HOF CLASS OF 2026: Balancing The Badgers - The Al Fish Story
August 17, 2026 | General News, Andy Baggot
Al Fish’s first day on the job with the Wisconsin Athletic Department was one he won’t forget.
This was back in March of 1989. Fish had just been hired from the State Budget Office, where he worked the previous 10 years in a variety of analyst and budgetary roles, by UW chancellor Donna Shalala, who needed someone who could get a handle on the state of finances in the struggling athletic department.
“I’d written a letter to Donna suggesting a plan to begin addressing the financial woes of the athletic department,’’ Fish said.
One of Fish’s early mentors was Dale Cattanach, who was the legislative audit director and had just done a comprehensive audit of athletics. After meeting with Cattanach, Fish sent Shalala his plan for dealing with the athletic department’s $2.1 million budget deficit and, ultimately, for finding ways to bring much-needed capital into an operation whose total budget back then was less than $20 million.
Six weeks later, Fish was reporting directly to Shalala as the administrative officer of the UW Athletic Department.
“It was crazy,’’ Fish said. “My very first day of work, I met with the business manager. I told him to lay out the whole budget, to take me through the whole thing. He brought out one 22-column sheet of accounting paper which the entire budget was on. One page.
“There was White Out over many of the boxes with new numbers put in. There was a coffee stain on one corner and maybe some sort of lunch stain on another corner.
“As I was asking him questions, he was punching numbers into his adding machine with a pull-down handle on the side.
“I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ Just the fact of where they were – so far behind in general budget management infrastructure – was stunning, more stunning than how bad their finances were.
“I got back to my office and I’m four hours into my first day when I called my wife, Susan, and say, ‘I may have made a big mistake here.’”
“Everyone loved Al Fish. He was open. He was transparent. He explained a lot to me that I didn’t know about what was going on in athletics.”Donna Shalala
There’s no mistaking Fish’s impact on the UW Athletic Department and why he’s a member of the 12-person hall of fame class of 2026. He helped engineer one of the most dramatic financial turnarounds in college athletic history. He did so by replacing a woe-is-me attitude with one of confidence, competence and action.
“We were lucky the day we found him,” Shalala said.
Over the course of his 13-year tenure with UW Athletics, Fish was involved in capital projects that touched every sport on the UW manifest, most notably the construction of the Kohl Center, Porter Boathouse and the McClimon Track and Soccer Complex, the renovation of Camp Randall Stadium and the introduction of the University Ridge Golf Course.
While Shalala wooed Pat Richter to be the athletic director and Richter turned the football program over to Barry Alvarez – two of the most insightful hires in program history – Fish was part of an executive team that put together a streak of balanced budgets starting in 1990-91. That was done through multiple new revenue streams, including a student fee, parking surcharge, exclusive radio rights for football and men’s basketball games and reclaiming Bucky and “W” trademarks from the public realm.
“We kind of picked away at getting more revenue streams in,” Fish said. “Then we had to go through the whole drama of reducing our sports complement by five sports (baseball, men’s and women’s fencing, men’s and women’s gymnastics were cut) in 1991. That was very hard, emotionally draining for everyone whatever your position was, but at the end of the day, we felt like we needed to work both on our revenue and our expenses.”
Fish also worked closely with senior women’s administrator Cheryl (Marra) Bailey on Title IX negotiations and budgeted to add three women’s sports: softball and lightweight crew in 1995 and hockey in 1998.
“He just helped us work through our financial difficulties,’’ Shalala said of Fish. “But also, he’s a skilled manager, one of the most skilled I’ve ever worked with.
“He has a very nice manner to him. He has great personal skills and he’s very funny and you need to have someone with a sense of humor when you’re dealing with athletics.
“Everyone loved Al Fish. He was open. He was transparent. He explained a lot to me that I didn’t know about what was going on in athletics.”
According to Richter, one of Fish’s strengths was his ability to help foster a desired outcome.
“The word ‘facilitator’ comes immediately to mind,” Richter said. “He was a man for all seasons, if you will. He had a knack for shepherding a project through the weeds to a usually satisfying resolution tilted toward the athletic department.”
BEST OF THE REST
One: Shortly after Sen. Herb Kohl pledged $25 million to build the on-campus multi-purpose facility that bears his name in 1996, he asked Richter about a project manager.
“We had never talked about that at all,” Fish said. “Pat came back and said, ‘Guess what? You’re the project manager.’”
“Herb Kohl trusted him like nobody’s business,” Shalala said of Fish.
“It was a real pivot point for me,” said Fish, who in 2002 became the UW associate vice chancellor for facility planning and management until 2012 when he took on a similar role at John’s Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. He later returned to UW as interim associate vice chancellor for facility planning and management before retiring in 2020. “It ended up being a fabulous transition.’’
“His efforts and dedication in the building of the Kohl Center were legendary and resulted in a facility that is top notch in every aspect,’’ Richter said.
“There is a standing joke among former athletic department senior staff that ran into a locked door at the Kohl Center. “Anybody have the master key?” someone would ask. Invariably the answer was “Call Al. He’s still got all the keys.’”
Two: Fish said he’s still trying to get an emotional handle on his induction into the UW Athletic Hall of Fame. “As many projects as I worked on, I usually concentrated on making sure the leaders of those projects were the face of those projects,” he said. “I was pretty consciously the guy in the back room trying to make it all happen. So having this be about me is very unusual. I’m still trying to process it, obviously. This is such an unusual honor for a guy who doesn’t coach or play that I have even more appreciation for the recognition.”
At Camp Randall Stadium on Thursday, May 28, University of Wisconsin Interim Director of Athletics Marcus Sedberry revealed that Al Fish will be inducted into the UW Athletic Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2026.
The class of legendary Badgers will be inducted into the Hall of Fame later this fall during a weekend of celebration on September 18 and 19. The inductees will be honored inside Camp Randall Stadium during Wisconsin Football's meeting with Eastern Michigan (Sept. 19 – 11:30 a.m. CT).
