Removing his 6-year-old daughter's booster seat from his pickup, the Mountaineers' second-year athletics director makes room to show off the highlights of a $32 million construction plan to a traveling party that includes a pair of sports marketing consultants.

In a span of 20 minutes, the view from Cobb's Ford F150 includes a park-and-ride stop at the new 2,000-seat baseball stadium scheduled to open next month, a new softball field and a peek at the steel girders hinting at a new indoor practice facility for ASU teams seeking shelter from the wind-whipped Boone winter. Then it ends with a spiraling drive to a muddy ledge offering a scenic view of Kidd Brewer Stadium, home of the two-time defending champions in NCAA Division I-AA football.

"Y'all didn't know you were going four-wheeling today, did you?" says Cobb, 38.

The construction-site tour of Appalachian State's athletic dreams may offer a bumpy ride, but Cobb's young tenure has proven nothing but smooth since N.C. State's former senior associate athletics director left Raleigh for the mountains in July 2005.

Cobb's arrival preceded by only a few months the first of two national championships for longtime Mountaineers football coach Jerry Moore. The men's sports programs recently claimed the Commissioner's Cup Championship awarded to the top overall program in the Southern Conference, while the women's programs followed by winning the conference's Germann Cup Championship.

The athletic success helped the Yosef Club, the university's official athletics booster club, surpass the $1 million mark for the first time, while four ASU teams -- men's basketball, women's cross country and women's indoor and outdoor track and field -- ranked among the top 10 percent nationally in their sports, going by the Academic Progress Rate scores tracked by the NCAA.

If the men's basketball team had earned an NCAA Tournament bid earlier this month -- and Cobb certainly put on the hard sell for the tournament selection committee -- the athletics director says jokingly that he might have retired. It couldn't possibly have gotten any better.

The son of two teachers, Cobb arrived in a Raleigh as an 18-year-old offensive-line recruit for Wolfpack football coach Dick Sheridan.

He weighed only 225 pounds and had spent little if any time lifting weights growing up in West Columbia, S.C. David Horning, now NCSU's senior associate athletics director and then the football team's strength and conditioning coach, remembers offering Cobb his introduction to the weight room. It began with a routine of isometric stretches and exercises involving a towel and whatever resistance Horning offered while Cobb tried to pull against his force.

The next day, the young lineman could not turn his neck or lift his arms without wincing.

"It may have been 30 minutes, but it felt like 30 days," Cobb says. "It was me, him and a towel, and he literally broke me."

Cobb developed into a second-team All-ACC center as a senior for State, and he was also an academic All-ACC selection before graduating in 1990 with a degree in business administration.

Climbing the ladder

Following the advice of Todd Turner, who was then N.C. State's athletics director, Cobb left State to pursue a master's degree in sports administration from Ohio University. That led to jobs with the Atlanta Sports Council, where he helped coordinate Atlanta's bid for the 2002 NCAA men's basketball tournament's Final Four, as well as event operations for the Peach Bowl.

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