In the latest rendition of the Experts' Roundtable, AthleticDirectorU takes a look at College Softball Sport oversight and the impact the new Student-Athlete Transfer Portal has on overseeing the program on campus.
This year is not yet two months old but we can already see hints about the future of sports programming and delivery platforms. Some of these clues involve the continuation of ongoing story lines, while others are emerging.
Conference leadership is really about building compromise amongst different institutions and constituents. While I’m fortunate in that there is consistency of culture in the WCC, it still requires me to lead from the top and ensure that the important issues are being addressed.
Central to Boise State’s culture of transparency, in addition to the establishment of expectations, is the regular exchange of ideas and input. This open dialogue does indeed extend to staff meetings in each area, in which every effort is made to ensure that members of the department are heard.
At least $300 million per year. That is the ask the SEC should pose to CBS in its negotiations to extend the current Tier I rights deal for football games.
For college football’s 2018 early signing day period, we were able to integrate Instagram-like “stories” into our website. With “stories” having become part of social media’s lingua franca, we knew our target audience of 13-18 year-old teenagers would understand and appreciate the functionality.
People, people, people. When it comes down to it, people are all we have. We don’t lead budgets. We don’t lead facilities. We don’t lead widgets. We lead people. Our role is to inspire and motivate people to act in a way, every day, which contributes positively to the mission of the organization.
In my time at NIU, we have strengthened and sustained revenue generation mainly because we have persisted with and prioritized it. Central to our enduring commitment to revenue generation has been a commitment to the student-athlete experience.
As the 2018 academic year began, I was very interested in supporting and rounding out our efforts in leadership training. I wanted my staff and especially those student-athletes identified as emerging leaders by their coaches to focus on their personal leadership skills and values.
Athletic departments should understand what coaches are expecting before they join the organization, and assess whether those expectations can be met in order to enhance organizational commitment and, in turn, intention to remain with the organization.
Even as student-athlete graduation rates climb higher than ever, it is becoming more commonly acknowledged in college athletics that graduation is no longer an assurance of career success for student-athletes. Athletics departments must do more to ensure real opportunities beyond just a degree.
Incarnate Word Athletics Director Brian Wickstrom has directed the Cardinals department since August of 2017 following leadership tenures at Louisiana Monroe and UC Riverside. Wickstrom served as ADU’s latest Athletic Director in Residence.
