Joel Nielsen has his work cut out for him.

For one, Nielsen, the 47-year-old former athletic director at the University of South Dakota, has been tasked with filling the shoes of long-time Kent State Athletic Director Laing Kennedy.

Joel Nielsen has his work cut out for him.

For one, Nielsen, the 47-year-old former athletic director at the University of South Dakota, has been tasked with filling the shoes of long-time Kent State Athletic Director Laing Kennedy. Kennedy, who has 16 years of experience under his belt, is the longest-tenured AD in the Mid-American Conference.

And then there are all those seats he has to fill — 90,000 of them at Dix Stadium, to be exact.

Nielsen, who has been transitioning into his role at the helm of Kent State’s athletic department since May, is beginning his tenure at Kent State with some lofty goals in mind, namely his department’s new 90,000KSU Campaign — a plan to sell out all 15,000 seats at each football home game.

Think of it as a PR blitz aimed at filling seats at the university’s often sparsely attended games.

“It’s hard to summarize, there are so many moving parts,” Nielsen said of the campaign, which has assembled a group of students, community members and athletic department staffers to brainstorm ideas.

“We’ve put a plan in place and are using a lot of resources and staffing to promote the [football] program,” Nielsen said. “It’s struggled for a number of years and we’d like to take it in a new direction.

“It’s a call to action to our fans.”

Under Nielsen’s watch, the University of South Dakota underwent an about-face, transitioning to an NCAA Division I sports program, revamping its logos and trademarks and overseeing the $2 million construction of a new scoreboard at the DakotaDome, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

As as an associate AD at Wake Forest, he helped their once ailing football team make an Orange Bowl appearance.

Nielsen, who said he pitched himself to President Lester Lefton as the candidate who “shared his vision for growth at the institution,” was announced as the new AD in March. He was hired under a 5-year, $225,000 per-year contract after pledging to help strengthen the program by increasing attendance, competitiveness and academic standards for athletes.

And when he made the move from South Dakota to Ohio, the university was sure to give him the full Kent State experience — they moved him into a room at Van Campen Hall where he lived until one week ago.

It may be an unorthodox living situation for a new university official, but Nielsen said he made the best of it.

“I had a great time,” he said. “The students were very friendly and very outgoing. They seemed very interested when they found out what I was doing. It was great.”

Nielsen hopes to add that same sense of adaptability to Kent State’s athletic department, bolstering the struggling areas of the department while preserving Kennedy’s legacy of success in other areas.

One of those neglected areas, Nielsen conceded, is fundraising. The department uses subsidies from the university to keep its budget out of the black.

Nielsen will have to not only manage the university’s athletics, but also become the face of its donor-relations activities, meeting and wooing potential donors into giving back to the university. With just weeks on the job, he has already travelled to several fundraising events around the country.

“And that also goes hand-in-hand with ticket sales,” Nielsen said. “But (athletic directors’) jobs are more externally focused now. Part of it is getting on the road and setting up fundraisers and meeting with alumni and donors.”

Though attendance and fundraising may prove to be some of Nielsen’s greatest challenges during his time here at Kent State, he does have Kennedy’s legacy to build upon.

But he is starting from scratch in many other ways.

“We’ve got nothing to sit on,” Nielsen said, lounging backward in his seat in his M.A.C. Center office, referring to his family’s newly purchased Kent home. “We bought lasagna the other night and we had nothing to eat it on.

“So we went out to eat in Tallmadge, to a restaurant, and our waitress was a Kent State student. Then we ran into a girl who was a cheerleader here at Kent and she was really excited about the program.”

Nielsen hopes to build upon that excitement, and possibly create some where it does not exist.

“I want to work on competitiveness — and I’m speaking comprehensively,” Nielsen said. “I hope our students can look back on the time they were in college and say they had the opportunity to go to a few bowl games.”

Contact editor Jenna Staul at [email protected].