A voice in the wilderness for sports as education

Christine Grant has always been committed to making a difference in college sports. Even in retirement, the former women's athletic director at the University of Iowa is devoted to doing what she can to train the next generation of athletic administrators.

"I feel strongly about what kind of educational preparation they should have," she says of her teaching duties in the graduate program of athletic administration.

Dr. Grant has a wealth of experience, which makes her a respected voice nationally. When she stepped down last year at Iowa after 27 years at the women's helm, the National Collegiate Athletic Association carried a lengthy retrospective of her career in the NCAA News.

It recounted how she taught physical education in her native Scotland before moving to Canada to coach the national field-hockey team, then moved to Iowa City in 1969 to pursue graduate studies.

Although she had no intention of staying, she soon was asked to head up a newly emerging program of women's varsity sports at the school. She became such a respected leader of the emerging women's sports movement that she rose to president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), an organization that eventually was dissolved in the early 1980s, when the NCAA began offering women's championships.

Although the change disappointed Grant, she, unlike some of her colleagues, "elected to stay in [athletics] and try to change the system."

In her view, the NCAA has become much more receptive during the past decade to ideas from women, like herself, with AIAW backgrounds, and more receptive to gender equity generally.

She has worked closely with the NCAA the past few years (she currently serves on the association's Amateur and Agents Sub-committee) and is encouraged by the findings of the reconvened Knight Foundation Commission, a group of college presidents who have urged various athletic reforms.

Still, Grant feels much work needs to be done. "The problems [of intercollegiate athletics] were identified repeatedly through the 20th century, with no solutions," she observes. "It's way beyond the tinkering stage."

Grant has never hesitated to speak forthrightly on this subject, and was characteristically direct during a phone conversation, excerpts of which follow:

Why do you say college sports are at a crossroads? Is something going to break if it isn't fixed?

I think the financial situation is really out of control. Let me give you an example. At Iowa State [University], 100 miles down the road, the men's basketball coaching salary was increased to $1.1 million [per year], a tremendous increase. Several weeks later, the school dropped two men's sports. If that doesn't raise a red flag, there's something wrong. The schools with the largest budgets are dropping sports, men's minor sports, and that's because the money poured into football and men's basketball over the last decade is unbelievable. [That's] a disgrace to an educational institution.

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