University of Minnesota Athletics
Maturi to be Honored with Hometown Field Dedication
8/10/2012 12:00:00 AM | Athletics
Aug. 10, 2012
Former University of Minnesota director of athletics Joel Maturi will be honored in his hometown Saturday, when the city of Chisholm, Minn., renames its high school football field after the recently retired Gophers' AD.
Known in Chisholm as Memorial Park, a ceremony to rename the facility Joel Maturi Field will be held at 4 p.m. on Saturday, August 11. Maturi said he will be present for the ceremony.
Maturi was a three-sport athlete in high school. He played football, basketball and baseball as a prep before going on to attend college at the University of Notre Dame, where he served on the support staff of Ara Parseghian's first National Championship football team in 1966.
Maturi received a bachelor's degree in Government from Notre Dame in 1967, completed credits for his master's in teaching from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and earned a master's in educational professional development from the University of Wisconsin, Platteville in 1985.
From 1967 until 1987 Maturi taught and coached at the high school level, 19 years at Madison (Wisconsin) Edgewood High School, where he coached track and field, baseball, football and basketball and led his teams to 10 state tournament appearances. He was inducted into the Wisconsin Basketball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1992.
He entered collegiate athletic administration at the University of Wisconsin (1987-1996), where he served nearly a decade before accepting his first head AD position at the University of Denver (1996-98). From 1998-2002 he was the director of athletics at Miami University in Ohio.
Maturi was named the director of athletics at the University of Minnesota in July of 2002. Over the next decade he would manage a difficult merger of the men's and women's athletic departments, foster significant growth in the Gophers' overall athletics budget, and lead the way on several key facility initiatives, including fundraising and construction of TCF Bank Stadium, the campaign to build a new home for Gopher baseball at Siebert Field, as well as several other major facility construction projects and upgrades.
Golden Gopher athletes also won more than 40 Big Ten or WCHA championships during Maturi's tenure to go along with NCAA titles in men's and women's hockey and wrestling.
Currently, Maturi is serving as a special assistant to university president Eric Kaler. In that capacity, he is assisting with course development and teaching classes in the College of Education and Human Development's Department of Kinesiology, helping the university with fundraising efforts and working on special projects assigned by the university president.
