Ames, Iowa ? Jamie Pollard wanted the perfect fit if he was going to become an athletic director.

He found it at Iowa State.

Pollard, deputy athletic director at Wisconsin the past two years, was introduced as Iowa State’s athletic director Monday, completing a quick, secretive search by the university and a whirlwind week for Pollard and his family.

“I made a personal commitment to myself that when the opportunity came, it would need to be at the right place and the right time,” said Pollard, who had been a finalist for the athletic director’s job at Indiana last year.

“The job is just too demanding to just want to be an athletic director. I wanted to be an athletic director where I knew it was the right place and the right time.”

Pollard, 40, succeeds Bruce Van De Velde, who announced his resignation Aug. 8 after five years on the job.

At Wisconsin, Pollard ran the day-to-day operations of a $72 million department because the athletic director there, Barry Alvarez, also is the football coach. He said that experience would serve him well at Iowa State.

“I know it prepared me for what I always thought, which was that I could be a really good athletic director,” Pollard said. “It gave me that final step, that final piece of confidence that said I can do this and I’ll be really good at this.”

Iowa State’s search committee and the company it hired to help in the search, Baker-Parker Associates, Inc. of Atlanta, looked at more than 100 candidates, ISU President Gregory Geoffroy said. That list was trimmed to nine and then to three, all of whom were interviewed in person by the entire committee.