Kennesaw State University Athletics

Matt Griffin began as the football Chief of Staff May 2022, and enters his third season in 2024.

He served as the Deputy Athletics Director from December 2019 through April 2022.

Grifin, who served six months as interim director director of athletics earlier in his tenure at KSU, was a senior associate athletics from December 2017 through 2019.

He returned to the Department of Athletics after spending the previous two years as Kennesaw State University’s director of trustee relations and development.

In his former role, Griffin was in charge of all external operations, overseeing ticketing, development, communications and marketing. He was also the sport administrator for football, baseball and women's soccer. 
 
Griffin previously served two years (2014-15) as assistant athletics director for internal operations.
 
Prior to KSU, Griffin spent two years as athletics director at Southern Polytechnic State University (SPSU) before the institutions consolidated.  
 
In role as assistant athletics director for internal operations, Griffin was primarily responsible for overseeing business operations and the Owls Champions Initiative, serving as sport administrator for soccer, softball and men’s and women’s tennis, and advising KSU’s Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC).
 
Before being named athletics director at Southern Poly, Griffin spent seven years as an assistant athletics director at SPSU concurrent with a nine-year (2004-12) tenure as the Hornets head baseball coach.  Griffin also served as the assistant coach of the SPSU program (2000-03).
 
In his two years as athletics director at Southern Poly, the athletic programs achieved great success at the national level.  The men’s soccer program reached the elite 8 in 2012 while the women’s basketball program made back-to-back national tournament appearances.  The baseball team made the University’s third appearance ever in the 2014 NAIA World Series.
 
In his nine seasons in Southern Poly’s dugout, Griffin accrued a 364-169 (.683) overall record, averaging 40.4 wins per season. In 2009, his team set a single-season school record with 53 victories and earned a No. 4 NAIA national ranking – the highest in program history.  That year the Hornets also received an automatic berth as the No. 5 seed in the NAIA World Series.  The Hornets won at least 30 games each season under Griffin and had 10 student-athletes selected in the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft during his tenure. 
 
The success of the Hornets earned Griffin several coaching accolades, including the 2007 Southern States Athletic Conference (SSAC) Coach of the Year award, 2007 and 2008 NAIA Coach of the Year honors by the Georgia Dugout Club and 2009 NAIA Region Coach of the Year by the American Baseball Coaches Association (ABCA).
 
Griffin played two seasons in the Chicago Cubs’ organization after being selected in the 32nd round of the 1998 draft. He then returned to SPSU to finish his bachelor’s degree in business administration.
 
Originally from St. Marys, Pa., Griffin grew up in Toccoa, Ga. He and his wife, Leslie, a civil engineer at Geosyntec Consultants, have a daughter, Grace, and son, Luke, and reside in Kennesaw, Ga.