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GREENSBORO — Kim Record's first hundred days as athletics director at UNCG have come and gone, and the occasion seemed to slip past her without notice.

"Nobody threw me a party," she said.

These are heady times at the former Woman's College as the school embarks on an athletics journey and no one knows where it will lead. For the first time in the school's history, the athletics department is headed by a woman, one of five in the UNC system, one of 29 in the country at the NCAA Division I level. And under the leadership of Chancellor Linda P. Brady, athletics has been made a partner in the school's overall strategic plans.

Record, hired in October after she spent 15 years at Florida State and a year as a consultant, thinks she's already behind.

"This is a marathon and not a sprint," she said Thursday night inside a new press room at the Greensboro Coliseum. "When you're competitive — and obviously athletics is competitive — I think I should've accomplished a lot more."

Turns out the first hundred days were more like a marathon and a sprint.

"I had a list every day of what I hoped to accomplish," Record said. "But sometimes a couple of days went by before I even looked at that list."

It's a long list. At FSU, where her duties including the monitoring of the men's and women's basketball programs in addition to women's soccer and Title IX compliance, she was the senior associate director of a $50 million, 19-sport athletics program. At UNCG, she's in charge of a program with a budget of about $9 million that fields 18 sports at a school that ran the department out of a log cabin 20 years ago.

The university doesn't have football, and doesn't want it. Its reputation is for men's soccer, and the irony that UNCG lost its men's soccer coach in Record's first hundred days isn't lost on her. It was one of the few areas she didn't anticipate having to deal with. It's a school built on academic foundations, dance, music, education and diversity. Students once went there because there wasn't an emphasis on sports.

A day after the Southern Conference announced that 24 UNCG student-athletes had been accorded all-academic honors, the men's basketball team was playing in the spacious Greensboro Coliseum before a crowd that could best be described as an audience. At one point, as T-shirts were being tossed into the stands with the band playing and cheerleaders cheering and dancers dancing, someone threw one of the shirts back onto the floor.

Among the many aggressive decisions the school has made in recent months, the most controversial had to be moving men's basketball games from a tiny campus gymnasium into one of the best, and largest, basketball arenas in the Southeast. The announcement was followed by the resignation of the only athletics director the school had ever known.

The message was clear. UNCG, with a new chancellor and a new AD, is thinking of joining the chase. What that means for existing coaches and their programs will become clearer in the next hundred days. And beyond.

"We need to be at the top of the Southern Conference in every sport," Record said. "It's going to be a different process for each sport."

That will mean a different path for each sport, but a common goal. Ultimately, the university plan to emphasize athletics will logically insist that athletics emphasize winning. The timetable will be different for soccer than say, track and field, a relatively new sport at UNCG that has no facilities. The timetable for the established men's soccer program will be different from that of men's basketball.

The backdrop, of course, will be fundraising. UNCG hasn't embarked on any grand-scale effort to increase exposure since the school accomplished the still-impressive move from Division III athletics to Division I that Nelson Bobb directed in the 1990s. Community involvement in UNCG's curricular programs has always been strong. Getting Greensboro interested in supporting UNCG sports will be a lot harder.

That was the main idea behind moving men's basketball from Fleming Gym to the site of the 1974 NCAA Final Four and 21 ACC men's basketball tournaments. The move came with a brutal schedule designed to entice ACC schools into playing before large crowds. Mike Dement, the Spartans' coach, was left with the task of dealing with the schedule and increased expectations. He's been nothing but supportive of the move and of Record since she arrived 100 days ago.

"She's hit the road running," Dement said. "She's trying to get everything in place and get a feel for everything from our standpoint. She really knows our sport from her experience at Florida State. She's focused on doing a great job on the management of the coliseum games. She felt that was important, so the staff could focus on coaching. She's been there for us, been at all our games and press conferences. She talked to our guys after the tough ones and after wins. She's been right there."

Record said she will make her judgments of programs when the seasons end. Longtime women's basketball coach Lynne Agee is in the final year of her contract, as is baseball coach Mike Gaski. Dement signed a five-year extension two years ago.

"I'm looking at the programs' future," she said. "My policy is, with every sports program, I'll sit down at the end of the season and talk to each of them. Having only been here a hundred days, to fairly assess a program, that's not a lot of time. I know where we want to go for the future of the programs, but I have not had those conversations."

She understands the history of the school, understands its past as an all-women's college, and is beginning to grasp what that means in Greensboro. She knows fundraising will take unique approaches and community awareness will take time. But she also knows she has the backing of her boss to do whatever is necessary.

"Absolutely," said Brady, who became the school's 10th chancellor in 2008. "We completed a new strategic plan last year, and athletics is a big part of that. We want to raise the visibility of Spartan athletics as part of a larger strategy to raise the visibility of UNCG. Something I heard a lot of when I came here was that UNCG was a well-kept secret. We want to address that issue, and athletics is a part of that."

Record got through the first hundred days and now faces 219 years of history.

"College athletics is a wonderful, wonderful story," she said. "So often all we hear about are the bad stories.

"UNCG and Greensboro have an opportunity. There's a jewel here, and we need to uncover that not only for ourselves but for Greensboro. And hey, it's fun to do things people have never done."

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com