SJSU-Ball State matchup a landmark for women

San Jose State already has made history at the Arizona Bowl, where the Spartans hope to complete their undefeated season Thursday against Ball State.

It will be the first bowl game ever to feature two female athletic directors and a female bowl director. The odds of that happening might be longer than San Jose State and Ball State facing each other in a bowl game, considering that both had just three winning seasons over the previous 23 years.

But here they are — the Spartans (7- 0), the Cardinals (6-1), their athletic directors Marie Tuite and Beth Goetz, in a bowl game run by a woman named Kym Adair.

SJSU’s Tuite and her Ball State counterpart, Goetz, are two of the 11 women working as athletic directors at FBS-level school; there are 130 of them. Adair is one of three women serving as executive director of a bowl game; there are 45 of them.

“It’s so exciting, and the best part about it is it happened organically,” Adair told Caitlin Schmidt of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, where the game will be held. “I think that’s a great story for women to know. There are lots of women in sports leadership and starting to converge. There are spaces for everyone that loves sports.”

Kim Ng was named the Miami Marlins’ general manager last month, becoming the highest-ranking female executive in a major American sports league.

Last season, Alyssa Nakken became the first woman on a Major League Baseball coaching staff, hired by the Giants.

Katie Sowers is completing her fourth season as an offensive assistant on the 49ers coaching staff and last February became the first woman to coach in a Super Bowl.

Last month, Vanderbilt kicker Sarah Fuller became the first woman to play and score in a major college football game.

“So many women interested in sports don’t think there’s a spot for them at the table,” Adair told the Daily Star. “It’s important to get the message out that there is.”

Tuite played field hockey and basketball at Central Michigan University; she is enshrined in the school’s sports Hall of Fame. She was an assistant AD at the University of Washington — she’d also held that title at Cal — when San Jose State hired her in 2010 as senior associate athletic director and CEO of the athletic department.

Tuite was named SJSU’s athletic director in May 2017. Since then, the pool of women who hold the position has grown by only two — a situation she finds “puzzling and disappointing.”