Former Rosemont basketball coach, assistant AD hired to become Salem CC’s next athletics director
By Al Muskewitz
Riverview Sports News
Salem Community College has tapped former Rosemont College basketball coach and assistant AD Bob Hughes as its new athletics director to succeed retiring Bob Bunnell.
He is expected to officially start the position Nov. 4, but will be on campus next week to start the transition. Bunnell retires at the end of the year.
Salem CC president Dr. Mike Gorman was authorized to make the hire by the college’s board of trustees at its last meeting. Hughes will be ratified at the upcoming board meeting.
“He has a sense of enthusiasm and his coaching experience gives him perspective that I think is important,” Gorman said. “He’s anxious to start this stage of his career.”
Hughes, 43, was the Ravens’ men’s basketball coach from 2012 to this past spring when he stepped down “to pursue other opportunities.”
He left as the program’s all-time leader in wins, which included nine straight playoff appearances from 2014-22 and the program’s first NCAA Division III Tournament appearance in 2019. But he had reached a crossroad whether to remain in coaching or pursue a future as an administrator.
“My family and I had a tremendous 12-year run leading this program,” Hughes wrote on his farewell post to Rosemont on X in April. “I am enterally grateful to the faculty, staff, administration and most importantly the student-athletes for making this now middle-aged man’s childhood dreams come true … Next play.”
While basketball will always be part of his life, he said Friday the move to Salem is about “focusing 100 percent on the administration and trying to grow the athletic department.”
“As you know, coaching is a huge time commitment,” he said. “At this time of year I’d be starting to be giving up every single Saturday for the next 20-some weeks, and that doesn’t include recruiting.
“I have an young family and this was an opportunity to move into an administrative role, really, to focus more on my family and have more time with my family. I have no interest in giving up any more Saturdays at this point than I have to.”
As an administrator, he served as Rosemont’s interim athletic director in 2021 and 2022, where he oversaw a $400,000 departmental budget and supervised a staff of four full-time and 37 part-time employees.
He also implemented Rosemont’s first DEI and sexual awareness programs from student-athletes in 2019 and worked with the AD to create a new athletics strategic plan, which was adopted by the board of trustees in June 2017.
Bunnell came aboard at Salem in 2018 to restart the Mighty Oaks’ athletics program that had been dormant for the previous five years. The resumption of athletics it was believed would increase enrollment and raise the profile of the school.
It was a complete rebuild, from starting several sports, hiring coaches, buying uniforms, finding players to fill those uniforms, securing playing venues and turning what basically was a multi-purpose venue for the county into a collegiate arena. “There wasn’t even an S on the floor of the gym,” he said.
Then once they got up and running they had a COVID pandemic to deal with.
But through the “extremely supportive” Gorman and a campus community that “really embraced athletics,” it “made this rather challenging effort easier to accomplish.”
The Mighty Oaks now offer baseball, softball, men’s and women’s basketball, and look to get men’s soccer back up and running next year.
“Tremendously proud to (go from) not even having a basketball to having teams that are competing at the regional level and successfully and having All-American and great academic athletes and a very strong coaching staff,” Bunnell said. “To go from no athletes to about 90 is pretty good.
“Obviously we didn’t do everything I wanted to do. I wanted to have both men’s and women’s soccer and, at the time when we started, cross country going. I’m really hard on myself. I wish that I had finished the job I set out to do, but it’s time for me to move on.”
And at the end of the year it lands in Hughes’ hands.
“What Bob Bunnell has done there has been terrific … it really tees up the next person to grow and stabilize some of the programs. There’s no reason with the foundation from an administrative perspective, with a foundation from an operational perspective Bob has put in place, that it can’t grow, that it can’t improve and that it can’t be a consistent source of excellence for the college moving forward.
“I’m excited to dig in and find out what we can do. The question isn’t what do they want to do as much as what can we do.
“One of the things that drew me to Rosemont 12 years ago, it was a program that was three years old when I took it over. I look at this the same way. You have someone who came before you and laid that foundation and now you can say let’s take this thing out and test it, let’s see what it can do and how far we can take it.”
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