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GREENVILLE -- Terry Holland wasn't looking for a job, much less a reclamation project. He was 62, and the former Virginia basketball coach and athletics director had little left to prove in college athletics.

Retirement beckoned. So did, at about the same time, East Carolina.

Holland was planning to go fishing when the down-east school with the underdog mentality made a run at him, and to the surprise of many -- even Holland himself -- reeled him in.

That was nearly five years ago. Today retirement is not on Holland's agenda, though a 7,000-seat expansion of the Pirates' football stadium is. Also on the table -- literally, in a conference room next to Holland's office -- are plans for a $30 million Olympic sports complex the school hopes to have completed in three years.

By then, ECU's athletics director and executive assistant to the chancellor will be 70 and might be ready to walk away. But don't count on it.

"As long as I'm effective, I have no desire to fish more than I do, which is not much, and certainly have no desire to be on the golf course," Holland says.

Effective doesn't begin to describe Holland's work at ECU. The football program, an embarrassment when Holland arrived, has rebounded. Other sports -- such as baseball, which advanced to an NCAA Super Regional for the first time this year -- are also on the rise. Academic standards have been tightened.

"The people down there think he walks on water right about now," says John Hudson, a Durham resident and former president of the Pirate Club, the ECU athletics department's fundraising arm. "Everybody realizes he's the best thing to happen to East Carolina."

At a still-trim 6-feet-7, Holland looms large around Greenville. With his silver hair and Carolina drawl, he's both down-home and distinguished, equally at ease in a barbecue joint or a corporate board room.

Holland said he'd come for a year; ECU wanted five. The more he investigated the situation, the more he felt it would be a good fit.

"It's easy to sit outside and take shots at what's going on," Holland says. "I needed to get my butt back inside and see what I could do there."

When Holland arrived, he found a fan base and athletics department "wringing its hands" over its perceived disadvantages. East of I-95 and always just south of the big-time, some said, the Pirates had long been scrappy outsiders. Now, in a landscape dominated by the Bowl Championship Series conferences, it looked as if their potential had been capped for good.

In Holland's view, ECU had been distracted, looking longingly toward the BCS, hoping to lobby or luck its way into a big conference. Meanwhile, other schools such as Utah and Boise State had been building their programs. Why couldn't ECU?

"I think those examples helped our fans buy in to our pitch that the BCS is not what defines our potential," he says. "We control our own destiny, and we needed to try to get them off this kick of feeling sorry for themselves or feeling disadvantaged."

If East Carolina couldn't be part of the BCS, if it had no regional rivals in far-flung Conference USA, it could at least stock its non-conference schedule with BCS teams and build some regional rivalries that way.

"We sort of adopted the idea that we would schedule our own damned bowl games," Holland says.

The way Holland sees it, the Pirates played two BCS bowls last year, knocking off Virginia Tech in Charlotte and beating West Virginia at home. The team faded in the middle of the season, but rallied to win Conference USA and play in the Liberty Bowl.

Practice fields, locker rooms and meeting rooms have been upgraded. The scheduling has helped recruiting and re-ignited the fan base. Expansion will push Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium's capacity to 50,000.

"Every coach wants an opportunity to compete on the highest level, and I was sold on coach Holland's vision in no time," Holtz says. "Terry can think outside the box. He's a pioneer when it comes to a lot of that."