Bill Hancock
The keynote speaker for the luncheon is Bill Hancock, Executive Director, Bowl Championship Series (BCS). The luncheon is held in partnership with Western Oklahoma State College. Funding is being provided by the Western Oklahoma State College Foundation,Inc. Partners in Education Excellence Program: Doughty Family Lectureship in Business, Winston and Ethelda Higgs Lectureship in Business and Jeff and Kim Wilmes Lectureship in Business.
Bill Hancock has achieved a unique double-double at the upper echelon of intercollegiate athletics. He was the first full-time director of the NCAA Final Four and is now the first executive director of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).
Hancock served for 13 years as director of the NCAA’s Division I Men’s Basketball Championship — the three-week “March Madness” event that culminates at the Final Four.
After a family tragedy, he retired in 2002 and for three years was the tournament’s media coordinator on a consulting basis before being named BCS administrator in October 2005. He became executive director in November 2009.
An avid outdoorsman, Hancock has run 15 marathons and has ridden a bicycle across the United States, twice. In 2001, he spent 35 days riding from Huntington Beach, Calif., to Tybee Island, Ga. In 2003, he traveled in 17 days from U.S.-Mexico border in Texas to the International Peace Garden at the U.S.-Canada border in North Dakota.
His memoir about the transcontinental bicycle journey, “Riding With the Blue Moth,” has been among the top-selling sports books since it was released in October 2005.
His second book, “This One Day in Hobart,” is a historical chronology of his home town in Oklahoma.
Hancock, 61, is a 1972 journalism graduate of the University of Oklahoma. In the fall of 1971 he joined the staff of the university’s athletics department as assistant sports information director.
After his newspaper-publisher father died in 1974, Bill spent four years as editor of his family’s daily newspaper, the Hobart Democrat-Chief.
For 11 years, he served on the staff of the Big Eight Conference, first as media relations director, then as assistant commissioner in charge of championships and marketing. He became director of the Final Four in 1989.
His wife and high-school sweetheart, the former Nicki Perry, also of Hobart, is retired after a 30-year career as a high-school English teacher. She was honored as Kansas state master teacher of the year for 2004.
Bill and Nicki’s son, Nate, is a consultant for EMC in Kansas City. Nate’s wife, Kristin, is a physician assistant. They have two sons, William and Jack.
Bill and Nicki’s other son, Will, was killed Jan. 27, 2001, at age 31, in the crash of an airplane carrying members of the Oklahoma State University men’s basketball team home from a game in Boulder, Colo. Will’s wife, Karen, is assistant soccer coach at OSU. Will and Karen’s daughter, Andrea, was born Nov. 16, 2000.
Hancock has served on the U.S. Olympic Committee staff at nine Olympic Games and two Pan American games. His hobbies are grandparenting, cycling, running, classical music and American history.
He was inducted into the College Sports Information Directors hall of fame in 2005 and the All-College Basketball Classic Hall of Fame in 2010.
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