Interview: Jack Swarbrick, Athletic Director at the University of Notre Dame, on the Challenges and Opportunities of Collegiate Athletics' Programs
In this episode, Amira Rose Davis and Brenda Elsey interview Jack Swarbrick, Athletic Director at the University of Notre Dame. They discuss the modern challenges and opportunities of running an athletic program in the NCAA.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Brenda: Welcome to Burn It All Down. It's the sports and feminist podcast you need. I'm Brenda Elsey, and what follows is an interview that I conducted with my co-host Amira Rose Davis with Jack Swarbrick, the athletic director for Notre Dame. We were there to record a live show, and Jack was nice enough to give us a little time. He's been instrumental, as befits the importance of Notre Dame in the college athletics landscape, in responding to the challenges and navigating the challenges of the NCAA as it changes with NIL, with other factors in college athletics. So, here you go.
Amira: Yeah. We really just wanted to talk to you about how you came into this position and what it looks like to run a modern day athletic department. And we have a few other questions.
Brenda: Yeah. That's our starting point, you know? How do you get to be here? Your interests, your…
Jack: Mine was a very non-traditional path. Out of law school, I chose to move to Indianapolis because I wanted to get involved in the community and I thought I could get involved there more quickly than in the west coast cities I had interviewed in. I was at Stanford Law, so I interviewed in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle. When I moved to Indianapolis, they had just launched a major economic development strategy around amateur sports – a brilliant strategy, I could say that because I didn't help create it – that really reacted to the fact that congress was in the process of passing the Amateur Sports Act. The Amateur Sports Act, created the national governing bodies in the United States, sort of broke up the AAU and gave the sports their autonomy. The city had a strategy for attracting as many of these new businesses as they could, and so they did. And then building facilities that supported those national governing bodies and hosting major events.
That was the logical place for me to get involved in the community. I didn't do it because I love sports and wanted to be a volunteer in sports events so much as, okay, this is where the community action is. If I moved to Indianapolis today, it'd be life sciences. It just happened to be. And so I just volunteered. I mopped floors, passed out towels, took tickets, did whatever you needed to do to support what was a remarkable growing volume of amateur sports events. And then it really grew. We hosted a lot of Olympic trials, a lot of world championships, a lot of Final Fours. My responsibilities grew as a volunteer. And so you started to meet the people who ran those organizations. And so eventually they came to me for legal help, right? And as a lawyer, I had to make a decision to sort of switch my practice to help them. And so I did.
So as a volunteer, my life was about sports. And then all of a sudden as a professional, I was also engaged in sports issues. That sort of became my life there, and that's what I did, and loved doing it. Among the things I did in that leadership role was to lead the relocation of the NCAA to Indianapolis, led Indianapolis’s bid. And that created relationships with NCAA people. So I started working for the NCAA as well as the Olympic sports. And then completely out of the blue – I did not desire to be an athletic director – I got a call from Father Jenkins asking me if the position was open and asking me if I was interested. I told him I wasn't but that I would love to talk to him about it because I had strong views about what Notre Dame ought to be looking for. He said, come on up and we'll talk.
And we had a dinner and at the end of dinner I called my wife as I was walking out of the restaurant and said, I still don't know if I wanna be an AD, but I wanna work for this guy. So, that was my perspective. He had a similar reaction to the dinner, and told me later that he was even less interested in me as a candidate than I was in the job. [laughter] He had zero interest in hiring me, but he had had so many people tell me he needed to talk to me that he was just checking it off his list. But we had a great conversation, and 15 years later here I stand.
Brenda: So what do you think is the purpose of the NCAA? You were involved, as you said, you know…What do you see its role right now?
Jack: Well, its role right now is largely nonexistent, right? It's about what it will be, right? I mean, its authority has lapsed in a lot of ways. And so we needed to run championships and run them effectively, and make sure the experience of all the student athletes at the championships are what they should be. We need somebody to set the rules, you know, competition rules, to start with. And then probably compliance, just because no one else wants to do it. But I think that's really probably the future scope, those three things.
Amira: Yeah. It certainly feels like we’re in a moment in which both the NCAA and really college sports are dealing with massive transitions.
Jack: No question.
Amira: And thinking about – both of us are historians, we look at, you know, how college sports have changed over the decades, but certainly we're on the precipice of a new moment. And it seems to me like one of the challenges that the NCAA faced, as you said, accountability, authority, all these things, but certainly the pandemic was also one of this area where all of these things were kind of tested and it felt like, and it feels like between that and name, image and likeness and that ADs and their relationship to the NCAA are constantly in flux and shifting. And I'm wondering…You talked a lot about vision for the NCAA. What do you think the NCAA is currently doing most effectively, and what do you think the greatest area of improvement needs to be?
Jack: What it's doing most effectively is probably championships, notwithstanding some recent challenges that we're counting on having been fixed. So yeah, I think that's it. I mean…And I wanna be careful, when I'm talking about the NCAA, it's us.
Amira: Yes. Absolutely.
Jack: It's a membership association, right? You know, I get frustrated when my colleagues talk about it like it's a third party. I was at a meeting once where a coach was railing against a piece of proposed legislation, and he was really upset about it. And a fellow coach who was chairing the meeting said, “Shut up and sit down. Your school introduced the legislation.” [laughter]
Brenda: Oh, wow.
Jack: He had no idea. But yeah, so I just want to…
Amira: Yeah. No, it’s an important point. Yeah.
Jack: This isn't that those guys are making…Yeah, it's us. And through the NCAA, we failed to articulate a new model for college athletics and we clung to an absurd model – amateurism – that made zero sense. And even after we were given that message by courts, we still pursued it, right? It just drove me a little crazy, as a former lawyer.
Brenda: So, why do you think people clung so hard?
Jack: I think part of it was a lack of sort of true engagement – understanding the issues, getting involved, knowing it. It was easy to say “we're protecting amateur athletics,” right? It was like a slogan. And the other was, I think, some dubious legal advice. But yeah, I never understood it, right? How is amateurism a value? What's good about it? I mean, it's not an argument for compensation directly, it's just like, why is it better, right? What's the value of it? And of course the history of it is awful.
Amira: Right. Absolutely.
Brenda: [laughs] Yes.
Jack: Goes back to the Henley, the original Henley regatta and the desire to keep commoners out of the race. So, it was a massive frustration in mind that we clung to that argument and that model long after we should have, instead of taking the lead and articulating, okay, here's what we ought to do, here’s a future model. We may not have gotten it right through that process, but we advocated leadership when we didn't try.
Amira: So, when we're thinking about...We’ll shift it a little bit to your role at Notre Dame specifically, and really let me say appreciate talking about Indianapolis and Indiana, because I think that you're right, Indianapolis is the center for many championships things. I know you had a hand in bringing the Super Bowl there – to date, my favorite Super Bowl I've ever been, which was well organized. [laughter] Which I think says something. But I think it's important because we think about these locations of like the center of collegiate sports and sports in general. And I think it's an important site to focus on. But thinking about like these gaps between the past and the present, one of the things that is coming up across many campuses is the role of boosters, and how you've seen at UT around The Eyes of Texas, we've seen at Ole Miss.
At Penn State where I used to work, you know, there was a number of very racist letters sent to our football players about how their hair is, or you know, what style of clothes they wear. And it seems to be a widening gap between boosters, especially around big time sports, and the current student body and the current college athlete experience. And I'm wondering how you're navigating it with a robust alumni group here, and it feels like we're standing in a moment where the gap between alumni visions or booster visions for the programs don't always align with even the work that is being done in athletics, and especially the experiences of modern college athletes. Are you finding that gap to be here at Notre Dame? And if so, how are you navigating it? Are you trying to head it off?
Jack: Yeah, I'm not. But I recognize it, you know, we got ADs and coaches being fired where the president doesn't know what happened.
Amira: Right.
Jack: You know, or wasn’t engaged. I think a core enabler or agent of that is that the average tenure of a university president is now less than five years, right? So, continuity and being able to sort of establish your authority is really hard to do when the windows are that small. The model's very different here. My boss is in his 17th year. Father Hesburgh, he was 30 some years. And so we just have the benefit of much greater continuity, and as a result an empowered presidency. And from my perspective, it helps me enormously. I mean, I benefit enormously from engagement with trustees and others because they tend to be really successful business people who have faced a lot of issues, and so I benefit from that, right? But there's no effort to sort of get involved and tell us how to operate our business. Now, will I hear from fans when we do something? So, when our student athletes chose to kneel for the anthem, of course I heard from fans. I didn't have a single person in the university structure to tell me to change our policy. So, we're a little different.
Amira: But that relates to…You know, I know you've been doing the Stand Together initiative. I was actually here a few years ago to do a panel on activism, and I find it really interesting because when you're talking about it, it's so clear that like the foundation of your sporting background is law, is business, is thinking about it like that. And with the Stand Together initiative, it brings in a lot of humanities, you know, concepts and ideas. And one of the things like Brenda has been tracking, and some of the studies are about how faculty and university communities engage with athletics. And one of the patterns that we've seen is that humanities professors tend to be some of the least engaged with university athletic programs.
It's easier to do like business tie-ins or journalist tie-ins, and then people who perhaps look at sports more critically or think about the intersection of sports and social justice until the last few years have been marginalized. And then we had a moment. And so I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit about the kind of force behind these initiatives that you've been doing at Notre Dame, and the successes, and your hopes for the continuation of them, and how you've met this moment where it seems to like all of a sudden present an opportunity to engage in discussions that perhaps weren't there, or weren't ready to have before.
Jack: Yeah. It starts with the students, and whether the concern is mental health or nutrition or social justice, giving them the room to help lead and to express their views helps enormously. So, we have several vehicles. One is what most schools have, which is SAC, or Student Athlete Advisory Council. And we have one that's pretty good. Some institutions, one team will elect a member, and that's SAC. Our SAC is open to every student athlete who wants to participate in it. So, it tends to be very inclusive in that regard. Secondly, you have to have people who accept the responsibility and, in some cases, whose job defines the responsibility of turning that concern into action. And it’s the follow up that becomes the challenge, not the discussion, right? Okay. Great. We've identified the issue. There's great concern here. What are we going to do? And having, initially for us, that was Angie Torain, who's now the athletic director at the University of Chicago. And now JP Abercrumbie–
Amira: She’s wonderful.
Jack: Yeah. Phenomenal. Both phenomenal. We are so fortunate to have had Angie and then convinced JP to move from a warm climate to here. [laughter] But so that's the next step of it, is to do that. And my job, and beyond creating that opportunity, is to make sure that I articulate what we're doing and that, you know, student athletes need to be assured that I'm supportive and that we're prepared to back the things they want to do and the conclusions they've drawn.
Brenda: How closely do you work, being a lawyer, you know, with the Title IX office here?
Jack: I'm not a lawyer.
Brenda: Or being in a law…
Jack: Yeah. I'm a recovering lawyer. [laughter]
Brenda: You know, having been a lawyer, how closely do you work with the Title IX person here?
Jack: Missy in our office is our Title IX coordinator, right? She's the longest serving employee. She's somebody I work extremely closely with. So, yeah.
Brenda: Because when we here, we got these t-shirts that were celebrating the 50th anniversary of Title IX, and they're great t-shirts. And so I'm wondering like, where do you see it now though? What do you do? Do you see Title IX at Notre Dame as having effectively implemented it and we're good here. Or what's left to do?
Jack: No, there's lots to do. I don't imagine there's an end in that journey, at least in my career, certainly, right? I think there are aspects of it where I can look at and say, okay, we're in really good shape, so, our female student athletes tend to lead more than our male student athletes – so, president of SAC, or, to answer your question, we also have a steering committee, which is the highest level of our governance. It includes some faculty members, administrators, coaches, and student athletes. And the student athletes are the majority of the steering committee. But it's the roles they play there. For whatever reason in my time here, our female student athletes have either been more willing or more effective in leading those entities. And so almost always it's been a female leader.
So, that's one small example. Yeah. We're doing okay there. I think in terms of resources on a sort of board comparative basis, baseball, softball, tennis, tennis, you know, we're in pretty good shape. Everybody who has a football program has an overall challenge with the allocation of assets, right? Because football produces, in our case, about 90% of our assets. They consume about 34% of our assets. So, you know, that's always gonna create a disparity that you have to try and reduce and address.
Brenda: Mm-hmm. And so what do you think, besides that, there's less to do here at Notre Dame with Title IX, when you're like, this is a journey that goes on and on, where do you see like the tough work that's yet to be done?
Jack: It's the continued investment, if you will. So, it's less about deficiencies, right? I don't wanna minimize, you know, we all have deficiencies. But our basketball facilities are great. Our tennis facilities aren’t. There's a Title IX dimension to that, right? I mean, our women's basketball facilities and our men's basketball facilities are identical, right? And that's good. But it's not just that tennis players deserve the same sort of quality of resources. There's a Title IX dimension of that. You have a female tennis team that needs better resources. And it's not just that the men have bad resources too, it's that you need to bring both to the front.
Brenda: At a lot of universities right now, one of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to treat trans students in athletics programs. Have you had those conversations? Do you have ideas about how Notre Dame will address that in the future?
Jack: Yeah. We've spent a lot of time on it because we've had student athletes we needed to support.
Brenda: Okay.
Jack: And you know, you can talk about it all day long. It's what you learn when you have the student in who's trans or who's questioning identity and, you know, and so we benefit, we have benefited a lot from that. It's as small as language, and as big as, okay, do our facilities support this? How will it work? You know, at what point in the journey does the identity of a member of a team, or which locker room you use or whatever change? And it's been really helpful to engage the student athletes in that. A student athlete who's transgender and his or her teammates, right, in the discussions. It's been great.
Amira: So, I'm thinking along the lines of those conversations that you're having, and I'm wondering too what it looks like to deal with issues that are such flashpoints nationally on campus. And I'm thinking a lot about how discussions I know I’ve been a part of with student athlete groups around bodily autonomy, how that works at a Catholic institution when especially student athletes who have reproductive capabilities have been speaking up about fears moving forward with Roe being gone. And I'm wondering if there's even a language to talk about it here because it's a Catholic institution, or if you're seeing those discussions happening and how you're navigating those waters as well.
Jack: Yeah. It's not just a Catholic institution, it's a Catholic academic institution.
Amira: Right, right.
Jack: And academic freedom, the opportunity to pursue areas of interest are really important, and I don't want to…Others can speak for the university as the university, right? But I think the track record is great, that of student affairs, as a priest, Father Gerry Olinger and his focus on creating an environment that's welcoming for all students has really been effective, from my perspective, and I couldn’t be prouder of what he's doing. Now, are there differences because it's a Catholic institution? Of course. We have single sex dorms. And so you wind up with gender identity issues in dorm assignments. You know, it's just different than a place who has…Most places had co-ed dorms now. So yeah, we run into some different issues. The university can strongly advocate as a university for the church's position on something like reproductive rights without in any way denying or limiting the ability of those on campus who disagree to communicate and to advocate for their position. And I think that's the environment that exists here.
Brenda: But for example, I'm thinking of some of the Jesuit schools in the Northeast that I'm more familiar with, they have a hard time getting, for example, contraception in the student healthcare. If a student athlete was looking for that, is that a problem here at Notre Dame, or do they have contraception readily available at the student health center? And maybe you don't know, I know you're not in charge of… [laughter]
Jack: On both the issue of insurance and what the student health center does, you should talk to somebody else.
Brenda: Yeah.
Jack: I’ve been part of those discussions. I don't wanna represent the policies because I just might get it wrong.
Amira: So, I have a question about accountability in athletic departments. And I've worked at institutions who are dealing with the aftermath of high public scandals or harmful things and whatnot. And I find that a lot of people are trying to figure out – and some not trying at all – to figure out like how to have a presence of accountability on campus, and how to move forward with also recognizing when harm has happened, and putting into place ways to prevent that from happening again. And so, it came to mind because obviously I feel like there's been a renewed conversation around Manti, because of the documentary that came out on Netflix, and I saw he was back on campus, which looked like a wonderful welcoming back for him.
But I was thinking of these moments, not everybody gets these like moments to be welcomed back, and to kind of revisit something that was very painful or very harmful. And I'm wondering, you know, not to get into any particular situation, but I'm wondering if you had for athletics developed the philosophy of accountability around either how you have in the past or hope to in the future meet harm when it happens. Because I think that every athletic department has dealt with something. But I'm wondering really about like how we develop ideas about accountability moving forward.
Jack: Yeah, I don't wanna minimize the focus on or value of accountability. But what I've really made sort of among the highest priorities for me is creating a culture of candor.
Amira: Okay.
Jack: Every one of those situations – Penn State, Michigan State, Ohio State – there were people who knew something was wrong and were afraid to speak up, right? Felt that they couldn't challenge the power of a coach, or whoever it may be. That idea is our greatest risk. If people won't speak up, if they won't identify the potential problem, you got no chance of solving it. And you get to accountability too late in the process, right? It's after it's blown up. And maybe your ability to enforce accountability has been taken over by the prosecutor, right? I mean, it's just like, it’s can we have that environment, and how do you do it? So, we talk about it all the time. We try and celebrate it when people demonstrate it, right, make it happen. And it's critical that I reflect it, right? So, the people who succeed in this leadership team are the ones who tell me I'm wrong. And that's part of that culture of candor, right?
And that's what we work so hard for in our environment. You know, you can have the hard conversation without compromising your position here or your relationships, and that's the message we're trying to send. Interesting how hard that is with our student athletes, because they have very few hard conversations directly. They communicate them electronically, and you need in the team dynamic leaders who are willing to have hard conversations with their teammates. It may be about sports performance, or it may be about some attitude they're reflecting in the locker room or someplace else. And it's just generationally, it's tougher to develop that, rather than it used to be. You know, somebody will break up with a girlfriend or boyfriend by text message. That doesn't foster a culture of candor.
Brenda: I think that's pretty much all I had. We've covered a lot.
Amira: I guess, like, coming to a conclusion, I'm wondering what is the biggest lesson you learned on your journey in this position? And what are you most proud of?
Jack: I'm most proud of sort of two related things. One is our ability to keep our students who are athletes integrated into the university as students. Part of it is university policy. A lot of it is what we do here in athletics as well. The isolation of student athletes into a separate community on our campuses is really troubling to me. I think it's our number one problem, right? And really proud of…Again, some of that the university helps. Every student here has to live in a residence hall for three years, right? And your freshman year here, you're probably rooming with somebody who doesn't know basketball from baseball. [Amira laughs] But that's what we want, right? That's the integration. There aren't different courses. You know, we're trying to address...We’re trying to make nutrition better here, but right now the vast majority of our student athletes eat all their meals in the dining hall. We only get some credit for it, but I'm really proud of the university that I'm part of for having done everything we can to make sure that stays what we do here.
The thing I'm most proud of is the result of it. I mean, it's the time I get to spend with former student athletes who talk about how impactful the experience was and what it's meant for their life. Athletics is a rare opportunity to impact young people in a positive way. Too often it doesn’t. But if you ask any professor what's the ideal academic environment, you might disagree. Most of 'em say, gimme a small group of students for an extended period of time. That's the athletic experience, right? I mean, you are with those group of students for four, maybe five years, and you're impacting their lives significantly. So, it's seeing that happen. It's making sure we have coaches who see themselves as educators. You know, we use the phrase “student athlete” in the industry. I dunno why we don't say “coach educator,” because they need to be. We probably don't have enough who are, but they need to be. So, I'm rambling, but it's that. It’s recognizing that for all the challenges of athletics and all the things we get wrong, it still has an enormous opportunity to impact and to change lives, and I think we do a good job of demonstrating that.
Amira: I guess my last question is, you had a non-traditional path into this position, and I'm wondering how we institutionalize some of these ideas that you're talking about across an industry that is set up to prioritize and measure success not in, you know, your measurements that you just gave, but in the ledgers and the win column and the trophy room, the recruitment, the booster dollars. And so I'm wondering if you have ideas about widening the access and path to athletic administrator positions, particularly for students of color who are very underrepresented, for women who, a consequence of Title IX, very underrepresented in athletic administration, and to these marginalized student athletes who are not reflected necessarily in admin. And looking forward to the future, what are your hopes for the business of athletic administration?
Jack: Yeah. The first part of that for me is recognizing the opportunity you have, right? I mean, I can't speak for all institutions, but this institution, we have a greater opportunity to be inclusive and to be diverse because of the nature of sport, right? Our student cohort tends to be more diverse than the student body as a whole, right? Our professional employees, coaches principally, tend more diverse. So, you've got an opportunity that in other places in the university you may or may not exist. And you've failed if you don't seize the opportunity. And every business I've ever led, my executive team has been dominated by females, because y’all are smarter. But you know, it's creating an opportunity, right? And building the best team you can build. And the way to do that, I think, with student athletes, is to recognize that your commitment to them, your engagement with them, isn't limited to their time here. You need to continue to be a resource.
You know, we've got student athletes going to med school and law school and getting their MBAs, but we have some interested in athletic administration. Some interested in coaching. How do we get them involved? How do we create opportunities for them? You know, we have a fellowship out of this office which is designed to do that for a student athlete who's interested in administration, to pave the way. But yeah. You recognize that you can do it more effectively than most other places in the university and accept the responsibility to do that. But set up real programs, real things. I mean, have people in place. We were one of the first schools in the country to have a career services person who was just focused on student athletes, not because there's something about them that requires a unique service. It's that we were holding job fairs when they were in practice.
You know, this came to my attention when my swimming coach came in to see me many years ago and said, my captain just quit. And I said, well, what happened? What’d you do, you know? [laughter] And he said he had a session with the career office here, the career services office here, and they told him, given the lack of activities on his resume, he'd never get the job he wanted. I said, wait a minute, that's a problem. I mean, we've gotta be able to translate the sport experience and the benefits there into what you're seeing, you know? Yes, this student athlete didn't have a summer internship – because he's trying to make the Olympic team! You know, you just have to have to convert that into…So anyway, it's one thing to say it, it's another thing to do tangible things like, okay, career services has to be in place to do this. If someone's interested in sport administration, they know how to start them off. Building the pathway.
Amira: Well, Jack, thank you so much.
Jack: My pleasure.
Brenda: Thank you. Yeah.
Amira: It's very exciting to be here, and we're looking forward especially to…I love that y'all hired Salima. I'm very excited to see how she builds up this volleyball program y'all have. And of course, we're big fans of women's basketball as well, so it's just been great.
Brenda: So that's it for this episode of Burn It All Down. This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our web and social media wizard. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network. You can follow Burn It All Down on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Listen, subscribe and rate the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Play and TuneIn. For show links and transcripts, check out our website, burnitalldownpod.com. You'll also find links to our merch at our Bonfire store if you want, you know, some very belated holiday presents. And thank you to our patrons. Your support means the world. If you wanna become a sustaining donor to our show, visit patreon.com/burnitalldown. I'm Brenda Elsey, and on behalf of all of my wonderful co-hosts, burn on and not out.