“Division III athletics are the last pure athletics that are left in this country.” A Conversation with Head Athletic Director Chris Bisignano
- 12 hours ago
- 6 min read
By Lena Flamm
On a Wednesday morning, Chris Bisignano sits in his third-floor office in the Purchase College Athletics building. Instead of exposure to sunlight or Purchase’s abundance of upstate New York greenery beginning to saturate for springtime, the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office look out on the campus’s massive indoor pool. “It’s a pretty great view,” he says of the neon blue expanse beyond his desk. Despite no indication of the changing of the seasons from within these walls, Bisignano is quite familiar with the outdoors of Westchester County.
Growing up just 20 minutes from Purchase in Port Chester, Bisignano learned more about football and baseball playing in backyards with the neighborhood kids and the Little League team than he ever did from watching the NFL or the MLB. “I think as a younger person I really didn’t watch sports a lot,” he said. “I played them.”
While many athletic children develop dreams of the pro leagues, Bisignano knew from an early age, despite his love of sports, that he wasn’t destined to be a professional athlete. His childhood realism, however, did not stop his desire to be around sports. Midway through college at Pace University, he found himself knocking on the door of Mr. Federici, his neighbor growing up, who also happened to be the athletic director of Port Chester High School, with no plan other than to say, “I’d love to coach.” After volunteering at the school for several years, he applied for the baseball coaching job, but Mr. Federici had other plans. He hired him as a softball coach, despite Bisignano being unfamiliar with the sport. “He gave me the rulebook, and that first year I kinda learned on the fly,” he said. “But I liked it.”
After the departure of the JV and the varsity coach at the school, Bisignano ended up moving up with the team and coaching the same group of girls through their high school career.
“We had a really, really good four-year run in Port Chester,” he reminisced. “We won the league all four years.” He expanded to coaching football and wrestling at the school before he found himself as the first-ever softball coach at Purchase. Despite moving on to an administrative role, he misses the sense of fulfillment he got from coaching.
“You know, you have a different relationship with the students when you’re coaching. You get to spend more time with them… I miss the strategy of preparing for games and game-planning, things like that, and the competitive part of it,” he says. “As a coach, you can still get as excited as the kids do when they're playing, and I think if you don’t, then you probably shouldn’t coach anymore.”
While coaching softball, he later took on jobs as the Facilities Manager and Associate Athletics Director, before being promoted to Head Athletics Director in 2012. But one of his major accomplishments for the department came in 2006, when he played a key part in the transition of the college into NCAA Division III status.
While some may see DIII as a stepping stone in a sports administration career, before moving on to a bigger stage, the athletic director feels that, in some way, he has found the place where he’s supposed to be.
“To me, Division III athletics is the last pure athletics that are left in this country. For now…so if you’re a Division I athlete or a Division II athlete, most of the time you’re getting some kind of athletic scholarship. And sometimes I question whether the kids are playing because they really like it, or because mom and dad are forcing them to do it,” the director opines. “At Division III, most- I won’t say everyone, but most people that play Division III, they’ve come to the realization that they’re not going to make money as a professional athlete. They’re not gonna get any athletic scholarship. They’re playing that sport because they love it. That’s why Division III is important and why I’ve made a career out of Division III.”
Behind the director’s desk, decorated with Panthers memorabilia, is a whiteboard full of long-term and short-term goals he has written for himself, to serve as daily motivation. At the bottom of the list, in all caps and with many exclamation points, Bisignano has written: “Be debt free!” This relates to the unorthodox way that Purchase, as a DIII school, is able to fund its athletic activities.
“We’re not funded the typical way a department would be on this campus,” he explains. “So what we do is we have a rental business basically, and generate revenue.” Bisignano’s latest project was the building of a $4.5 million turf softball field, which the department is working to pay off.
Other than charging $5 admission for non-students at men’s and women’s basketball games, which, according to Bisignano, are needed to help pay for the extra staff members the teams require, Purchase athletics does not make ticket revenue. It is an athletics program that makes almost all of its money from renting out spaces to other athletics programs.
Despite a particularly brutal winter that delayed the spring sports program, Purchase’s business model, along with its turf baseball field and brand-new turf softball field, was able to work to its advantage.
“We’re very fortunate, because as I mentioned, if you have an actual grass field, it’s not ready… But we have turf fields, and they all have lights. So we’ve gotten a lot of last-minute rentals from local high schools and other colleges that typically wouldn’t rent from us, but they have to because of field conditions.”
Despite his goals for the financial success of the program, Bisignano is quick to name something entirely different when asked about what goal is most important to him at this moment. “The most important goal obviously would be either the retention rate,” he says, pointing to where he’s written it on the whiteboard, “or the top GPA in the Skyline Conference.” Purchase’s retention rate for student athletes is currently 90%, and their average GPA is 3.0.
As for why he believes the retention rate is so high, he credits it to the extensive support system a student athlete receives as soon as they get to campus. Students can ask their upperclassmen teammates or a coach for advice, as well as a SAM, or student athlete mentors - a position Bisignano introduced to the school in 2022. “There’s always someone awake at the wheel for our student athletes.”
Bisignano would like to see the SAM program be even more involved, though. “I would like to see our coaches and our student-athlete mentors look at our students’ schedules before they start, especially incoming freshmen. Lots of times, I think freshmen might take on more than they should,” he said. “Statistics show that your first semester as a freshman typically could be your worst semester… I think that someone that has a better understanding of those things might help with that schedule.”
The athletic director was adamant that moving forward, it was not just academic success that he was pursuing amongst student athletes, but giving them a place to belong, and the tools to face whatever life may have in store.
“Sports and athletics is just as important a classroom as any other classroom on this campus… Hard work, setting goals, determination, teamwork, perseverance… you’re not always going to be able to do things on your own, you gotta be able to work with other people. So those are things that you get by being a student athlete, and I think that’s the important part of what we’re trying to teach here at Purchase College.”
Adam Taraska, baseball coach and general manager of the Athletics Department, has been working closely with Bisignano since he was hired at the school in 2011. “Absolutely a role model and a mentor to me. I’m not sure that too many other people have what it takes to do what he’s been able to do in this athletic department,” he said. “He's a lifer here. He worked from the ground up in this athletic department… I think that he’s a builder. If you just take a look at what we have going on on this campus, he has his footprint all over it.”
Many may look at Purchase Athletics, a Division III program at a primarily arts-focused school, not often at the top of their conference- and see nothing special. But every aspect of the program that would be the reason another person would overlook it is a reason Bisignano has stayed for 25 years. “I think that [Division III] is personified here more than anywhere else, because it’s not known for its sports… So if you’re here, and you’re playing a sport, it’s really because you love the sport,” the director articulated. “Out there, they’re sacrificing their time, their body, their everything to do it- not because they’re gonna get money, not because they're going to play pro sports, not because they have an opportunity to earn scholarship money. They’re doing it just because they love it.”