Among the 65 schools in the power five conferences, three have a female AD.
“You know what? Twenty years ago it was three, and it’s still three,” said Debbie Yow, AD at North Carolina State. “There’s never been more than three.”
The three current female ADs are Yow, Penn State’s Sandy Barbour and Rutgers’ Julie Hermann. In all of the FBS,
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N.C. State's Debbie Yow said women wanting to become an AD continue to face significant hurdles.
Photo by: Getty Images |
there are seven women leading athletic departments.
“It’s because of fear,” Yow, who previously served as AD at Maryland and St. Louis, said of the paucity of women ADs. “Generally, schools have boosters on the search committees and they’re men. Just the idea of having a woman in charge is a foreign concept to them. You see more women at Divisions II and III, but at the higher levels where there’s more visibility, those jobs are so important that they’ve got to be entrusted to someone who will do a superior job. Most of the time, in the minds of men, that’s another man.”
Yow’s advice to women pursuing an AD job is to put all the cards on the table.
“Share more information than the committee asks for,” she said. “There are things the committee can’t ask. Go ahead and tell them your plans for child care. Share your plans for your spouse. Let them know your attention won’t be split. It sounds archaic, but it’s not something people talk about. For males, they don’t have to deal with those types of concerns.”
— Michael Smith
A fresh-faced Lynn Thompson was the youngest Division I athletic director in the nation when he was named AD at Bethune-Cookman in 1991 at the age of 32. Twenty-four years later, Thompson no longer sees himself in a job.
“For me, it’s a ministry,” Thompson said.
As the dean of ADs at historically black Division I universities, Thompson has learned how to get the most out of a resource-challenged athletic department.
“When people talk about thinking outside the box, well, we’ve always been outside the box,” Thompson said with a laugh. “We never could afford the box. So what I’ve told our staff is that we have to teach. We utilize tons of interns, grad assistants and student workers. So everybody we hire has to have the capacity to teach them how to do jobs.”
| Level |
Female |
Minority male |
Minority female |
| FBS |
7 |
15 |
0 |
| FCS |
9 |
15 |
2 |
| Other D-I (100 schools) |
10 |
9 |
2 |
Note: Excludes interim directors
For example, Thompson said it takes a staff of 12 to run Bethune-Cookman’s CatEye Network, a digital platform for streaming live games and original content that features coaches and athletes. Of those 12, only one is full time; the other 11 are students.
“We survive on cross-training,” Thompson said. “You have to know how to do a multitude of things. … We have to do what [historically black colleges and universities], and small schools in general, have always done. We have to innovate. We have to embrace our roots. But at the same time we have students from 31 different nations at our school. We practice diversity and we’re proud of our diversity.”
— Michael Smith
