roster sizes fluctuate and staffs across both administration and coaching have grown in size, reshaping how locker rooms and meeting rooms get used from one season to the next.

Having 50,000 best friends

Revenue sits at the center of nearly every decision now, from premium seating to concessions to television contracts. When Kenan Stadium replaced its bleachers with individual seats roughly eight years ago, capacity dropped from 60,000 to about 50,000 in exchange for a more comfortable experience, part of a broader push to make attending games worth the cost in a market with no shortage of entertainment options.

“The big thing for us is revenue generation, and ensuring we’re evaluating every route of it,” Grimsley says. “We’re leaving no stone unturned.”

Grimsley credits UNC’s athletic communications operation, branded Go Heels, with getting ahead of the curve years ago on digital media, building a studio with technology that still feels current. He also credits the informal network of facilities directors across the country, colleagues who compete on the field but trade ideas off it, for helping him navigate problems that rarely have just one solution.

None of it feels routine, though little surprises Grimsley after so many years on the job. On football Saturdays, his team hosts a party for 50,000 people, and the goal stays simple no matter the crowd size.

“We don’t panic during a game,” he says. “Let’s solve the problem and keep everybody safe.”

A great place to be

Three decades after wandering ECU concourses with his parents, Grimsley still finds himself pinching himself over where that path led. He and his wife, a former Tar Heel student-athlete, have built their life in the town where he first arrived to play baseball, and he still finds the motion of construction and competition energizing rather than exhausting.

“I’ve been in Chapel Hill over 30 years as a student-athlete and working in the athletic department,” he says. “It’s a great place to live and work.”

That appreciation shows up in the smallest details as much as the largest ones — fresh paint before a recruit’s visit, a video board catching the last light of a September evening, a season ticket holder settling into a seat that didn’t exist a decade ago. The buildings change. The mission, Grimsley says, does not.