New leadership leads Sycamore Athletics into the future

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV) — 2024 has been a big year of change for Indiana State Athletics.

New athletic director Nathan Christensen enters his first year leading the Sycamore athletic department at the same time as 3 new head coaches at ISU (soon to be 4 with a new softball coach).

Christensen stresses that broad base success across the department is a major goal for him in year one.

“I’m a big believer that we should be winning the MVC All-sports trophy that’s my number one goal for our athletic department each year to win it.” Christensen said, “For us to continue to be a part of those conversations, we need to have that broad base success because if you’re really good in one or two sports that’s great but these conferences and people that want to associate themselves with other institutions, they want to see that broad base success.”

In terms of success, new Indiana State head baseball coach Tracy Archuleta might have the biggest shoes to fill in replacing Mitch Hannahs. Hannahs led ISU baseball to the NCAA Tournament five times and won the program’s first ever NCAA regional in 2023. Archuleta explains that duplicating that success is important but having his team be active in the community is crucial as well.

“The first thing is having a team that is connected with Terre Haute and the community and having them bought into what we’re doing,” Archuleta said, “next year at this time we are hopefully talking about the regional we made and the Valley conference championship that we hopefully can get to but saying that knowing that it’s going to be tough. I mean it’s not an easy transition with the 22 guys that were in the portal before I even got here. The guys that we’ve signed so far, I think we’re on a good track to get to that point, but we still have a lot of work to do.”

The Men’s and Women’s basketball programs have new faces leading the way as well. Wabash Valley native Matthew Graves takes over the men’s program while Marc Mitchell will lead ISU women’s basketball into the future.

“I’m a competitive guy and you want to do well not only for the city, Indiana State, our players but selfishly I want to do a good job for this community and I’m excited about the challenge and if there wasn’t pressure that simply means people don’t care and there’s a lot of people that really care,” Graves said.

“My goal and expectation is going to be to get us to that conference championship as quickly as possible. It’s all about team, it’s all about togetherness, it’s all about family. No one person is bigger than the common goal,” Mitchell said.

In terms of philosophy for leading the athletic department into the future, Nathan Christensen stresses alignment from the top down and investing in student athletes.

“”I think having that strong partnership with athletics and campus is critical. The biggest thing for me is we need to be investing in our student athletes and also our campus and community so that’s always going to be at the core of our focus,” Christensen said.

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