In 11 years as athletic director at the University of Maryland, Debbie Yow has presided over an enviably successful department. Since 1994, Maryland has won nine NCAA national championships and raised the graduation rate for its four-year student athletes to 85 percent. Yow has served as president of the National Association
of Collegiate Directors of Athletics and on the U.S. Department of Education’s Commission on Opportunities in Athletics to review the status of federal Title IX regulations. Thanks to Yow’s marketing and fund-raising efforts, private gifts to athletics at Maryland have increased more than 350 percent and corporate sponsorship revenue has increased by more than 300 percent during her tenure. Yow spoke with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry
Kavanagh.
Education: B.A., English, Elon College; M.A., Counseling, Liberty University
Favorite vacation spot: It’s not that exotic, but I would say the Marriott at Marco Island.
Favorite piece of music: I’m pretty eclectic in my music tastes; it just depends on the mood.
Last books read: “Discovering the Power of Purpose,” by Dr. Paul Crites, and “Managing for Excellence,” by David Bradford and Allan Cohen
Pet peeve: Lazy people
Favorite quote: C.S. Lewis: “No clever arrangement of rotten eggs will ever make a good omelet.”
How would you characterize your management style or philosophy?
YOW: Wired for 220 versus being wired for 110. People who had worked for us who were wired for 110 generally short circuit. We are excited about what we do: full of energy and life, very optimistic and creative. I really value creativity in problem-solving, whether it’s personnel, financial or recruiting issues. I’m very involved in recruiting for all of my sports, which is very time consuming but very important.
In 1990, when you were at Saint Louis University, you said: “I would rather make the hard decision and advance the program and take my knocks … than ever have anyone say, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing.’” What has been the most difficult decision in your career?
YOW: The area that is always the most challenging for me is personnel. I would say firing someone was, and still is, the most challenging part of the work: releasing someone from their duties. There’s just no easy way to do that.
In his autobiography, Bob Knight challenged college presidents to clean up academics. He wrote: “Tie the number of scholarships you can give to the number of graduates you have. A player graduates, you can replace him. A kid doesn’t, you have to wait an established time to use that scholarship again. Very quickly coaches would be sincerely interested in bringing in kids who can and want to graduate, and all kinds of things detrimental to college athletics would be averted right from the start.” What do you think of his plan?
YOW: I’m a proponent of doing everything we can within reason to encourage graduation on time — meaning within five years, not four. Regular students don’t graduate within four years any longer, either. That being said, most solutions are more complicated than they originally appear. As an example, if [that] rule were in place, what would happen if I were a women’s basketball
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| Maryland’s men’s basketball team won the national championship in 2002, one of the nine NCAA titles during Yow’s tenure at the school. |
player, say, here at Maryland, but that my mother in North Carolina has cancer and I decide that I’m going to forgo my last year of eligibility and school to go take care of her. What would happen in that case? Would the school be held accountable and lose the scholarship when I left the institution to go care for my mother? Those are the types of complications that would have to be vetted fully perhaps with an appeal process. So, I think the idea has merit, but the devil is in the details.
Should a coach be responsible for his players’ academic progress? Is the moderator or faculty representative, for example, of the drama club or the campus newspaper or any other school club similarly responsible?
YOW: I think that when you choose an institution because of the scholarship that they offer, the entity which provides the scholarship has a special working relationship day-to-day and therefore special accountability to that individual. So, in answer to your question, if they’re on a drama scholarship, then I believe that the person in the school of drama that offered that scholarship does in fact have a special obligation to that individual.
Frank Deford said that anybody who thinks college presidents are going to save college sports believes in the tooth fairy. Do college sports need to be saved and, if so, can the presidents save them?
YOW: I think that intercollegiate sports should be carefully monitored as the most high-profile enterprise of a Division I institution. Certainly no one is drawing 70,000 people to a play or to hear a student orchestra. So, in that regard, collegiate athletics is unique. It can provide a number of the most spectacular and heartfelt moments that alumni remember for 50 years.
Conversely, it can also evoke a number of very bitter emotions if there were an NCAA violation that embarrassed alums or some significant social issue that occurred.
So, do they need saving? No. Do they need monitoring? Yes. And that starts with the coaches. Coaches are monitoring intercollegiate athletics as well as athletics administrators and presidents. Presidents are monitoring everything on their campuses, and the smart ones hire very dedicated and experienced athletic professionals.
At the Sports & Social Responsibility conference, you said, “Don’t establish a rule you cannot enforce.”
YOW: I learned that as a coach, not as an administrator. I had a rule when I was coaching the women’s basketball team at the University of Kentucky from 1976 to 1980. In my third year, I established a time for [the players] to turn in for the night, and then I set about doing spot checks with surprise visits at 11 o’clock on a weeknight. I was surprised when I went to the off-campus apartment of one of my student athletes. It was about a quarter to 12 and a young man answered the door. I named the student athlete and I said she has weeknight curfew, and she’s supposed to be in bed. He looked at me and said, “She is in bed — with me.” So, you have to be careful how you word these things. That was not exactly what I had in mind when I suggested that curfew. … Someone will test the limits every time on any rule or regulation. In that regard, I’ve tried to be careful in setting hard and fast rules.
Linda Bruno, commissioner of the Atlantic 10 Conference, talking about diversity in sports business, said, “One of the problems we run into is that we get very talented minorities, particularly minority females, graduating from college who get snapped up by corporate America at a higher level than we can pay them.”
YOW: I don’t think that’s likely to change in any significant way. We’re in higher education. I would suggest that we’ve probably lost a degree of the talent pool out of every academic discipline on campus to business. I think this is more a lifestyle choice than just a strict monetary choice. I am very well compensated, being in my 12th year as Maryland’s director of athletics, but I don’t work any differently than I did in 1976 when I earned $9,000 as the women’s basketball coach at Kentucky.
And the reason that’s never changed is because this is my lifestyle choice. I want to work on a college campus. I believe in what collegiate life stands for. … Most of us in intercollegiate athletics and on a college campus chose to be here for reasons unrelated to finance.
