Patrick Elliott didn’t intend on entering the sports administration field. Even as he pursued a bachelor’s degree in management and industrial relations at Seton Hall University, Elliott planned on entering the corporate world after graduation.

But during his sophomore year in college, Elliott received a phone call from Keith Glass, his former basketball coach at Mater Dei High School. Glass offered Elliott jobs as his assistant and the freshman team coach. Because the commute was manageable, Elliott accepted.

While continuing to coach at summer basketball camps, Elliott met P.J. Carlesimo, who coached Seton Hall’s basketball team to six NCAA tournament appearances in 12 seasons. Elliott joined Carlesimo’s staff as an assistant after graduating in 1989. He missed out on Seton Hall’s NCAA runner-up finish in 1989 but was part of four NCAA tournament teams.

When Carlesimo left Seton Hall to coach the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers five years later, Elliott took a job with a commercial financial firm in New York City. Life was finally how he had expected it to be.

But just a few months later, Seton Hall called, seeking an assistant director of athletics for facilities and operations. Elliott snatched the job, and from then on, he stayed in sports administration, stopping at St. John’s University before landing his first gig as athletic director at St. Peter’s University.

St. Peter’s

College students typically pull all-nighters to cram for exams. But on Nov. 17, 2009, thousands of St. Peter’s students fended off sleep in anticipation of a 6 a.m. tipoff at the school’s Yanitelli Center.

Elliott, the school’s athletic director at the time, had convinced ESPN to broadcast the Peacocks’ men’s basketball game against Monmouth University as part of the network’s College Hoops Tip-Off Marathon. The student body responded with unprecedented enthusiasm, spending the night in the tennis bubble adjacent to the gym. DJs, games and a 4 a.m. pep rally breakfast occupied them until warm-ups.

“We hadn’t really gotten students to games, so it was really, for us, turning the corner of engaging our students, of being in the community, of highlighting our sports program,” Elliott said.

And it wouldn’t have been possible without Elliott’s hard work and persistence with ESPN, which, at first, hesitated at the thought of broadcasting a team coming off an 11-win season. But an athletic director at a smaller Division I school needs to persist in order to receive national attention.

A Brand Name

Just eight years after transitioning to Division I, Binghamton University’s athletics achieved a milestone that put the program in the coveted national spotlight. The school’s men’s basketball team won 23 games and reached the NCAA tournament as a No. 15 seed.

With most of the team set to return the following season, the college basketball analysts gave the Bearcats lots of attention.

But then the infamous basketball scandal occurred, diminishing the prominence of Binghamton athletics to a fraction of what it was.

In fact, according to Elliott, people outside of Binghamton’s region frequently are unaware of the school’s status as a Division I program. So when he succeeded James Norris as the school’s athletic director in November 2011, Elliott said he wanted to “get the brand of Binghamton athletics out there.”

But if Elliott needed to argue with ESPN for a televised game at St. Peter’s, you can only imagine what he’d need to do to bring the network’s cameras to the Events Center.

Elliott admitted it’s not a quick process, but he said he has already made some progress.

The Decision

Leaving St. Peter’s was not an easy decision for Elliott, who was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Middletown, N.J. He had never lived outside the New York metropolitan area, but he had vacationed near New York’s southern tier and was at least somewhat familiar with the region.

While St. Peter’s athletic development, specifically the basketball team’s rise to the 2011 NCAA tournament, also made it hard to leave, Binghamton’s facilities and young, quality Division I program made the job enticing.

“At St. Peter’s we were building something, and we reached some milestones,” Elliott said. “I felt that there was still some work I wanted to do there, but the opportunity came up and I just felt it was the right opportunity at the right time.”

No Typical Day

Just one constant persists every day of Elliott’s week: waking up his three sons, feeding them breakfast and dropping Dominick, 12, and Matthew, 3, at school on the way to Binghamton University.

Other than that, he said it’s hard to describe a regular day as Binghamton’s athletic director.

“There’s no typical day,” he said. “Sometimes you can plan out a great day, and you don’t get done what’s on your to-do list.”

But he usually spends about six hours in meetings and devotes the rest of the day to responding to phone calls and emails and doing paperwork. Sometimes Elliott’s inbox and voicemail are so flooded with messages that he needs to finish responding to people after putting his kids to bed at night.

Why I Come To Work

Attending meetings and making phone calls are part of the job, but there’s more.

“The whole key to being an athletic director is you want to positively impact students’ experiences and give them the tools they need to succeed — [make sure] that they’ve had a great experience athletically and that they’ve been educated and go into the world and do bigger and better things,” Elliott said.

While some student-athletes need a lot of guidance, others don’t.

Elliott fondly remembers a women’s soccer player at St. Peter’s who tore her right ACL twice and left ACL once during her four years in college. Despite these injuries, she never lost sight of the bigger picture, staying involved with groups and clubs on campus and tutoring other students.

Witnessing her character prevail when faced with adversity made Elliott proud.

“As an athletic director, when you look at that, that’s why you do your job,” he said. “That’s what keeps you coming to work every day.”

That’s one example, but there are certainly similar cases at Binghamton, where Elliott faces the tall task of resurrecting a formidable sports program.

Making Binghamton athletics prominent nationally, or at the very least, regionally, will take time. But under Elliott’s watch, the St. Peter’s basketball team went from six wins to an NCAA tournament in four years, opening the eyes of people across the country to a small school in Jersey City. That’s just one team, but Elliott’s persistence helped the Peacocks tremendously.

Now Elliott’s goal is for that same quality to help Binghamton.