Dan Coonan

Honored to have worn so many hats through the years – Conference Commissioner, Athletic Director, CEO, Attorney, Novelist, Senior Congressional Campaign Advisor, Fundraiser, Nonprofit Chairman of the Board, College Adjunct Professor, occasional Political Essayist, Youth Sports Coach, Bartender, Batting Practice Pitcher, Thanksgiving Dinner Chef, Wedding Officiant, Dock Talk Facilitator, devoted husband and father.  Those weren’t listed in order of importance! :)  Many more chapters still to come…

FOLLOW THAT DREAM

(To borrow a phrase from that great American poet, Bruce Springsteen.)

That’s kind of been my guiding principle from the beginning.

I grew up in a big, close Irish-Catholic family with first-ballot Hall of Fame parents and siblings to match.  We lived in El Segundo, a little town in Southern California on the coast in between Manhattan Beach and LAX.  El Segundo was and still is a baseball town, and that was the prevailing passion of my childhood. Both of my parents were educators. What a gift to be raised in that environment.

I attended Catholic schools and followed in the footsteps of several family members by attending Notre Dame.  By that time I had added politics as a passion, inspired by a few college professors and a book I read about Bobby Kennedy.  I wanted a career in sports or politics and felt a law degree would help me achieve success in either of these fields.  So I went to law school, earned a spot on Law Review, and spent my last semester clerking fulltime for a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a judicial externship.

Following law school I took a job with an LA firm practicing law, but kept my eye open for any opportunities in college athletics or on Capitol Hill.  I enjoyed working in the law, but desperately wanted to follow my passions.  Seven years went by in a flash.  Still single and with a little money in the bank, I rolled the dice. I left my law practice to serve as Finance Director and advisor on a congressional campaign.  I loved it, and would have followed the candidate to Washington if she had won.  She didn’t, and I woke up the day after the “victory” party with a bit of a hangover and no job. But it was great getting a little taste of politics.

I decided to give college athletics a shot.  I knew someone who knew someone in Notre Dame’s athletic department, and I offered to come back and do anything they wanted me to just to gain some experience and get a foot in the door.  An exceedingly kind administrator who didn’t know me from Adam took pity on me and let me do it.  (That administrator is still among my most valued friendships today.) I put my stuff in storage in LA, packed my car and drove back to South Bend.  As I was pulling out of El Segundo, I paused at the stop light on Main and Imperial and wondered if this was bat shit crazy or the smartest thing I’ve ever done.  Had to be either one or the other. 

At ND I tried to be the first one in each day and the last one to leave, and volunteered to do absolutely anything they wanted.  I crashed in the basement of my sister’s house.  I’ll be forever grateful to her for letting me do that for four months.

That little internship was all I needed in the industry.  I moved around a bit from there – eventually to the Pac-12 as Assistant Commissioner and to Cal Berkeley as Executive Associate AD overseeing football and basketball.  I saw what a difference it makes to be really passionate about what you do.  It never really felt like work.  Still doesn’t. I had the opportunity to teach a graduate course in Sports Law at USF in the evenings for five years which I also enjoyed very much.  Oh, and by the way, I married the girlfriend I had left in Los Angeles when I moved back to ND.

We moved across the Bay when I took a position as Santa Clara’s Athletic Director, a job I loved and stayed in for eleven years.  We had three kids, and a college campus like that provided a great environment in which to raise children.  They were fixtures at Santa Clara events, and the athletes made for such great role models.  My youngest even donned the mascot costume at age eight and performed in front of the student section at games.  

All that Jesuit compassion we saw day in and day out at Santa Clara rubbed off on us.  My daughter and I started volunteering at a local homeless shelter network.  It had a great impact on both of us.  She is an ICU nurse now, and I’m convinced that experience helped her develop that enormous heart of hers.  She is an awesome nurse, and is so well-cast in that role.  The homeless shelter network added me to its Board of Directors, and ultimately made me Chairman for four years.  During that time we merged with another large shelter network and formed LifeMoves. That was such rewarding work for an increasingly urgent cause.

We moved back to LA when I became Executive Director of Development for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles – with 300 parishes, 5 million Catholics and an annual fund of $16 million a year.   The Church has had well more than its share of troubles lately, and so much of that is shameful and self-inflicted, but it’s undeniable that the work being done in Los Angeles by all the various ministries of the Catholic Church is nothing short of miraculous – and the need there is staggering. 

In 2016 I took another crazy gamble and moved the family to Connecticut to become the next CEO/Commissioner of the ECAC – an 85-year old intercollegiate conference with 250 member schools spanning all three divisions of the NCAA.  They were kind of looking to go outside of their traditional network for the hire, and a few people I’ve known in the industry convinced them I’d be a good choice.  It was quite a challenge to get the finances of the organization squared and secure the future, but with a lot of help and a little luck I’m thrilled to say our financial fortunes have completely turned around.  A piece of that involved our decision to expand into intercollegiate esports, which hadn’t even been on my radar screen when I took the job. We had just twelve schools with us for that first esports year, but five years later we’ve grown to over 1,100 esports teams and 10,000 competitors nationwide, with no end in sight. The ECAC Board of Directors and the member schools have been terrific.  And our family absolutely loves our new life and friends in the Northeast.  We really couldn’t be happier with it all.  Someone above continues to smile on me.

In 2017, after watching two of my friends publish debut novels (Julie Finigan Morris and Julie Clark), I decided to pursue a life-long dream of writing one myself. I am so glad I did. Three years later we released Presidential Spirits, and two years after that came Another Round. I loved everything about the creative process, and found my daily writing time to be every bit as energizing as my workouts. These two novels, the cause they embody and this website are just the latest dream I’m pursuing. Love the chase.

Looking back on it all, I am overcome with gratitude for all who helped along the way, and for the good fortune and blind luck that paved my way.  Like my guy Satch says in Presidential Spirits, I’m far from done here.  There are many chapters still ahead.  And those chapters just seem to be getting better and better as we go along . . .