Kim's newest defense of Jen is "There's a difference between a bad hire and a hire that didn't work out". Wtf? If a hire doesn't work out that makes it a bad hire. Gtfo with that bullshit.
While I agree that if the hire doesn't work out it's a bad hire, there's still a difference between hiring someone with potential who *could* work out (i.e. Jimmy), and hiring someone who's failed in the past and whose hire is almost universally questioned at the time (i.e. Donovan).
NOGAF about women’s basketball. They really don’t.
It’s like a Yankees fan giving a shit about their single A team. Sure, they might enjoy it if the single A team wins, there might a prospect they enjoy watching (Plum in this case), but nobody actually gives a flying fuck about women’s hoops.
NOGAF about women’s basketball. They really don’t.
It’s like a Yankees fan giving a shit about their single A team. Sure, they might enjoy it if the single A team wins, there might a prospect they enjoy watching (Plum in this case), but nobody actually gives a flying fuck about women’s hoops.
Jennifer Cohen's Unlikely Path to the Top of College Sports
The University of Washington athletic director is the only female one in the Pac-12 and one of five in the Power 5 conferences to hold the position. The journey Cohen took to get there has helped her navigate the uncertainties of 2020.
It’s Superset Friday for Cohen and her workout crew, and that means a cycle of burpees, in-and-outs, speed skaters, hammer curls, mountain climbers and something called a skydiver. The last movement doubles as what it feels like Cohen does when she wakes up every morning.
After the Cohens moved from San Diego to Tacoma, Wash., in the 1970s, Dennis Smith purchased season tickets in the end zone of Husky Stadium. He and Jen soon settled into their fall Saturday routine. The Cohens would drive north to campus, park near the arboretum and walk across the Montlake Bridge into a setting as picturesque as anything in sports. Inside, Jen would sprint to the front row and beg for wristbands, while barking—WOOF! WOOF! WOOF!—at opponents in the nearby tunnel. At halftime, they ate polish dogs. When it rained, they wore garbage bags over their clothes.
Those Saturdays helped a young girl fall in love with college sports in general and Washington football in particular, her passion intensifying until she started penning letters to Husky coaches. She wrote the legend, the Dawgfather himself, Coach Don James, saying she wanted to eventually replace him. James wrote back, dismissing that quest as improbable but noting that there were more opportunities for women than ever in college sports. The fifth-grader took no offense to the less-than-PC response. Whatever else James said, no matter how few women actually lived the life she wanted, none of that mattered. Her hero had told Cohen there was a chance—and a chance was all she needed.
Gender did not shape, or factor into, Cohen’s quest initially. Failure did. As a senior, she ran for president at Curtis High, losing to a classmate named Mark Sievers who was overseas during the election and won without giving a speech. She applied to UW, chasing childhood fantasies, only to be waitlisted. She graduated from San Diego State, earned her master’s degree from Pacific Lutheran and began her march toward the top of college sports as a … glamorous … celebrated … Division III volleyball coach. “I was,” she admits, “terrible at it.”
Cohen swept floors and fixed shot clocks. She slept in church basements, split bagels for breakfast and drove vans for hundreds of miles into inclement weather for games with no fans, long before crowd sizes were restricted. She became the de facto strength-and-conditioning coach. And the staff nutritionist. And she wrote to Division I athletic directors, begging for a meeting, asking for informational interviews that might crack open doors long closed. No chance, they almost universally responded, if they even responded at all.
With no gatekeeper and little pedigree, all the more typical paths to becoming an athletic director (her dream) remained closed. Rapidly approaching 30 and concerned about her future, Cohen left behind her husband and moved to Lubbock, Texas, to become an intern in the Texas Tech athletic department in the mid-90s. Cockroaches scrambled across the floor of her cramped apartment, multiplying until she took to vacuuming them up en masse so she wouldn’t have to touch them. Her life possessions at that point consisted of a TV, a futon and the bug-vac. She had never been to a press conference before. But she stayed. Learned. Climbed. Vacuumed.
Because her then husband was a youth baseball coach … and because he introduced Cohen to an influential UW baseball donor named Herb Chaffey ... and because Chaffey decided to throw his heft behind a lifelong Husky who just happened to be female … Cohen landed her dream job in the Washington athletic offices back in 1998. Even then, Barbara Hedges, the school’s female AD, wondered about Cohen’s qualifications.
Cohen’s father wrote Jen a letter as she settled into her office near the stadium where they once sat together on Saturdays in the fall. It read, in part, “Remembering you at the tunnel.” Tears rolled down her cheeks. She loved Washington athletics as much as anyone loved anything, and one day, she hoped, she would follow Hedges into the school’s top office.
Cohen never left. But as she began to cement her reputation as an ace fundraiser, others began to qualify her accomplishments, making her an ace female fundraiser and the rare woman to work at the highest levels for a major college program. Maybe she didn’t care about her gender, but that didn’t mean she could escape such outdated and obstinate notions, either. She could only roll her eyes when someone said Saturdays were “for the boys.”
With office dynamics, especially in regard to conflict resolution, she couldn’t win. If she cried or expressed emotion, she was too vulnerable, too womanly, too weak. If she yelled and screamed, swore and pounded tables, she was too aggressive, a real “b----.” Men she worked with constantly shushed her; one asked her to fetch him ice cream. Donors mistook her for a coach’s wife, or, worse, a player’s mom. Some tried to intimidate her. One wrote saying that he figured Cohen would fail in a department the size of Washington’s, because he didn’t like Hedges, who ran things in a gruff, no-nonsense style and represented more of a contrast to Cohen than an apt comparison. “Wow, people only see me as a woman,” Cohen thought. She wrote the donor back, saying she was curious about the comment when she and Hedges shared so little in common beyond their gender. The donor never responded.
So many focused on who she wasn’t and who she was supposed to be, rather than who she actually was and is. Friends describe Cohen as loud, gregarious and a free hug dispenser (pre-COVID-19, anyway). She’s smart and capable and one of the top administrators in the country. She doesn’t have to apologize for any of that and doesn’t plan to. And yet, from ’98 to 2016, as she became an important voice at the one place she loved the most, she still considered herself an underdog, unworthy in some respects, searching for someone who believed in her more than she believed in herself.
That person was Stephanie Rempe, a longtime UW athletics employee who’s now the COO in the athletic department at LSU. Cohen isn’t exactly sure why Rempe said anything to her. Perhaps Rempe could sense Cohen’s fear, her deepest doubts. That she couldn’t do the job, that she wasn’t the person that these people, this system, this entity, wanted. Regardless, Rempe looked her straight in the eyes in ’15 and told Cohen, “You know you can do it, right?”
Cohen nodded, unconvincingly.
Rempe continued: “Not only can you do it, but you owe it to us to do it.” Meaning, become an athletic director of a major program. Not a female AD. Not a b----y or sensitive AD. Just an AD, the job that Cohen still coveted after almost two decades at UW.
Cohen says she never doubted her qualifications again after that conversation. She had already helped Washington land Chris Petersen, the highly regarded football coach. Petersen didn’t know of Cohen when the Washington contingent flew to Boise for an interview, but he quickly realized that she connected with and understood people “better” than anyone he’d ever met. When coaches applied for assistant positions, Petersen would ask Cohen to meet with them, and he rejected some applicants based on her reads, which weren’t always the same as his. He began to refer to Cohen as his problem-solver, and when Scott Woodward left the AD position for the same job at Texas A&M, Petersen recommended strongly that administrators choose Cohen to replace him. Reading people was her superpower, Petersen told the UW brass.
Washington promoted Cohen to interim athletic director in ‘16. You were built for this, she continued to remind herself. Then she proved her constitution beyond even the most optimistic expectations. She started with the strategic planning exercise known as a SWOT analysis, brainstorming ideal Huskies and what they represented until her team had clearly defined the culture they wanted to create. She asked the coaches in nonrevenue sports what they needed to continue winning championships. She erased the $15 million deficit she inherited, continued fundraising and pumped the additional cash and growing TV money into facility renovations. Petersen laughed at the interim tag. Like, he says, “Wait, what are we talking about here? Just hire her already.” The school made her the permanent AD after a few months.
Cohen made unpopular decisions, like firing beloved basketball coach Lorenzo Romar after the 2016–17 season and replacing him with Mike Hopkins, a talented outsider from Syracuse who wasn’t well known on the West Coast. Three of her first five new coaching hires—Hopkins; Yasmin Farooq, women’s rowing; and Elise Ray-Statz, gymnastics—won conference coach of the year honors in their respective first seasons. The football team compiled the highest APR in the country and made the Fiesta Bowl, the softball team surged to the Women’s College World Series final, the baseball team advanced to the CWS for the first time, both rowing teams finished second nationally— and all that was just 2017–18. Meanwhile, Cohen helped coax Jimmy Lake, the prized football assistant, to remain on staff, and when Petersen stepped down for personal reasons in December, his top lieutenant was available to elevate. Amid all that winning, Cohen landed the school a 10-year, $119 million deal with Adidas, quadrupling the previous agreement with rival Nike, good for the fifth-highest contract in the nation based on yearly average and second-most in the Pac-12.
Jennifer Cohen, one of five women to serve as Athletics Director for a Power 5 school, took an unlikely path to the top of college sports. The philosophy she brings to the job hasn't changed from the approach that got her there.
Jennifer Cohen, one of five women to serve as Athletics Director for a Power 5 school, took an unlikely path to the top of college sports. The philosophy she brings to the job hasn't changed from the approach that got her there.
Comments
It’s like a Yankees fan giving a shit about their single A team. Sure, they might enjoy it if the single A team wins, there might a prospect they enjoy watching (Plum in this case), but nobody actually gives a flying fuck about women’s hoops.
WSU never disappoints by acting like they've never been there before.
Jen Cohen UW AD Intro Presser (2016)
SI: How Jennifer Cohen Built An Athletics Powerhouse In The Pacific Northwest
Jennifer Cohen, one of five women to serve as Athletics Director for a Power 5 school, took an unlikely path to the top of college sports. The philosophy she brings to the job hasn't changed from the approach that got her there.