Marek Warszawski: New Fresno Pacific AD Aaron Henderson brings youthful energy

The stubble, eyeglasses, dress shirt and necktie don’t make Fresno Pacific’s new athletic director appear any older.

Aaron Henderson is 30. Which makes him the youngest athletic director in the PacWest Conference.

Before that, during the two years he worked at Immanuel High School, Henderson was the youngest athletic director in the Central Section.

“It’s not the first time I’ve ever been in a position where I’m the youngest at what I’m doing,” he says with a grin.

Fortunately, youth doesn’t have anything to do with capability. The powers-that-be at this private, Christian liberal arts college must have understood that when they tapped Henderson in late August to oversee an athletic program with 14 men’s and women’s teams and a $2.6 million annual budget.

It’s a big transition year for Fresno Pacific in other ways. Following a four-year wait, the Sunbirds are finally permanent NCAA Division II members after decades of competing at the NAIA level.

What’s the difference between NCAA and NAIA, beside two letters? The two governing bodies of college athletics have different eligibility standards, transfer rules and recruiting periods. But at Fresno Pacific, the biggest change might come from the outside.

“There are kids we can recruit now that we couldn’t before,” Henderson said. “When we were with the NAIA, a lot of people didn’t know what that was. Trying to explain that to someone made our job a little bit harder. But everyone knows that blue sticker. Everyone knows the NCAA. It’s definitely helped.

“A lot of people feel like we’re a legitimate university now. We haven’t changed, but maybe the perception of us has.”

Tucked into a leafy corner of southeast Fresno, Fresno Pacific’s campus isn’t exactly sprawling. You can see from one end to the other, and the main quad is a lawn that’s barely big enough for a game of ultimate Frisbee.

With 1,200 undergrads, the campus doesn’t need to be larger. What seems outsized is the fact that 270 of them are student-athletes. Meaning nearly one in every four students walking to and from class plays a varsity sport.

Certainly, this is no jock factory. Annual tuition at Fresno Pacific costs about $26,000, and very few Sunbirds are on full athletic scholarships. (Many receive other forms of financial aid.) So they’re playing more for the enjoyment and a well-rounded college experience.

“Student-athletes, as they’re walking across campus, fellow students will yell at them, ‘Hey, great game last night!’ ” Henderson said. “It’s more of a personal feel. When I was recruiting for basketball, I used to tell people, ‘If you don’t want to be known, don’t come to this school.’ Because you will be known. It’s a small campus. People here do care.”

Henderson knows this firsthand.

After attending Exeter High and College of the Sequoias, Henderson transferred to Fresno Pacific in 2006 to play basketball and compete in track and field. During this time, he met a Sunbirds volleyball player from Clovis who became his wife. Brittany Henderson is now girls volleyball coach at Clovis North, and the couple have a 10-month-old daughter.

Aaron Henderson’s coaching career began even sooner. While still an undergrad, he transitioned from basketball player to coach and soon moved into the role of lead assistant under head coach Chris Wright.

His responsibilities kept expanding. After graduation, Henderson took on a new position as assistant athletic director of events management in addition to his coaching duties. He also became an adjunct professor in kinesiology, teaching classes with titles such as “Analysis of Non-Traditional Sports.”

“We actually hired three people (to replace Henderson) when he went to Immanuel and took the job there” in 2013, said Jeremiah Wood, Fresno Pacific’s assistant athletic director for communications.

Henderson returns to his alma mater at a critical time.

After years of being a relatively big fish in the small NAIA pond, Fresno Pacific finds itself in a larger tank swimming against athletic departments with significantly greater resources. Even in the PacWest, the Sunbirds’ athletic budget ranks toward the middle bottom of the 14-team league.

Henderson is much like Jim Bartko, his counterpart at the NCAA Division I university across town, in that fundraising is a chief concern and responsibility. Fresno Pacific is about 65 percent fully funded for Division II, meaning the Sunbirds could award more scholarships in every sport if the school had money to pay for them.

Five fellow PacWest members are 100 percent funded, and Henderson wants to get there as well. He is also eying improvements to the facility shared by track and soccer, which lacks permanent bleachers, restrooms or a concession stand. Plus, baseball coach Oscar Hirschkorn, who led the Sunbirds to consecutive National Christian College Athletic Association titles (where the Sunbirds competed in the postseason while transitioning to D-II), is eager to turn his high school-ish field into a stadium.

“Aaron’s going to do a good job here,” Hirschkorn said. “He understands that we’re not going to change the type of school we are or the type of student-athlete we recruit, but that we also need to grow.”

Sounds like a task for an athletic director full of youthful exuberance.

This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 6:33 PM with the headline "Marek Warszawski: New Fresno Pacific AD Aaron Henderson brings youthful energy."