MORGANTOWN — Perhaps the neatest thing about a biography is that each event in one’s life brings on a new chapter, but even though you have turned the page you never can get very far away from those chapters that were written in the past.

So it with Rob Mullens, whose life story just began a new chapter last week when he was named athletic director at the University of Oregon.

It is, to be sure, a new beginning for this man who had written previous chapters in his hometown of Morgantown, where he was a basketball player at University High and a WVU student, and then the University of Miami, the University of Maryland and the University of Kentucky, where he served as an administrator.

Each step along the way was carefully crafted toward the ultimate goal, which was to become a Division 1-A athletic director.

“I’ve been able to reflect on the past 10 years and find out some things about myself,” he said after taking the job at Oregon. “One is what growing up in Morgantown meant to me. I became focused on a college town because of what a great experience that was and the opportunities it provided to me.

“I had narrowed jobs I was interested in based on growing up in Morgantown and going to WVU. I didn’t know when it would come because I became a little more selective around our family values and where we wanted to have a specific quality of life. It really became about fit for me.”

Indeed, the chapters that were written in Morgantown laid the path which Mullens would take, a path that he almost failed to take. Indeed, he would say on an appearance of WAJR’s “Sportsline” the other night that Mike Fragale, who now serves as assistant athletic director – communications at WVU, was “the one who introduced me to this business. I owe him a lot.”

We have to go back to the young Rob Mullens, a good student who had graduated from West Virginia’s business school and gone to work for the accounting firm of Ernst and Young.

It was the late 1980s and Fragale was assistant sports information director and oversaw the work studies program.

“It was one of those things where he had a good job and a good career,” Fragale remembered Tuesday morning in his Coliseum office. “It just really wasn’t what he wanted to do. His love was for sports and that’s where he wanted to be.”

And so it was that he gave up the job and the career and returned to school and joined the work study program.

“Back then, as they still do now, they clip newspapers, they make copies on the copy machine, they drove posters and schedule cards all over town. He was a champ at clipping newspapers,” Fragale said of this man who now runs a $70 million athletic department.

“He learned from the ground up,” Fragale noted.

Certainly, there were some doubts, considering what Mullens had given up to change career paths and Fragale was aware of that.

“I was a mentor to him,” Fragale said.

The two would talk and talk honestly.

“A lot of times the discussions focused on the fact that we already know you can go out and be a success in accounting, but it wasn’t your passion. It wasn’t what you loved to do. Now you’ve made the career change. We identified an area. We identified his strength. Then it was go out and get as much experience as possible,” Fragale said.

“I warned him back then about the long hours, about the weekends, about how people think it’s glamorous and that’s not always the case. In fact, it’s more often not the case. I wanted him to have both sides of it. If it deterred him, it deterred him.”

At this same time Mullens was a classmate of Mike Montoro, nowthe sports information director in charge of football at WVU. He even lived with Mullens for a few months before Mullens left school to head out into the real world.

“All the time we talked about our career paths,” Montoro recalled. “He knew at that point he wanted to be an athletic director. I’ll tell you want you could tell at that point that he knew what he wanted and he knew what career path he was going to take.

“He had a plan. He wanted to be an AD by a certain age. You could see the qualities in him at that time. He had that leadership about him. He had knowledge. There was something special about him at that point.”

The talks would go on in places like Gene’s or Crockett’s Lodge over a hot dog and a beer or whatever, two college kids dreaming about their futures, laying them out and then, making them happen.

Mullens picked up experience at the top schools he worked at, being mentored after Fragale by the likes of Debbie Yow at Maryland and Mitch Barnhardt at Kentucky.

“I’ve been very fortunate being under those athletic directors,” he said. “I was involved in every phase of the program.  They both knew my career goals and supported my growth as a professional and helped me build the experience that would prepare me for the opportunity. I feel prepared.

“But at the end of the day, when your name is what everyone sees, there’s a different level of visibility and accountability. As they say, when you go from making suggestions to making decisions it’s a different game.”

It may be a different game, but it’s the game Mullens has prepared for his whole adult life.

E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.