Veteran Athletics Staffers Meador and Brandt Retiring in June
May 21, 2025 11:31 AM | General, Men's Basketball
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By: John Antonik
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – For Randy Meador, Morgantown, West Virginia, was supposed to have been a 12-month stop on his way back to Oxford, Ohio, to hopefully become Miami University's head athletic trainer.
His dad, Ed Meador, spent decades photographing and filming RedHawk football and basketball games with young Randy often by his side.
Meador earned his athletic training degree from Miami in 1984, married his wife, Beverly, shortly thereafter, and then they set out to West Virginia University so he could get his master's degree in athletic training.
Back then, owning a master's degree typically meant a few extra bucks a month in your paycheck.
"The promise to my young wife at the time was we'd come over here for one year for grad school, and then head back," Meador recalled recently.
Well, one year turned into five, then to 10, and now, 40 years later, the Meadors are finally going to have more time to return to the Cincinnati area to visit their parents or travel the states they have yet to see. Randy says they are down to four – Alaska, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.
Meador, affectionately known to thousands of former West Virginia University athletes simply as "Doc," is retiring on June 30.
The unforgettable image of athletic trainer Randy Meador tending to an injured Da'Sean Butler during the 2010 Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis (All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo).
Joining Randy on the retirement list is longtime athletics maintenance worker Billy Brandt, who will be wrapping up his 38th year with the department on June 13.
A painter and drywaller by trade, Billy was hired to work on the maintenance staff in 1987 at a time when you could still fit the entire athletic department in one classroom inside the WVU Coliseum.
Brandt grew up in Windham, Ohio, about five miles west of Warren, and through an older sister, he found his way down to the University City. His first job in Morgantown was drywalling Northridge Apartments, and eventually, he got hooked up with electrician Bryan Deem when they were doing work together on Barrington North Apartments.
Deem was hired by athletics to oversee the maintenance department staff, and he asked Billy if he wanted a more stable job with benefits.
Billy said yes.
"They started me out at $6 an hour, and I was making $6.60 across the street, but the benefits were much better, and the overtime pay was helpful," Brandt remembered. "Back then, we worked 500 or 600 hours a year."
Through the years, everybody in the department got to know Billy Brandt because you always heard him before you ever saw him. His infectious laugh had a way of making the long days seem much shorter.
Meador's career pivot came about as a result of assistant athletic trainer Jim Rudd getting another job, leaving the Mountaineer men's basketball program without a trainer. Randy spent one year working as a graduate assistant trainer with football while earning his master's degree, so getting men's coach Gale Catlett to sign off on the move was imperative.
His first meeting with Catlett turned into a test in allegiances.
"Coach was sitting behind his desk, and he was doing his typical spiel, 'Oh, so you are a football guy, huh?'" Meador laughed. "Then, he saw that I was from Miami, Ohio, and he (had) coached at (Cincinnati), so he didn't care too much for that either.
"Well, about that time, Lester Rowe walked into his office, and he goes, 'Hey, Randy, how 'ya doin?' Coach does a double take, and he says, 'How do you know Lester?'"
Meador then began to explain to him that he often worked with the men's basketball players when they came over to the stadium to lift weights.
"Coach always respected Lester so much, so after hearing Lester's approval of me, he was on board," Meador said.
It was the beginning of a long and successful tenure that included the remaining 18 seasons of Catlett's coaching career. Meador's stint continued through John Beilein's five years, then 16 with Bob Huggins, followed by one each with Josh Eilert and Darian DeVries.
Added up, that's 40 years at the same place working for five different coaches.
Of course, so much has changed over the years.
"When I started, the players weren't around in the summertime," Meador explained. "Even at football, a lot of the players worked jobs in the morning and then lifted weights and worked out in the afternoons and evenings. It was a different time. Now, our guys are around all day.
"From 1985 to 1991, I was on a 10-month appointment," he continued. "To get our longevity pay, I remember going to see Joyce (Bucklew) once and telling her, 'Hey, I'm short a year here.' She said, 'Well, (your longevity) is prorated because you weren't full-time during those years.'"
There were just two full-time athletic trainers, a graduate assistant and some students who covered the entire athletic department when Meador first started. Teaching in the School of Physical Education was also a prerequisite. Now, the department has 16 full-time athletic trainers alone, plus numerous graduate and student assistants.
The athletics maintenance department has also grown from a staff of just eight when Brandt came aboard.
Billy said he has missed one football game in 38 years. That happened in 2000, when he was forced to quarantine because his wife and son had COVID-19. He also worked men's and women's basketball, gymnastics, baseball and other athletic events numbering in the thousands during his three-plus decades here.
"I tell people all the time, 'This is our life,'" Brandt said. "People used to see me running around with my little boy, who is now 19, at work all the time. I would tell them, 'That was the only time I got to see him.'"
A typical game day for the athletics maintenance staff meant at least 15 or 16 hours spent at the venue setting up beforehand and tearing down afterward. Prior to the basketball practice facility, the days were even longer when athletics shared the WVU Coliseum with the School of Physical Education.
"When we used to have to clean the bleachers for PE every day, we didn't get out of here until 10:30 or 11 o'clock at night," Brandt said.
There were many long days for Meador, too. College basketball now is basically a year-round deal, and athletic trainers must be on-site whenever the players are on-site.
Family vacations had to be strategically planned around a little sliver of days in late May at the end of the spring semester or in early August right before the start of the fall term.
Travel was always a challenge because Morgantown does not have an airport capable of handling modern aircraft used for team travel. Before Clarksburg's runway was extended, the squad used to have to fly commercial out of Pittsburgh, meaning an hour-and-a-half bus ride added on to the trip each way.
That has been pared down to 45 minutes going to Clarksburg, but that's still an extra hour-and-a-half included on basketball road trips that oftentimes conclude at daybreak.
Between the basketball practice facility and team charters from Clarksburg, Meador said his family time has increased significantly over the years.
"Since we got the practice facility, the coaches have allowed the academic people to determine practice times based on class schedules, and it's usually early in the afternoon, and I was getting home a little after five.
"I always told Bev, 'I'll look at doing something else when I get tired of the travel,'" Meador explained. "This Big 12 travel … people who haven't done it don't know what they're talking about. It's a challenge, but I always enjoyed it. The Big 12 athletic trainers, we're a pretty good group. We don't always do a lot together, but we communicate and help each other out. The camaraderie keeps you going. I worked my way up to third-longest in the Big 12, and then second-oldest. I will miss those relationships, and I will miss the staff here, although we've had a lot of turnover since COVID."
Among Meador's many personal highlights were working the 2010 Final Four at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
"You dream about working one of those, and you'd see some of these young people who hardly put any time in, and they go immediately and you're like, 'Sheesh.' Well, it took me 25 years to get there for one," he said.
Of his many professional triumphs, the one that sticks out most was the time he helped Da'Sean Butler recover from a serious ankle injury in practice two days before he scored a career-high 43 points in a home victory against 13th-ranked Villanova in 2009.
Coach Bob Huggins' policy at the time was a player who didn't practice the day before the game couldn't play the next day.
But because of Meador's persistence, and Butler's willingness to play, they forced Huggins to make an exception to his rule.
"We spent as much time together as we could, and we got him to shoot-around and he was able to do some stuff, which got Coach interested," Meador recalled. "We talked him up and talked him up and eventually Huggs said, 'Okay.' His ankle was still pretty swollen, but he goes out there and scores 43 on it.
"Not too bad, huh?"
During Meador's first year at WVU in 1985, Mountaineer basketball was playing in the Atlantic 10 Conference. The league consisted of many smaller schools on shoestring budgets, which oftentimes required resourcefulness and ingenuity.
Meador remembers the team dressing in classrooms at Rhode Island's Keaney Gymnasium, or watching the squirrels have their way with each other up in the rafters at Massachusetts's Curry Hicks Cage.
It was impossible to play a game at Temple's McGonigle Hall without a couple of buckets because the roof always leaked.
St. Joseph's Alumni Fieldhouse also served as the Philadelphia 76ers practice facility, which meant frequent interaction between the 76ers players and visiting teams when they had to share the gymnasium.
Across the street was the best Philly cheesesteak joint in the city.
There was once a bomb threat called into St. Bonaventure's Reilly Center forcing both teams to evacuate the building and sit together on the same bus, Jim Baron and the Bonnie players on one side and Gale Catlett and the Mountaineer players on the other side.
Sitting right in the middle of them with his athletic training bag resting on top of his lap was Randy Meador.
Saturday games at St. Bonaventure meant Sunday morning brunches at the Castle Inn across the street from campus.
"They even had frog legs - in Olean, New York!" Meador exclaimed.
He was also on the team bus that broke down on the Newport Bridge, backing up traffic for miles and miles. Randy recalls legendary "Voice of the Mountaineers" Jack Fleming, accustomed to professional sports team travel working for the Pittsburgh Steelers, not handling that travel interruption very well.
When the team moved on to the Big East, there were a couple of late-night aborted landings when the pilot had the propeller-driven plane headed perpendicular to the runway, ultimately forcing the team to land at nearby Allegheny County Airport just outside of Pittsburgh.
Meador said all that was available in the wee hours of the morning to pick the team up were two yellow school buses, and one of them, overloaded with weight, lost its brakes coming down Easton Hill and continued up an adjacent hill past the Pines Golf Course before it finally came to a stop.
Brandt, too, has some pretty interesting travel stories during the year WVU closed the Coliseum in 2000 for asbestos abatement. The show went on the road to Wheeling, Fairmont and Charleston, which meant the maintenance crew had to pack everything up and take it with them for all home games.
"The Physical Plant took (the floor) on a tractor trailer while Scott Wolfe and Bryan Deem transported the two baskets," Brandt recalled. "We had to take the bench seating and scoring tables. We would leave here at noon and get back around one or two o'clock and then be back at work at seven the next morning.
"Me and Jerry (Mahoney) came back one night in a Penske Truck with that stuff, and nobody had (cell) phones back then," Brandt added. "A tractor trailer flipped over, and we stopped and helped pull the poor guy out of the cab and into the snow."
To make a little extra money during the summer, Brandt and the other maintenance workers were permitted to have side hustles during off hours. Billy's side job was painting and drywalling, and there were dozens of coaches' homes he visited over the last 38 years.
Once, while painting assistant football coach Bill Kirelawich's house, he knocked a full pan of white paint on top of his head.
"It was a good thing I had sunglasses on," Brandt chuckled. "I called my wife, and then I had to drive from the other side of Cheat Lake, where Kirlav lived, back into town to the shop where I had paint thinner to get it off me. My whole face was white."
Another time, while staining coach Don Nehlen's deck, Nehlen's wife, Merry Ann, asked Billy if he would like something to drink. He said he would.
"She whispered, 'We only have Pepsi, and the University is now a Coke school, so don't tell anyone.' I said, 'I don't give a %$^&; I won't tell anybody,'" Brandt laughed.
That is until now, anyway.
Meador's noteworthy career includes numerous local and national awards, most recently his induction into the Mid-Atlantic Athletics Trainer Association and West Virginia Athletic Trainers' Association Halls of Fame.
With four different coaches in the last four years, however, not to mention entirely new players coming with them, Meador said the timing was right to let someone younger tend to their athletic training needs.
Billy Brandt has been a fixture at Mountaineer athletic events for the last 38 years (All Pro Photography/Dale Sparks photo).
"In the last few years, I haven't been able to develop (player) relationships like I have in the past, so when a coach asks me about a certain guy, my response was, 'He's not too bad, but I've not seen him long enough to know how he's going to respond to an injury or how he handles pain. I will know a lot more tomorrow morning,'" he said. "That's frustrating to a new coach, but when I've got 14 new players, a new injury is a new injury to everyone."
Now that we are in the transfer portal era of collegiate athletics, Meador said a considerable amount of time is spent in April and May calling other athletic trainers researching the medical histories of the new players.
He has also spent more and more of his time sharing the same information with others.
"When we got into this, it was about developing relationships and today that's almost non-existent," he said. "What you really enjoyed were the relationships you developed with the players."
Meador said he's going to keep his athletic trainer's certification active and might consider doing some weekend per-diem work in the future.
His oldest son, Luke, lives and works in Morgantown, and his other son, Eli, is a U.S. Army recruiter living in Sumter, South Carolina. Both grew up religiously watching Mountaineer games at the WVU Coliseum.
The Meadors are avid bicycle riders and plan on taking some time together to explore places they have yet to see.
"There are some national parks we want to get to," he pointed out. "When we go somewhere we like to take our bikes; if we can find a trail somewhere we go. In Montana and Wyoming, I already know the trails I want to do there."
Brandt said he has a long list of things waiting on him when he officially retires on Friday, June 13. His wife has big plans for the house and his neighbor already has jobs lined up to start the morning after his retirement.
Like Meador, Brandt said the time is right to begin the next chapter of his life.
"I realized how fast the last five years of my life went, and in the next five, I will be 70. I'm ready. It's time to go.
"I loved every minute working here," Brandt added. "My kids and grandkids got to come to the games. My oldest boy had his 16th birthday party at the Shell Building and the younger ones had birthday parties in the indoor practice facility.
"What a great place to work! This place was the best thing that ever happened to me!" he concluded.
