The Golden Era

One searingly hot Des Moines day in 2007, Brian Hardin stepped foot onto the Blue Oval. It had been a while.

Hardin, a Drake Relays champion during his high school days in West Des Moines, had competed at the Relays all four years while attending Marquette. But now, five years after college, the pressure was really on: He had brought his girlfriend back for a tour of Des Moines—and Drake Stadium.

The one-time champ kicked off his sandals. He took off for a lap. Halfway around home stretch it hit him: this track feels really hot. As he ended the lap, he looked down: The track’s iconic blue rubber had seared his feet—and stuck into it in tiny bits.

“And now I’ve got pieces of the blue track embedded in my foot,” says Hardin, now the director of Drake Athletics nearly 20 years later. “I didn’t graduate from Drake, but I’m literally always walking on the Blue Oval.”

Since taking over Drake Athletics in 2017, Hardin has overseen what Drake University President Marty Martin calls “the golden era of Drake Athletics.” In 2024, Drake won the Missouri Valley Conference All-Sports Trophy with student-athletes achieving a cumulative GPA of over 3.5—a first in MVC history. In May, Drake Athletics finished third in the All-Sports standings for a third straight year, a first for any private school.

Now, as Hardin seeks to extend that unprecedented excellence amid ever-shifting dynamics in college athletics, he says Drake Athletics can’t be afraid to reinvent itself, even as it stays true to its values and its community.

“We will evolve as a department with the changing times,” he says, “but we can’t lose sight of those distinct aspects that have helped make Drake so special.”

Hardin has Drake in his soles, yes, and his blood, too: His parents both graduated from the School of Education in 1973. Hardin returned to Des Moines with his wife, Cara—the then-girlfriend who witnessed his fateful lap around the Blue Oval—and their three sons. That came after serving as deputy athletics director at Marquette University, with prior stints at Marquette, Ball State, and Notre Dame.

“When I first got here, just being truly honest, I was surprised by the level of apathy that surrounded Drake Athletics,” Hardin says. “I felt we needed to give alumni reasons to be proud to be associated with Drake.”

Under Hardin’s leadership, alumni have quite a few reasons to feel proud:

Drake’s men’s and women’s basketball teams both won consecutive conference tournaments in 2023 and 2024, the first MVC school ever to do so (the men won their tournament again this year).

Meanwhile, the men’s track and field team had 10 total All-Americans from 2021 to 2024 including three in 2021, the most in any year by Drake since 1965. The women’s soccer team won the MVC regular-season title in 2023.

“That led right into us winning the Missouri Valley Conference All-Sports Trophy,” Hardin says.

Not bad for a relatively scrappy staff of 85 coaches and employees—about a third the size of some Big 12 schools Drake faces, he notes. But Hardin stops short of calling this a “golden era” for Drake: “That’s not for me to say.”

What Hardin will say: success for Drake doesn’t come from the highest-profile student-athletes with the most lucrative endorsement deals. To hear Hardin explain it, success doesn’t come from seeking success at all.

“Success is you against somebody else. Excellence is becoming the best version of yourself,” Hardin says. “If we can just strive to become the best version of ourselves, the outcomes will take care of themselves.”

The best version of Drake Athletics, as Hardin sees it, is in student-athletes bettering themselves in character, in academics and, yes, as recent years show, in competition. It’s in Drake establishing itself as the “hometown team” of Des Moines, of alumni returning to pack Drake Stadium for football and the renovated Knapp Center for hoops. It’s in embracing what makes Drake uniquely Drake.

“We’re very open about it,” Hardin says. “There are plenty of schools where you can go major in your sport, but that’s not going to work here. You’re going to be challenged academically, athletically, and socially at Drake—on a team competing for championships, getting a first-class education, and living in a thriving community that’s been going through a renaissance.”

Golden era or not, Hardin knows there’s more work to be done. But every year, on a clear spring day during the Relays, he finds himself back on the Blue Oval, taking it all in: the energy of crowds, the focus of the athletes, the history of everyone—himself included—who’s competed there. It’s all part of a growing momentum he knows can carry him and every Bulldog, past and present, into Drake’s future.