Gavin McKinney knows how to rebuild a college soccer program that has been struggling, and the Canada native will get a chance to do that as the new women's coach at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
UTC on Tuesday announced the hiring of McKinney to replace J.D. Kyzer, who resigned last month after 15 seasons.
"The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is a great school," McKinney said Tuesday in a phone interview, "and I think Chattanooga is seen as one of the best cities in Tennessee and within the Southeast.
"Soccer in the area is booming. Both within youth soccer and the semipro teams they have there make it a great soccer city. So there was a lot to attract me to UTC."
McKinney comes to UTC from NAIA program Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tenn., where he had a record of 71-26-3 in five seasons, including three consecutive trips to the NAIA Sweet 16 and a run to the final eight this past season.
The Mocs finished 1-17-1 in 2014 and have not had a winning record since 2004, a similar situarion to what McKinney inherited at Cumberland in 2010. The program that had won three games the previous season went 9-7-1 in his first year. In 2014, Cumberland finished the season at 17-4-1, was ranked No. 1 for four weeks during the season, advanced to the final eight in the NAIA national tournament and was ranked No. 6 in the final NAIA coaches' poll.
UTC vice chancellor and athletic director David Blackburn said Tuesday that he was impressed with McKinney's proven ability as a head coach and ability to build a program, his connections in Tennessee and the surrounding region and his leadership abilities.
"It's a difficult situation, so there's no sense in sugarcoating it," Blackburn said. "His focus is going to be first with the team, and then it will it be with the Chattanooga community. He wants to build strong ties to the Chattanooga community -- not just soccer, but certainly in the local soccer community."
Despite a 4.75 percent decrease in funding to UTC as a whole, Blackburn said the athletic department has decided to boost its investment in soccer for the upcoming season in an effort to produce a successful team.
"We felt like we needed to enhance soccer," he said. "At this level, you can't just throw 50 thousand dollars at it. You have to do it incrementally, and we're committed to doing that.
"Our intent is to continue to grow our revenue and help all our sports, and soccer is certainly part of that."
Sam Stroud, who had been an assistant coach under Kyzer, has been the Mocs' interim head coach. He will meet with McKinney soon to see if he will remain on staff or if a new assistant coach will be brought in.
McKinney played college soccer at Lambuth, and he's spent his coaching career in Tennessee at the youth and college level.
"It wasn't the deciding factor, but it was very important for two reasons," Blackburn said of McKinney's Tennessee contacts. "One, given our budget, the more in-state students you can sign the more you can maximize your aid. But also, Chattanooga is an important soccer community, and it's important to the community that soccer has a presence and (Chattanooga Football Club) has helped that. And we want to recruit and try to get the local talent we can get."
For now McKinney will focus on earning his certification to coach at the NCAA Division I level, preparing to move his wife and young child to the area and begin seeing what can be done to make UTC soccer succesful.
"I'm just ready to get in there and meet the players and assess what we have and see where we can go from there," McKinney said. "At Cumberland it was a similar situation (when I arrived), and I did the same thing there.
"I'm just excited to get to campus, meet the players and inject my philosophy on how to be a successful program, and hopefully we'll go from there."
Contact Jim Tanner at jtanner@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6478. Follow him at twitter.com/JFTanner.