What will the athletic department of the year 2025 look like? I am not sure but I am sure that it will look completely different. The skill set of productive and valued athletic department staff will be different just as it is in the business world. Athletic departments have tended to lag behind corporate America in being on the cutting edge of of changing and adapting to new and better ways to run an organization. However, it is becoming apparent that sports, in general, are rapidly understanding that the old or today’s way of operating will not succeed in the extremely competitive world of college athletics.
Every athletic department staff, including coaches, need to try to identify new and progressive ways to become more productive. As I look to the future, it is clear that the two areas that Athletic Departments must continue to focus are technology and analytics. The ever advancing world of technology allows departments to maximize productivity by becoming both more efficient and effective.
At ETSU we have become so much more efficient by leveraging technology to automate many of our important core processes. From recruiting and team management, to compliance, work flow, medical records, and constituency communication, ARMS Software empowers the staff and coaches by helping save time, money and space while also assuring a much more accurate system of checks and balances. This success has occurred because our staff has embraced the challenge of maximizing the benefit of technology and have looked for new and better methods to accomplish daily tasks because ARMS gives us new and better ways to get work done. With the technology available, one of our main challenges is going to be fully understanding the capabilities of powerful software and what that means for our department in developing new and innovative ways to actually be more efficient and achieve better bottom line results.
While Arms has provided tremendous value internally, ETSU has just negotiated an agreement with Adobe to be “the first academic institution in the nation to work with Adobe to implement enterprise-level Adobe Marketing Cloud solutions into their curriculum.” As part of that agreement ETSU athletics and the ETSU Global Sport Leadership Doctoral Program will have access to Adobe’s enterprise-level digital marketing platforms. This relationship will tremendously enhance our ability to develop compelling content that we can deliver to all our constituencies while teaching our doctoral students how to use the Adobe Digital Marketing cloud. This technology is currently being used by some of the absolute pre-eminent brands in the world to maximize brand recognition, including two thirds of all Fortune 500 companies. The big challenge? How do we maximize value while minimizing cost?
Additionally, as part of the the Adobe Digital Marketing cloud, analytics are provided in real time with detailed segmentation across all of our marketing channels. Without question in 2025, every department in the country will rely on analytics to make decisions regarding the best course of action. Analytics will become an important piece of evaluation of all programs and coaches and staff will have to justify expenditures using analytics rather than relying on unsupported guesses. Just like in the professional leagues, teams will have an incredible amount of data, will use it to be predictive and be responsible to both mine and interpret that data.
Going back to the original question, I do not know what college athletic department will look like, but I do know that the effective leadership will maximize the value of technology both internally and externally and develop ways to develop and distribute compelling content to build their brands. To assure that their efforts are fiscally responsible, leadership will use analytics to evaluate each and every function of the department and make decisions based on those analytics.
Because of the ultimate reliance on technology and analytics by all efficient organizations, we have built this as a major part of our curriculum in our Global Sport Leadership Doctoral program. We believe it is important for the next generation of leadership in college athletics.
For further information on ETSU’s Ed.D in Global Sports Leadership contact Dr. Brian Johnston at Johnstob@etsu.edu
About Dr. Richard Sander
Dr. Richard Sander, led Virginia Commonwealth’s athletic program for 20 years, and was introduced as ETSU’s Director of Intercollegiate Athletics in 2013. Prior to his time at VCU, Sander served as Assistant Athletic Director and was responsible for athletic fundraising at Memphis State University (now The University of Memphis). Sander earned a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga in 1968. He received a M.S. in Physical Education from Xavier University in 1974, and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Cincinnati in 1980.
You can contact Dr. Sander at sander@etsu.edu
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