Rick Bay was a sports executive for 25 years in both collegiate and professional sports. He has been the athletics director at the University of Oregon, the University of Minnesota, San Diego State University and The Ohio State University, where he resigned to protest the firing of his football coach by the university president.
He has also worked for George Steinbrenner as the Chief Operating Officer for the New York Yankees, and was the President of the Cleveland Indians.
Rick graduated from the University of Michigan, where he played football, was an All-American wrestler and was voted the Big 10’s Most Outstanding Wrestler. He later coached wrestling at his alma mater. His last two Wolverine teams were undefeated, won a Big 10 championship, were ranked first in the nation and finished third and second in the NCAA Tournament. Rick was voted the 1974 National Coach of the Year. He also was named to the Illinois All-Time Illinois High School Wrestling Team.
A man of many interests, and still an active fitness buff, Rick ran the Boston Marathon in 2 hours, 47 minutes. He has traveled the world (usually with his late beloved wife, Denice), and visited such remote places as Rwanda, Burma, Laos, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Cuba and North Korea. In 2009 he travelled to the Middle East including Iran, Syria, Jordan and Egypt.
In August of 2007, Rick lost his wife of 23 years, Denice, in a tragic car accident. Two weeks later, he hiked to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa, which, at nearly 20,000 feet, is the highest free-standing mountain in the world. There, in a tribute to Denice, who had visited and loved the African continent, he scattered her ashes. Later, Rick returned to Rwanda for the dedication of a new building for the Imbabazi Children’s Orphanage (in the town of Gisenyi), part of which is named in Denice’s honor.
In 2009 Rick was inducted into the University of Michigan Sports Hall of Honor, and in 2010 he was enshrined into the National Athletics Directors Hall of Fame.
In 2011 Rick married Dr. Julie Kerry of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she has practiced denistry for over 25 years. Last fall the Bays spent seven weeks in Africa, visiting South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Kenya and Rwanda.
Rick is a patron of the cultural arts, collects contemporary art, enjoys opera and ballet, and has seen professional theatre productions of all 37 plays written by Shakespeare.
Rick is currently working on writing three books. The first, entitled The High Road Leads Out of Town: My Wondrous Life as a Sports Executive, is an entertaining memoir of Rick’s colorful career as an executive at the highest level of professional and college sports. The other works, entitled Michigan Days: 20 Years a Wolverine recount his two decades in Ann Arbor as a Wolverine student-athlete, coach and administrator, and Confessions of a Coach's Son, is a memoir about growing up in Waukegan, Illinois. Both works are awaiting publication.
