After 45 years, Bernie Waxman prepares for life after FSU Athletics
After more than four decades of service to his alma mater, Bernie Waxman admits there have been several moments over the past few years when he contemplated retirement from the FSU athletics department.
Times when he wondered what it would be like to be home with his family every evening and to have weekends off. How it would feel to not have to plan his life's events around the schedules of the Seminoles' sports programs and ongoing facilities projects.
After struggling to figure out the perfect time to make that leap, Waxman finally had an epiphany earlier this year.
That perfect time he had been waiting for? It's never going to come.
There always will be another project on the horizon.
As much as he'd love to stay on board through the completion of the Seminole Golf Course renovation, which is nearly complete, and to witness looming improvements to Dick Howser Stadium and the planned construction of a new football operations center, Waxman is calling it a career.
After 45 years -- the first 17 guiding FSU's intramurals program and the last 28 overseeing facilities in the athletics department -- today will be Waxman's last official day as Florida State's associate athletics director for facilities and events management.
It has been an incredible ride. One that started when most FSU sports were still yearning for national respect and the football team played its home games in the old "Erector Set."
“It doesn’t even resemble the campus that it was back then,” Waxman said, when asked to reflect on the changes he has witnessed. “Every day I drive in to work and see the University Center (the building that surrounds Doak Campbell Stadium), I just shake my head. I can’t believe what it looks like now.
“And what’s amazing is we have four or five generations of students that don’t know what it looked like before. They have no idea where we came from and how we got here.”
Waxman knows those things as well as anyone.
Not long after receiving his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Florida State, Waxman took his first job with the university in 1974 -- a good two years before the Seminoles would hire a young football coach named Bobby Bowden. Six years before Mike Martin Sr. would take over the baseball program.
Then, after heading up intramurals and campus recreation until 1991, Waxman received the opportunity to move over to athletics under then-A.D. Bob Goin.
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Waxman, a Merritt Island, Fla., native who ran track at FSU during his undergraduate days, had gotten to know Goin while participating in a racquetball group that also included university administrator Bobby Leach. Once the position running the facilities department opened up, Waxman was Goin's choice.
“It was basically a one-person department," Waxman said. "We didn’t have all that many facilities. It didn’t resemble what we do today. Back then, the coaches would prepare their own fields for their contests. They would set everything up with the help of the university grounds crew. Eventually, we were able to take this off their plates and let them focus on coaching.”
If it sounds more like a mom-and-pop operation than the multi-million-dollar behemoth that FSU's athletics department is today, that's because it was.
As a relatively young school with limited resources, Florida State was known for making its dollars stretch as far as possible -- and then maybe a little more. The Seminoles were often short on amenities, but long on imagination. And while times were sometimes tough financially, Waxman says the Seminoles' resourcefulness is what made the department so special.
“It really did start with Coach Bowden,” Waxman said. “The kids were coming to FSU because of the coach, not because of the facilities. And everybody talks about family [at all schools], but we really were a family. Everybody cared about everybody else. The coaches and administration wanted all the sports to be better, not just their sport. So they supported each other.
"I think that’s why we’ve had more than our share of people spend their whole careers here.”
Throughout his interview with Warchant, Waxman spoke in the past tense about his many positive experiences in the FSU athletics department. But he made a point to clarify that he isn't implying things have changed; he's merely preparing mentally for his departure.
Even now, with FSU is in the midst of a financial crunch that likely will endure for another year or two, Waxman said he has no doubts that the Seminoles will continue excelling in all sports.
He has seen Florida State work through similar crises before.
“We went through it in 2007, '08 and '09 ... we didn’t have the money we were used to having,” Waxman said. “But we tightened our belts, and the boosters stepped up. It was a difficult time, but we’re resilient. We’ve always bounced back, and we always will.
“We’ve got a great foundation. There might be a crack here or there at different times, but it’s always temporary. We’ll never fold.”
During Waxman's tenure, virtually every Florida State athletics facility has either seen new construction or extensive renovations.
Aside from the massive and continued upgrades at Doak Campbell, FSU also built a softball and soccer complex, a basketball training facility, indoor and outdoor tennis courts, the Morcom Aquatics Center, the McIntosh Track Building and more.
But Waxman said it's not the shiny new buildings that will leave the greatest impressions on him. It's the relationships that made him feel good about going to work every day.
"Life is all about the people that you meet along the way, and that's really what made the job what it was — the people,” said Waxman, who also had oversight responsibilities for FSU's cross country, track and field and golf programs. “We’ve had so many great people here, and I’ve been so very fortunate to be around them. One thing that was always nice was that jobs here weren't so narrowly defined. They were jobs without borders. You did what needed to be done, and you did it because you wanted to, not because you had to."
That, of course, led to many long hours and seven-day work weeks, but Waxman said it was a labor of love. As the administrator in charge of facilities and event management, he always wanted to make sure the student-athletes and fans had a safe and positive experience, and that the coaches had everything they needed to succeed.
Even as his staff grew to about a dozen employees, Waxman could be seen at just about every FSU home game or tournament.
“I wanted to be at all of them,” he said. “I don’t know if I had to be, but I felt bad if I wasn’t.”
Preferring to remain outside the limelight, Waxman tried to keep his retirement relatively quiet and initially resisted being interviewed for this story.
But word about his departure had been spreading throughout the athletics department for weeks, and his daughter, Gabrielle, recently shared the news on Facebook.
“More people than I ever would have guessed have reached out and said so many nice things,” Waxman said. “It actually made me like social media for about an hour and a half.
"Then I went back to being a dinosaur," he said with a laugh.
Although he has flirted with the idea of retirement for a couple years, Waxman doesn't have any grand plans laid out just yet. His primary objective will be spending more time with his wife, Lisa, who also was a Seminole track athlete and is retiring in December from her position as chair of FSU's department of Interior Architecture & Design.
“I am excited about it, but I've never done it before,” Waxman said of being a retiree. “I could find out a year down the road that I don’t like it. Or I could think, ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’”
While juggling their two careers, vacationing hasn't always been easy for the Waxmans. Bernie joked that Gabrielle, who also graduated from FSU in 2011, grew up thinking that Christmas was officially tied to football bowl trips.
So with about five months remaining before Lisa joins him in retirement, the first item on Bernie's post-FSU agenda will be putting together plans for a major trip to celebrate.
For nearly three decades, his specialty has been planning the logistics for home games. Now, he'll get to work on an extra special road trip.
“That’s homework I’m looking forward to,” he said.
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