UNLV President Len Jessup is at the halfway mark of his original five-year contract and speaks on the progress and what is to come on Friday, March 24, 2017.
Friday, April 14, 2017 | 4:23 p.m.
UNLV’s search for a new athletic director could be drawing to a close. According to two sources, Virginia Tech Deputy AD Desiree Reed-Francois has emerged as the leading candidate, though no deal has been finalized.
Reed-Francois is the No. 2 sports administrator at Virginia Tech, where her duties include overseeing the football program, ticketing, marketing and communications. She interviewed for the UNLV job Monday in Salt Lake City.
Reed-Francois graduated from UCLA in 1994, earned a law degree from Arizona in 1997 and has been working in sports administration for most of the past two decades. She was the interim AD at Cincinnati for five months in 2014 before becoming executive associate athletic director at Virginia Tech.
According to her bio on the Virginia Tech website, she “played a pivotal role” in hiring football coach Justin Fuente in 2015, and in 2016, she was promoted to deputy AD.
Now it appears as though UNLV is narrowing its focus on making Reed-Francois its next AD. Current Athletic Director Tina Kunzer-Murphy is leaving the position in July, and the university would like her successor to be in place by the end of the academic semester in May.
Mike Grimala can be reached at 702-948-7844 or [email protected]. Follow Mike on Twitter at twitter.com/mikegrimala.
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