East Carolina University and former Pirates men's basketball coach Ricky Stokes have agreed to part ways, ECU athletics director Terry Holland announced Thursday.

Seventeen days earlier, on Aug. 6, ECU announced that Stokes was giving up the head coaching post to become the associate athletics director of basketball, a new position. He acknowledged on Aug. 7 that his move was spurred by his concern that his firing as coach could be imminent after he coached the Pirates to a 14-44 record in two seasons.

Instead, Holland announced Thursday that Stokes will accept a lump-sum payment of $250,000, under the terms of the mutual agreement of termination Stokes signed on Tuesday. No explanation was provided for the two-day delay in announcing the signing of the agreement.

Stokes had been willing to continue working for the athletics department instead of accepting his contract-mandated buyout, Holland said in a news release, yet "we have found creating a new position within our department to be impractical at this time."

Stokes' original contract, which was scheduled to run through April 15, 2010, called for an annual salary of $150,000.

In a statement relayed by the university's chief public affairs officer, ECU chancellor Steve Ballard said he has complete confidence in Holland and that he preferred to let Holland answer questions about the basketball program.

Efforts to reach Holland and Stokes for further comment were unsuccessful.

However, a timeline released by Holland on Thursday shed further light on the university's decision to jettison Stokes, 45, who played college basketball at Virginia for Holland.

On the heels of a 6-24 season, ECU officials decided by the end of April that they did not want to replace the entire coaching staff and disrupt the progress Stokes' staff had made in improving the team's academic performance, Holland said in Thursday's release.

By early July, according to Holland's timeline, a consensus had developed among ECU officials to promote associate head coach Mack McCarthy to acting head coach and move assistant coach Chris Ferguson to associate head coach.

Discussions about Stokes' future and that of the basketball program continued into early August, and Holland initially had not been prepared to announce the shuffling of the staff and Stokes' new role on Aug. 6.

But university officials felt their hand was partially forced, according to Holland's timeline.

"By that time, speculation concerning changes in our basketball program had become so ill-informed that I felt we should clear the air with the August 6th announcement, even though the timing was not optimal as I was out of the country and we did not have a final resolution to several aspects of the changes," Holland said in the release.

No further details were disclosed concerning the nature of the speculation about the program or what changes still needed to be finalized.

Jeremy Shyatt, the former director of basketball operations on Stokes' staff, said he did not know what precipitated Stokes' decision to leave the university.

"Quite possibly, he might have decided he wasn't ready [to move] to the administration side," said Shyatt, who left ECU in the spring to become the director of men's basketball operations at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Asked about the remaining amount of money the university must pay Stokes and three other former Pirates coaches replaced by Holland, ECU trustee David Redwine said it was an unfortunate reality for many major college athletics programs.

"I think the athletic administration probably has a duty to the students and to the alumni and the university itself to try to have the best sports product that we can possibly have and to have the best coaches that we can have," Redwine said. "And when there's a feeling that those coaches are not performing up to that level of expectation, then changes have to be made.

" ... Obviously it doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the last basketball record that we've had here recently under Coach Herrion and under Coach Stokes and realize perhaps we do need to make some moves to help better that."

(News researcher Brooke Cain and correspondent Ronnie Woodward contributed to this report.)

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