August 1, 2025
By Ben Anderson, FM88 Sports Director
HUNTINGTON, W. Va. (WMUL-FM) — Gerald J. Harrison has been hired as the new leader of the Marshall Thundering Herd. Harrison comes to Marshall after serving Austin Peay where he served the same position since 2018.
Marshall University President Brad D. Smith said that Harrison checked all of the boxes when looking for a new director of athletics. 
“Someone who’s a strategic thinker,” Smith said. “Thinks over multiple time horizons. Someone who drives for results, establishes bold goals, figures out the priorities and resources them. Someone who builds a high performance culture, who can attract and retain the top talent, and then create an environment where they can do the best work of their lives. Someone who innovates for impact wakes up every day and says there has to be a new and better way. To make this happen and last but not least, someone who inspires through personal action brings intellectual curiosity, humility, teamwork, and perhaps martial secret sauce. Grit.”
During his seven years at Austin Peay, the Governors’ sports programs saw unparalleled success on and off the field, winning 13 championships – three in football – while boasting of 16 consecutive semesters with a department-wide GPA of 3.0 or better.
Harrison said that he felt right at home from the very first moment that he stepped foot in Huntington.
“It is truly an honor to be at Marshall University and for the Harrison family to officially become a part of the hunting community,” Harrison said. “From the moment we stepped foot in the city, we walked from the airport to the chief, giving us a ride to the hotel to us just walking around downtown. The number of people who said hello, they just stopped and gave a warm greeting, not having a clue. Who we were or why we were here. But we felt a sense of warmth and belonging. That’s hard to describe and really impossible to ignore when you think about this community.”
With the changing landscape in collegiate athletics comes the challenge of retaining athletes. Harrison said that his goal to keep athletes at Marshall is focusing on providing the best possible for the athlete.
“There’s conversations that you have where it comes down between you and another school that you compete against have similar numbers,” Harrison said. “How do you win that battle of riding a great student athlete experience, your facilities being great, where they eat, where they’re trained, all that stuff matters and what we’re going to work to build is an infrastructure that is great as well.”
Harrison now sets his sights on turning the Thundering Herd athletic department into one of the top tier athletic programs in the country.