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University of South Alabama president Jo Bonner needed less than two months to come to the realization that the right person to lead the Jaguars’ athletics department was already on campus.
South Alabama formally introduced Daniel McCarthy as its athletics director on Wednesday. He’d been interim AD since June 1, after Joel Erdmann retired following a 17-year stint in Mobile.
“We met with all our coaches,” Bonner said. “We asked them to not only give us an honest evaluation of their sport, but also the (athletics) program itself. And to a person, everyone talked about all the amazing things that Dr. Erdmann had been able to lead us to do up to where we are today for the last 17 years. But they also talked about the fact that Daniel had the qualifications, he had the integrity, he had the experience to take us to the next level.
“And that next level gets more challenging because the world of sports … has changed so much just in the last year or two. There was just a universal belief that he has earned this opportunity, that he is going to be an amazing athletics director somewhere. So why not here?”
The 47-year-old McCarthy has been in the USA athletics department since 2008, and was elevated to deputy athletics director for external affairs in 2017. The West Point, Ga., native previously worked at Richmond and Mercer and has degrees from Huntingdon College in Montgomery (bachelor’s), Georgia (master’s) and South Alabama (Ph.D.).
McCarthy becomes just the fifth full-time AD in South Alabama history, following Mel Lucas (1964-80), Cliff Ellis (1980-84), Joe Gottfried (1984-2009) and Erdmann (2009-26). Though he wasn’t sure he’d ever stay nearly two decades at one school, he called South Alabama “a place of opportunity.”
“At first, it was the opportunity to get closer to home,” McCarthy said. “That was kind of the primary objective, and that was that first opportunity. Then it became the opportunity to build something truly unique.
“… As the years passed, it became the opportunity to grow professionally, to take on new responsibilities, to take on new challenges, to learn and fail and improve. Amanda and I had the opportunity to raise our family here. We put down roots. This community truly became home. And along the way, I realized something — sometimes the greatest opportunities aren’t the ones that require you to leave. They’re the ones that ask you to stay and continue to bloom where you’re planted.”
South Alabama’s overall athletic department has enjoyed success in recent years, including winning a record 17th Bubas Cup Sun Belt Conference all-sports trophy for the 2025-26 academic year. Men’s basketball — among other sports — appears to be on the upswing, though baseball hasn’t reached the NCAA postseason since 2021 and football is coming off a 4-8 season.
McCarthy said he’ll take an “incremental” approach to evaluating and improving the various athletic teams on campus. He said he wants to be active in the community and proactive in getting Jaguars players and coaches whatever they need to succeed.
“I feel like I got a little bit of a jump start on this because I had the interim opportunity, and what I was able to do in the last 6-7 weeks is, I’ve met with every head coach, because my priorities are their priorities,” McCarthy said. “I need to understand (and) I need to hear from them, ‘what are the most important things to you right now? What can I do to help you? What obstacles can I remove to enable your success?’ And I know what common thread’s going to be — money. Nobody’s come to see me and said they had enough.
“Because I’ve known these guys for so long, my partnership with them is important. But I think it’s getting back into everything I wrote down during those meetings, and really starting to figure out how do we chip away at this? I’ve been telling our staff, ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ You eat it one bite at a time. So let’s not get overwhelmed with how big everything is, let’s just incrementally take one bite at a time.”
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