As Paul Federici retires from Iowa football, he leaves legacy of mentorship, steady leadership

IOWA CITY — A passionate Iowa football fan got a hold of Paul Federici’s phone number “probably a week or two or three” after the Hawkeyes returned from the 2010 Orange Bowl.

The “somewhat animated” fan had a complaint for Iowa’s director of football operations after the Hawkeyes’ big bowl win during what was then the coldest Orange Bowl in history.

“He was not happy that on a very cold night in South Florida that the players were allowed to dump ice-cold Gatorade on the head coach,” Federici said. “How could we let that happen? How could I let that happen?”

Little did that resourceful fan realize when he picked up the phone that Federici had a plan to make the winning tradition a little less unpleasant for the victorious Kirk Ferentz.

“Before the game, we filled a 10-gallon cooler with room-temperature, 64-degree Gatorade and hid it in the locker room because I anticipated what would happen after the game,” Federici said. “With five or six minutes left in the game, we dumped all the iced Gatorade water off the table and brought this other one out from the locker room.”

So then when Iowa players grabbed the cooler to dump on Ferentz at the end of the game, they were grabbing the Gatorade that had been staying somewhat warm in the locker room all day.

“It wasn’t shower water, but it wasn’t 40-degree Gatorade either,” Federici said.

Ferentz’s not-as-cold Gatorade bath after the Orange Bowl is just one example of Federici’s attention to detail that has served him and the Hawkeyes so well since 2004 — and an attention to detail that will be leaving the Hawkeyes this week as Federici retires.

Ferentz described Federici in a statement as an “invaluable member of our program.”

“It is incredibly challenging to manage all the details surrounding every facet of a football program — from logistics, to travel, to managing staff and player needs — and Paul has made it look effortless,” Ferentz said. “We wish him well in retirement and thank him for making our program better.”

Federici — known endearingly around the football program as “Fed” — is widely respected well beyond the walls of the Hansen Football Performance Center.

When the Big Ten needed a new representative on the National Football Operations Organization committee, Federici’s counterparts had little hesitation about who the obvious choice was.

“There was an email out from Tim (Knox at Illinois) saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to step away and go into more administration, so we need a new representative for the Big Ten,” said Ben Hansen, Iowa’s director of football administration and engagement. “And I swear he sent that email, and it only took probably five minutes, and everybody was responding back. And it was like, ‘Fed,’ ‘Fed,’ ‘Fed.’ Everyone was ‘Fed.’

Hansen compares Federici’s role as director of football operations to being a long snapper — an “unbelievable” position, but also one where “you never really notice them per se as a fan unless something goes wrong.”

“They don’t notice you unless you snap it over probably the punter or you did a bad snap or you bobble it — something like that,” Hansen said. “Then they’re like, ‘Gah, who is that?’ So that’s kind of like with ours. You aren’t going to get a high-five or clap because we got to a destination and there’s five buses outside of our plane. That’s to be expected.”

Hansen has plenty of stories of how the Federici-led operations staff took what could have been a crisis and made it as smooth as perhaps a long snapper’s ideal snap to the punter.

The 2020 trip to Penn State might be at the top of that list. Hansen remembers “everything was good” on the day of the departure as Iowa had its “typical practice,” team meal and uneventful bus trip to The Eastern Iowa Airport.

Well, until it was time to take off.

“The front tire of the plane … had like a screw in it and would not clear obviously to take it, and they don’t have the parts or materials there to do that,” Hansen said. “Now, we have everybody there. Some have already boarded the plane.”

Federici was “calm, cool, collected” amid the major last-second problem.

Iowa’s staff knew the replacement aircraft “wasn’t going to get in for probably three hours” and quickly pivoted. The team bused back to the football facility to do the meetings and meals that otherwise would have happened in State College.

The operations staff had a video call with five of its catering vendors to see which restaurants had which necessities for a day-before-game meal and worked with multiple Pancheros stores to have hundreds of burritos ready for the team on the plane.

“The plan that we all had set in place due to his leadership and all of us learning from it — we were able to operate in a way that could have been more disastrous in regards to flow, meals, all that, but none of the things ended up missing,” Hansen said. “ … Other than just us getting there later not having our meetings there, you wouldn’t have felt any type of crazy or chaotic moment in there.”

Iowa went on to win that game, 41-21, which was the Hawkeyes’ largest margin of victory at Beaver Stadium in program history.

More so than any operations success, though, Federici takes pride in the “incredibly rewarding” experience of being around young people and being a “small part of their journey from entry into college through what are some really formidable years and then see them leave as a grown person.”

“Whatever they’re going to do — whether they’re going to enter the workforce, they’re going to be a public servant, they’re going to be public safety, they’re going to be an engineer, a teacher, an athlete, whatever they are — it’s really been fun watching young people transform over a four or five-year period,” Federici said.

Former Iowa student managers — ones under Federici’s supervision — have gone on to work across the country in sports operations. Dan Wolfe, a 2009 Iowa alum, is the assistant athletic director for football operations at Northern Illinois.

Brock Baumert and Andrew Schnoebelen work as the Kansas City Chiefs’ director of team operations and manager of team operations, respectively, after working as student managers at Iowa in the 2010s.

Krisanne Ryther — formerly a recruiting operations and special events coordinator with Iowa football — is the operations manager for 49ers Enterprises and Investments and the executive assistant to the president of 49ers Enterprises and executive vice president of football operations.

Hansen said Federici’s mentorship of younger staff members and student managers will be his “biggest lasting impact” as he concludes his 21-year tenure at Iowa.

“Fed is an unbelievable mentor,” Hansen said. “Obviously is going to be missed. … He always wanted to be able to assist and help (the younger staff) within their career path, both career and also personally.”

The longtime staffer’s care for others extends beyond those who work on Evashevski Drive as well, even if his stoic “northeastern-type” demeanor does not immediately show it.

“He truly cares about the people around him and every single aspect of the people who help us — our vendors or the people that are assisting our program that are outside of the program,” Hansen said. “He has a genuine respect for all of them and appreciation for them and really wants to get to know them as people. So by the end of those (bowl trips), they do end up having a long-lasting relationship where he still is in contact with almost all the bowl games that we’ve been to.”

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Federici has been at Iowa since 2004, leaving a job with the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks to work on Ferentz’s staff. He initially spent five seasons as the Hawkeyes’ director of athletic training services before spending the following 16 years as the director of football operations.

Federici had “different administrative opportunities” during his time as an athletic trainer with the Seahawks and more so with Vanderbilt before that such as facility planning, team travel and budgeting.

“Those types of things that had nothing to do with providing health care became really interesting to me as pieces of a puzzle that goes into the operation of an athletic department,” Federici said. “When that opportunity became available and Coach (Ferentz) talked to me about it, it was immediately of interest.”

Federici has largely stayed out of the public spotlight in his 21 seasons at Iowa, and that’s not by accident.

“I’m not comfortable at a podium and speaking to big crowds,” Federici said in a phone call with The Gazette ahead of his retirement announcement. “I certainly don’t like talking about myself. This is even kind of uncomfortable, honestly.”

That desire to maintain a low profile makes it a little harder for those around Federici to fully celebrate his impact as he officially closes this 21-year chapter of his career on Tuesday. Hansen’s gift for Federici after more than a decade of working together is a little note and a picture frame.

“He doesn’t want the celebration,” Hansen said. “I respect that because he is now doing what he has always had as the priority, which is family and friends. He’s only going to live eight miles away from his son. I know that’s a huge thing. … Hopefully just us continuing to do what he has taught will be what he would want as a celebration.”

Federici, in his ever-humble manner, has “nothing extravagant” planned for July 2 — his first official day of retirement.

“I’ll probably wake up, get my walk in, get my workout in, do some things around the house,” Federici said. “No big party or anything.”

Federici and his “really patient” wife Teddie — who relocated with him from Nashville to Seattle to Iowa City over the last four decades — now “want to do some things that we’ve put off for a number of years.“

First, though, he has a nonfootball operations problem to solve as they get settled in their Arizona home.

“Going through boxes and trying to remember where things are,” Federici said with a laugh. “Or once I open boxes, why I still have this box. I think that’s going to be a recurring theme here for the next couple weeks.”

Federici leaves Iowa in a strong position from an operations standpoint. Hansen has been on staff for more than a decade — first as the assistant director of football operations and now as the director of football administration and engagement. Ireland Hostetler, Iowa’s director of internal operations, has been on staff (including her time as a student) for the last seven years.

“Our staff has grown in the last decade or so, and I think it’s in a really good spot,” Federici said.

While Hansen anticipates Federici being “hands off” literally as the next generation of Iowa football operations leadership makes its own mark, the way that Iowa’s Federici-mentored operations staff does important tasks will “have Fed’s fingerprints all over it.”

“Whether that be our rooming list, how we operate with hotels, with our BEO, how we end up doing our manifest seating, to how we lay out with our position rooms, meeting spaces, etc. — those things all are going to have his fingerprints on it,” Hansen said. “ … I owe everything I know in regards to (operations) to Fed.”

It remains to be seen whether Iowa’s operations staff will have its own version of his call with the concerned fan in 2010. After Federici letting the fan air his grievances, he explained the pre-Gatorade-bath cooler swap in what turned out to be “a very pleasant hour on the phone.”

“I appreciate you explaining all that; I would never have guessed that,” Federici remembers the fan saying. “So that conversation, to me, is an example of why I’ve enjoyed this so much is that we can do things behind the scenes. Nobody sees it, nobody knows it, nobody needs to know it.”

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