‘Sorority’ smashes glass ceiling of college football
Arizona Bowl will have 2 women athletic directors, woman executive director
When Marie Tuite was growing up and even early into her career, she never thought she would be where she is today: heading the athletic department of a Division I FBS school that just won its first- ever conference championship in football.
“I didn’t see a path of opportunity,” she said. “There were so few women managing athletic programs, in particular in college.”
But nearly four years into her job at San Jose State, Tuite is about to make history, alongside Ball State director of athletics Beth Goetz and Arizona Bowl ex
ecutive director Kym Adair.
Thursday marks the first time a bowl game will feature two female ADs and a female bowl director. The odds of that happening might be longer than San Jose State (7- 0) and Ball State (6-1) facing each other in a bowl game, considering that both had just three winning seasons over the previous 23 years.
Now do the rest of the math. There are 11 women working as athletic directors at 130 FBS schools. There are three women working as executive directors of the 45 bowl games.
The glass ceiling in college athletics is cracking, said Adair, in her fifth year as boss of the 6-year-old Arizona Bowl.
“I think that it’s so exciting, and the best part about it is it happened organically,” Adair said. “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 made headlines
this summer when she was named the Miami Marlins’ general manager, becoming the first woman in major American sports to hold the role.
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 made history as 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 said. “It’s important to get the message out that there is.”
Goetz, hired as Ball State’s athletic director in
2018, played soccer for Brevard College and at Clemson while earning her bachelor’s degree. She held second-incommand positions in athletic departments at Butler and the University of Minnesota from 2008-15, then spent a year as interim AD at Minnesota before taking over as the chief operating officer for the University of Connecticut’s athletic department.
She’s “thrilled” to be making history “and to do that with two incredible leaders like Marie and Kym is a really wonderful culmination of events,” Goetz said. “In any context I would be excited, but to be charged to lead in such a challenging year and to end with a bright spot is a little sweeter.”
Since Tuite was named SJSU’s athletic director in May 2017, the pool of women who hold the position has grown by only two — a situation she finds “puzzling and disappointing.”
Tuite played field hockey and basketball at Central Michigan University and is enshrined in the school’s Athletics 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.
“If I could, I’d tell my younger self to have more confidence that I could become an athletic director,” Tuite said.
She said the “sorority” of FBS-level female athletic directors is a tight one and that when Goetz got the job, the first thing she did after sending a congratulatory email was write the group’s newest member a handwritten note.
“We’re presidents of each other’s fan clubs,” Tuite said. “We’re cheering for each other and we’re there for each other when speed bumps come up.”