Danny Morrison, Commissioner of the Southern Conference and former assistant athletics director at Elon, will become the director of athletics at Texas Christian University.
Morrison became the Southern Conference’s seventh commissioner on November 13, 2001. Under his leadership, the Southern Conference has undergone a number of changes including the addition of Elon University, moving the SoCon’s marketing and development programs in-house, and relocating the league’s headquarters from Asheville, NC to Spartanburg, SC.
Morrison was instrumental in developing a partnership with TIAA-CREF to present the Academic All-Southern Conference teams in all 19 sports and increasing funds for postgraduate scholarships by $10,000. The league also initiated an Education Partners Program as well as an Employee Assistance Program for all member institutions.
The SoCon has also participated in an internship program with the National Football League and broadened its reach on television with its partnerships with ESPN, Fox Sports Net South, C-SET, Comcast/Charter Sports Southeast, and College Sports Television.
Morrison was named to the NCAA Division I Baseball Issues Committee in 2004.
Morrison, 51, had served as the senior vice president at Wofford from 1997-2001, focusing on business operations and enrollment management. He also supervised a number of major construction projects on campus including a new $4 million residence hall and the $14.5 million Roger Milliken Science Center.
Prior to becoming senior vice president, Morrison was Wofford’s director of athletics from 1985-97. Among the national leaders in graduation rates for its student-athletes, Wofford went from competing as an independent in the NAIA ranks with nine sports to a member of the Southern Conference at the NCAA Division I level with 16 sports. Facility improvements included land acquisition, the Richardson Physical Activities Building, Gibbs Stadium, the Reeves Tennis Center, NFL-quality practice fields and a renovated soccer stadium. The athletics endowment grew from $150,000 to more than $7.5 million and annual Terrier club giving increased from $220,000 annually to $675,000. Morrison also was instrumental in negotiating a 15-year agreement for Wofford to host the NFL Carolina Panthers training camp.
A native of Burlington, NC, and a graduate of Williams High School, Morrison graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Wofford in 1975 with a degree in mathematics. As an undergraduate, he was a four-year letterman in basketball for the Terriers. Morrison earned a master’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in 1993, he completed the month-long Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University. In 2001, he completed work on his Ph.D. in higher education administration at the University of South Carolina in Columbia where his dissertation focused on marketing practices in colleges and universities.
Following his graduation from Wofford, Morrison returned to Williams High School where he was a math teacher and assistant basketball coach. The following year, he was named head coach. In 1980, Morrison moved to Elon as an instructor of math, assistant basketball coach and head tennis coach. He became an assistant athletics director at Elon in 1982 before moving to Wofford in 1985.
Morrison was named Wofford College’s “Young Alumnus of the Year” in 1992 and earned “Alumnus of the Year” from the University of South Carolina Higher Education Department in 2002. He was inducted into the Wofford Hall of Fame in November, 2002 and was ranked seventh on the “Top 50 Most Influential Sports Figures in South Carolina” by The State newspaper in 1996. He also is a recipient of the Lewis E. Miller Leadership Award from the Spartanburg Development Council. Morrison attended the Aspen Institute Executive Seminar in 2001 and has been a panel speaker on key topics in intercollegiate athletics including “Intercollegiate Athletics: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” and “Brand Building in Higher Education: Obtaining a Sustainable Competitive Advantage.”
Morrison and his wife, Peggy, are the parents of a son, Trey, a student at the University of South Carolina, and a daughter, Meg, a student at Wofford.
The Southern Conference is an NCAA Division I athletics conference consisting of 12 member institutions in the states of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee with headquarters in Spartanburg, SC. Members include Appalachian State University, College of Charleston, The Citadel, Davidson College, East Tennessee State University, Elon University, Furman University, Georgia Southern University, UNC Greensboro, UT Chattanooga, Western Carolina University and Wofford College.