Do a search on the Bucknell Athletics Web site for Rick Hartzell and it turns up no matches.

That does not mean Hartzell shouldn’t be accorded a prominent place in the history of Bucknell sports. For 11 years, from 1988 to 1997, Hartzell served as Bucknell’s athletics director. During that period, Hartzell guided the Bison into the Patriot League, renovated the the football stadium, Davis Gym and the the field house and raised the funds and got the ball rolling on the Langone Athletics and Recreation Center, which includes Sojka Pavilion.

The Bison also enjoyed tremendous competitive success on Hartzell’s watch. In the nine years under Hartzell that Bucknell was a member of the Patriot League, the school won six President’s Cups, symbolic of overall athletic superiority in the league. The long list of championship teams during the Hartzell era includes the school’s only Patriot League football title in 1996.

Off the field, Bucknell was annually ranked among the top 10 in the nation in the NCAA graduation rate surveys, a tradition that continues in Lewisburg (as does winning the Presidents Cup on a fairly regular basis).

Since then, Hartzell has duplicated many of those successes at his new gig at Northern Iowa, his alma mater. Here’s a cut from Hartzell’s profile on the school’s Web site:

The football team has claimed two conference titles the past four seasons, and the men's basketball team won its first-ever Missouri Valley Conference championship in 2004, with back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances - including the school's first-ever bid as an at-large team in 2005. UNI volleyball has won six of the past seven conference championships, and made three appearances in the NCAA tournament's Sweet 16 during that span. Panther wrestling crowned its first Division I national champion in 2000, and has placed as high as 11th in the national tournament. Track and field and cross country have claimed numerous conference titles, including the last six indoor men's crowns, and baseball made its first-ever NCAA tournament appearance in 2001, winning the rugged MVC crown. In fact, no less than 10 sports have seen teams or individuals in postseason action since Hartzell came back to the Cedar Valley.

In addition, the Panthers have finished in the upper half of the Missouri Valley Conference's all-sports standings each year under Hartzell's direction, including a best-ever finish of second in the 2000-01 campaign. Prior to his arrival, UNI had finished in the upper half of the league all-sports standings just once. UNI has also consistently finished in the top 90 in the annual Director's Cup standings since Hartzell's arrival, a ranking that measures a school's success in various sports in NCAA championships during that athletic year. In 2003-04, UNI finished 80th nationally, tops among schools in the Missouri Valley Conference.

Like he did at Bucknell, Hartzell has overseen a lot of infrastructure improvements. Next season the basketball team moves into a spanking new 7,000-seat arena.

Obviously Hartzell is part of the storyline as Bucknell visits the UNI Dome Saturday for the BracketBusters matchup with Hartzell’s Panthers (although it has been overlooked by many in favor of the now-tired pep band story).

What you will hear, or read, about the Hartzell link between the two schools will almost certainly include a claim that Hartzell hired both of the coaches – Northern Iowa’s Greg McDermott and Bucknell’s Pat Flannery, who, coincidentally are both alums of the places they work.

True, both coaches got their jobs when Hartzell was the A.D. at the school. But it is tough to give Hartzell the credit for Flannery’s hiring.

Bucknell is not like some of those big conference places where a coach leaves and the A.D. hires his hand-picked replacement a day or two later. As one former athletics department staff member put it, “Bucknell is very famous for large, unwieldy committees. The committee was what picked Pat.”

When Charlie Woollum left Lewisburg in 1994, after a highly successful 19-year run at Bucknell, Flannery was not Hartzell’s choice for the job. Hartzell’s choice for the job would have been current Air Force coach Jeff Bzdelik..

Hartzell even went public with his support of Bzdelik in an interview with The Danville News, saying it would take an awfully strong horse to beat Bzdelik in the race to replace Woollum.

Bzdelik, then an assistant with the NBA’s then Washington Bullets (now the Wizards), and Hartzell had been acquainted since Hartzell’s days as an assistant A.D. at Northwestern, where Bzdelik was an assistant basketball coach. When Hartzell got the head job at Maryland-Baltimore County, it was Bzdelik whom he hired to coach his basketball team.

Bzdelik, by the way, was not Hartzell’s first choice. That would have been then-Duke assistant Tommy Amaker, the current Michigan coach. Hartzell, who moonlights as a one of the top refs in Division I, was working the Atlantic Coast Conference in those days, which is how he knew Amaker.

Although it was never clear how serious the pursuit of Amaker ever got (Hartzell also floated the idea of interviewing Cheryl Miller), it did go as far as to enlist the help of a former Duke women’s player who was interning at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, Pa.

Amaker’s wife was a doctor at the Duke medical center. The former Duke player, who was also a volunteer assistant with the Danville High School program, gathered together a recruiting packet touting Geisinger to be used in an effort to make central Pa. more attractive to Amaker’s wife.

Five guys came to town to interview with the committee. Bzdelik was one of them. So was Flannery. Woollum assistant Terry Conrad, who stayed on as an assistant with Flannery and now is head coach at D-II Bloomsburg, was another. The then-coach at D-III Kenyon also interview with the committee. The fifth candidate defies the memory of everyone interviewed for this story.

Bzdelik bombed in those interviews.

“He was not prepared. He could only name one other coach in the league,” a member of the committee recalled.

“(Bzdelik) was Hartzell’s guy. But I don’t think he was ever the committee’s guy,” a former B.U. athletics staffer said.

The committee's top two were the guy from Kenyon and Flannery, whose passion for his alma mater ultimately might have been his trump card, though his Lebanon Valley team winning the D-III national title just weeks earlier certainly did not make a bad impression.

“Pat was very well organized, very well prepared. He had a passion for the place. He knew what it took to be successful at Bucknell on and off the court, he had done it,” a committee member said.

Flannery knew he was not Hartzell’s first choice.

“I got the distinct feeling (Bzdelik) was. That was why I pulled out of it originally,” said Flannery, who withdrew from consideration, then later agreed to put his name back in the hat.

In hindsight, it has worked out for everyone in the end. Hartzell and Flannery are both likely to have teams in the NCAA Tournament again this season. Bzdelik eventually landed a $1.5 million deal to be a head coach in the NBA before landing at the Air Force Academy.