Danny Morrison came to the Southern Conference with as varied a background as any of his predecessors. He had experience as a student-athlete, math teacher, basketball coach, director of athletics, and college senior vice president. The latter position came at Wofford College, his alma mater, and included duties in business operations and enrollment management.
Prior to that, Morrison had been the AD at Wofford and paved the way for the college to go from a bare-bones NAIA athletic program to the ranks of Division I and an invitation to join the Southern Conference in 1997.
When thinking about the commissioner position, the native of Burlington, North Carolina, wondered how he would react to no longer being on a campus. Before making up his mind, he spoke with John Swofford, commissioner of the ACC and a former North Carolina athletic director.
“He said he loved working for more than one school,” Morrison told writer Rick Nelson of the Charleston (SC) Post and Courier. “I thought it was great to hear he loved his role.”
Hired in November of 2001, Morrison built upon the work of Alfred White in increasing the conference’s corporate marketing efforts. He hired Pete Moore, a former Duke football player, to head up corporate relations. He began a program to recognize and honor boosters and benefactors contributing to Southern Conference institutions. Additional postgraduate scholarships were awarded each year.
“Having been on a campus, I wanted to look for ways to help our programs with development,” Morrison recalled. “The distinguished service award concept was part of an effort to bring some harmony to the group. We consciously built social events into meeting schedules. We tried to upgrade our annual spring meeting by moving it to Hilton Head and that seemed to work well.”
Morrison and his staff successfully hosted the 2002 NCAA Basketball Tournament first and second rounds at Greenville’s Bi-Lo Center. It was the first time the tournament had been played in the state of South Carolina in thirty-two years.
When the lease in Asheville was due for renewal, he decided to look at other possible sites for the conference office. Ultimately, the league accepted an offer from Spartanburg, South Carolina, to settle in a renovated textile mill. The conference office moved to Spartanburg in the summer of 2002.
Morrison created a fall retreat at the Biltmore Estate in Asheville to conduct meetings and bring in high-level professionals from intercollegiate athletics to talk with the presidents and chancellors. He worked to obtain TV coverage with a number of regional sports networks.
In the spring of 2005, Morrison announced that he was leaving to become the director of athletics at Texas Christian University. He remained at TCU until accepting the position as president of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers in 2009. He was with the franchise when it played in the Super Bowl following the 2015 season.
Morrison left the Panthers two years after that and taught a sports management course at the University of South Carolina before being named executive director of the Charlotte Sports Foundation in early 2019. He always spoke highly of his time at the SoCon.
“I see the conference office as a place where you take ideas from all the institutions, pick the very best ones, and find a way to collectively move forward.”
Bio taken from "A Proud Athletic History: 100 Years of the Southern Conference" by John Iamarino