In new AD Anne McCoy, WSU gets a new leader — and a committed supporter of student-athletes

PULLMAN – Jake McCoy always knew when his mom was at his sister’s swim meets. He’d be watching the live stream of Taylor’s race, a couple years back when she swam for Washington State, and he’d hear a certain voice start cheering somewhere in the background.

“You can hear our mom,” Jake laughed. “You can hear her screaming. It’s hilarious. But then she sits down, and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m nervous.’ ”

That would be Anne McCoy, who was introduced Tuesday as WSU’s new athletic director, four months after she became the Cougars’ interim AD and three weeks after she was promoted to the permanent position. A mother of two, McCoy’s elevation comes at a critical time for WSU, which needs someone to guide the program into a hazy new chapter nearly a year after the Pac-12 collapsed.

That responsibility now belongs to McCoy, who made a few things clear in her introductory press conference. Her top priority is securing a permanent conference home for the Cougars, who are competing as affiliate members in the Mountain West and West Coast conferences this upcoming season, and she anticipates that happening no later than July 2025.

“I think as much as the temptation would be to try to finish things or get things nailed down or just make a decision sooner rather than later,” McCoy said, “I just think that we don’t know all the variables yet. And I don’t think we have all the information we’re gonna need to make a good decision and the right decision.”

McCoy also emphasized the importance of fundraising, which previous AD Pat Chun took to “a different level,” president Kirk Schulz said. Chun may have departed for rival Washington back in March, but in McCoy, Schulz sees a successor who can keep that up.

“Raising money, everybody sometimes thinks there’s some magic piece to it,” Schulz said. “A lot of it is vision and shoe leather work, and sitting down with people, having a conversation and talking about ways mutually they can support Washington State University. And guess what – you gotta know a place to be able to do that well.”

Turns out, that was a key reason why Schulz hired McCoy, who has worked at WSU in different capacities since 2001. She knows WSU well, and she knows Pullman well, and that’s not a bad starting point.

But in McCoy, the Cougs are also getting an athletic director who draws on her personal experiences as much as her professional ones. In her rise to the top of WSU’s athletic department, from her start as an intern in Connecticut to her most recent post of senior deputy director of athletics at WSU, she has kept in mind her reason for getting into the business in the first place.

“You had a chance to be part of a student-athlete’s life from the time they came to college, when maybe they were 17 or 18 years old, to when they left when they were 22 or 23,” McCoy said. “And just really watch them grow and get to know them as people, to really feel like there’s a human connection and that you can be part of their journey.”

In that way, there isn’t much difference between Anne McCoy the WSU athletic director and Anne McCoy the mom, her kids explained. The same person who works as her kids’ personal Uber driver – “She’ll go from the hotel to the pool, back to the hotel, to food, to the hotel, to the pool and back,” son Jake said – is the same one who gets to figure out which conference the Cougs will be competing in on a permanent basis.

In fact, she proved it in the process of taking this job. Last month, after Schulz offered McCoy the job while the two were at a meeting in Vancouver, she broke the news to her family at the dining room table in their home. Jake, Taylor and husband Brian had known about the possibility for some time – Jake was the last to find out, he joked – but it wasn’t until she arrived back home that she delivered the news: She had the offer in hand.

“She was like, OK, here’s the situation. Here’s what’s going on,” Taylor said. “How do you feel about this? Because I want this to be like a family decision and something we all do together. Because we’re all one unit here.”

“She wanted to make it a family decision, to make sure that we didn’t have any concerns,” said Jake, who has committed to swim at Tennessee beginning in the fall of 2025. “I was like, concerns? You’re gonna be great at it. I know that. Her biggest thing is staying kind and I know that’s not gonna change.”

Much is changing at WSU. That much is clear, especially because McCoy said Tuesday that “just because we’re not talking about things real publicly right now doesn’t mean there’s not a lot happening.” She didn’t want to elaborate – these kinds of things happen behind closed doors in that way – but whether the Cougs end up in a rebuilt Pac-12 or another conference entirely, the woman leading the charge is the same one who can get too nervous to watch her kids swim.

“She’s usually got a ‘go TT’ for me,” Taylor said, “but then she sits there and acts like she’s gonna throw up during our races. We had a meet this past weekend, and we both had races we were very excited with and she was like, first one there afterwards, after our coach, and was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m so proud of you guys.’ Just our biggest supporter.”