In Playing the Field, we profile women who are making an impact in the world of sports, either in competition or behind the scenes. For this installment, we spoke with UW-Milwaukee athletic director Amanda Braun.
Approximately 10% of NCAA Division I athletic directors are women. That number shrinks to just 4% if you consider only football bowl subdivision schools. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee falls into the first category, making second-year athletic director Amanda Braun a major minority. She knows that means she’s both scrutinized and a role model. She relishes both.
“It’s never bothered me to be underestimated,” said Braun.
Approximately 43% of collegiate athletes are women. Women hold about one-third of all athletic department administrative positions and at many of the nation’s largest schools, the second or third in command is a woman, but ascending to the top spot has remained a major glass ceiling for women.
Yet Braun said she never considered not following her chosen path, nor does she allow her gender or her rarity to define her days, months or years. Every day that Braun is successful, not as a female athletic director of an NCAA DI program, but simply as an athletic director, she pushes the line a little further and makes the path a little easier for future hires.
Asked if she had misgivings about taking on the UWM position that had been fraught with problems prior to her 2013 hire, knowing that it would come with extra scrutiny and that her gender might become an additional scapegoat, Braun admitted it’s an occasional passing thought, but one she often dismisses as quickly as it enters her mind.
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“From time to time, you’re sitting in a room and it’s all male administrators,” she said. “But I think that’s why it’s important that I have this role.”
An important advocate in the push toward more female hires is the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators (NACWAA). “It’s so well run by a CEO [Patti Phillips] right now,” Braun said. “She’s become a resource and she provides names for universities when positions become available. So we’re becoming more thoughtful.”
Ultimately, though, universities want to hire the right person for the job. According to Braun, the thinking about which qualities are considered desirable has shifted and that works in women’s favor.
“Presidents are looking to hire the very best, regardless of gender,” she said. “What ‘the best’ means now may be changing a little bit and tilted more toward leadership styles that are traditionally stronger with females. Soft skills are important; the ability to relate to people, communicate, problem solve. We do a pretty good job synthesizing information and not getting bogged down in one piece. … The command and control leadership style is not in fashion anymore. The football world—I think there’s still some element of that, but it’s changing. Sandy Barber just got named at Penn State and she’s going to be great.”
But even with NACWAA’s list, the thing Braun said women most need to do is find their confidence. They need to be applying for open positions, regardless of whether they know initially if they want them or if they’d be the right fit. That’s part of what the interview process is for.
It was clear from her answers in regard to dealing with being one of the few women that Braun is upfront, clear and sometimes brash about the topic. She won’t be cautious or restrained and she won’t apologize. She knows it’s a larger war and she picks and chooses the battles she’s a part of. She knows that meetings and outings often take place on the golf course and says she more than willing to be on the links, because that’s part of the way things are done.
Woman administrations, she said, “have to be intentional. If we’re not willing to do that, if we’re not willing to take risks, then the door won’t be open to being an AD.”
Asked how she deals with overt sexism or misogyny, Braun said she doesn’t often see or hear overt sexism, and she attributes that to the men she affiliates herself with in the higher education community, who she says wouldn’t allow them, either. But she did say that she works to combat the smaller, everyday biases and ingrained behaviors that others don’t even know they have.
Braun recalled a story she likes to tell to convey the subtlety of gender difference.
“My previous chancellor would go out for a run on his lunch break,” she said, “He can go out run, shower and be back in his office or in the community for his next meeting. I can’t do that. I used to joke about that. We talked about the expectations on a man and woman. Often when I’ve been asked in classes about the differences or expectations, I’ve told that story. It sounds stupid, but it’s real. The way we’re socialized, it’s not acceptable. That’s what follows, the discussion.”
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Knowing her limitations, though, Braun jokingly said she’ll leave the tackling of societal expectations for another, more prepared person on another day.
One of the most rewarding and toughest aspects of the athletic director role is that no two days are ever the same according to Braun. Having come into the position for the first time in her career in a situation where there was a lot of trust to be rebuilt and organizing to be done, as her second academic year dawns, Braun is looking forward to the freedom a department restructure will give her to be more involved in the Horizon League, among other things.
Though her days don’t often repeat themselves, she said what keeps her grounded is working with collegians, whom she loves for their energy and fresh perspective. Despite the department disarray that brought her to Milwaukee and the many and varied aspects of her ever-changing job, Braun said that she sees her role as fundamentally being quite simple.
"I focus on two things every day: Providing great experiences for our student athletes during their time here and preparing them for life beyond their college years and helping our university achieve its goals. And those two aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Braun didn’t always know she wanted to be in athletics administration. After college in upstate New York, she spent time in Florida and began law school at Duke University. She says she enjoyed the education and found it interesting, but wasn’t passionate about it.
As a former collegiate basketball player on a basketball-crazy campus, she was drawn to Cameron Indoor Stadium and experience told her that pick-up games were likely to be occurring with current and former players on the practice courts of campus. Her instincts were correct and she began playing in leagues with those players. Those contacts got her interning with the women’s basketball team and doing game announcing. Here, she found passion. She soon changed paths and schools, though not basketball allegiances.
“I’m partial to Duke,” she said. “My degree is at Carolina, but I’m partial to Duke.”
Even though she was firmly in athletic administration, Braun said she didn’t necessarily know initially she wanted to become an athletic director. She credits early professional development and Dave O’Brien, the athletic director while she was at Northeastern, with helping her solidify her career path.
What helped her make the choice was that O’Brien made a deal with her to show her all the “ugly” parts of the job. She was the second in command and he involved her in all aspects of the AD job and consulted her.
“We went through some tough, some really hard stuff,” she said. (That includes the university deciding to cut their football team).
“Ultimately I realized that even after all that, I was still passionate,” she said. “It’s not an inspiring way to talk about how you decided your career goal.”
She also said that she’s always felt she needs to answer three questions when making big life decisions: “Am I happy in life and work, do I feel challenged in my work and do I feel like I’m making a difference?”
If any of those three questions aren’t easy to answer or answered affirmatively, she knows she needs to re-evaluate. So when she went through the “ugly” stuff with O’Brien and was still excited for a future as an athletic director, she opened herself up to the possibility of applying for available athletic director positions.
Despite a long stretch living in Boston and working at Northeastern University, Braun wanted to return to the Midwest. Her interest in UWM’s AD position was piqued when it opened up in 2010, but she felt it wasn’t the correct time for her to leave the position she had. She remembers telling a friend that if it were just two or three years later, she’d be applying. She had no idea that was a premonition of things to come.
