Four Northeast Conference Championships, two NCAA Tournament wins and a furthering of a winning culture here at Central Connecticut State University. This is what Brian Barrio leaves behind with today’s announcement of his resignation as CCSU’s Athletic Director.

Barrio will be named Athletic Director at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and will be making the move down to Maryland sometime in January. UMBC, which gained national recognition for their upset over Virginia in last year’s March Madness men’s basketball tournament, is a university deeply rooted in its athletics, as proven by the addition of their $85 million event center last year.

While his time here as Athletic Director only stems over the course of 16 months, Barrio has a deep rooted history here at Central Connecticut. In 2003, Barrio interned at CCSU.

As for his tenure here at Central Connecticut, the accomplishments are not hard to come by. Both baseball and women’s soccer collected NCAA Tournament wins in their lone seasons with Barrio as Athletic Director. Along with them, football and women’s cross country also collected NEC Championships.

Through all of these great feats reached by Central Athletics, Barrio could be seen on the sidelines or in the stands, sitting amongst Blue Devil fans and quickly becoming one of the biggest fans of the program himself.

“Winning comes with culture,” Barrio said in a prior interview with The Recorder. “When you do the little things right, when you treat student athletes the right way, when you handle your business on a day-to-day basis the right way, winning follows. I think our coaches and student athletes are indicative of that.”

While these accomplishments are all obviously on the track record of Barrio and his time here, he is quick to push the credit of success towards the coaches and student athletes.

“It’s not my success,” Barrio said, “it’s the athletes’ success and the coaches’ success. For me I just feel rewarded seeing the people that I work with everyday meet their goals. Being on the field with the soccer and football student athletes, seeing the tears, the hugs, the release of just having accomplished something you’ve worked for all year, that’s why I come to campus everyday.”

When asked to define what the Blue Devil culture is, Barrio looked to the city’s nickname (the hardware city) to encapsulate the work done by athletics.

“It sounds trite because we’re in New Britain the hardware city, but it’s about that hardhat mentality. We come to work everyday, we’ve got our dirty jeans on and work-boots and we’re going to put some work in, and that’s what our student athletes and our coaches do everyday. I don’t think anybody here spends a lot of time making excuses or worrying about what we don’t have, its how hard do we need to work to get that trophy at the end of the year.”