TDR Interview: Josie Harper

By Daniel F. Linsalata | Friday, May 5, 2006

Editor’s Note: Josie Harper came to Dartmouth in 1981 as the Women’s Lacrosse coach, where she led the team very successfully until 1992, when her assistant, current coach Amy Patton, took over. In the meantime, she had been promoted to Associate Director of Athletics in 1990. She was promoted to Senior Associate in 1999, before replacing Dick Jaeger to become Dartmouth’s seventh Athletic Director in 2002. She is the first woman to hold this position in the Ivy League. She sat down with The Dartmouth Review to share her perspectives on the resurgence of Dartmouth sports teams.

The Dartmouth Review: I was perusing materials published by the Athletic Department about Ivy League championships and national tournament appearances by Dartmouth athletic teams, and particularly since the early and mid-nineties, the frequency certainly has ramped up in the past four or five years. What do you attribute that to?

Josie Harper: I think we have some really great coaches. We’ve had a lot of support from Jim Wright, and one of the selling points for our student-athletes is to say that the out-of-classroom experience is important. You’ll see him and he will be visiting. There are a lot of athletes, even at our Ivy counterparts, who will come on campus and leave after four years—and students in general—who will never meet the president. The other thing they will never do is meet the professor they signed up for in class. One of the goals in the Campaign [For the Dartmouth Experience capital campaign], I understand, is more faculty. That’s an incredible plus because we have to keep that whole value of the undergraduate education and balance it with whether it’s research or however we move ahead. But the one niche that Dartmouth has always had is incredible students, as well as good grass-roots communication with the other professors and the coaches. I think that’s a real solid plus. We can’t loose it.

TDR: You touched on the out of class experience and a visible and approachable president and faculty as distinguishing characteristics for recruits. Since Dartmouth primarily draws from the same recruit pool as other Ivy League schools and NESCAC [New England Small College Athletic Conference] schools, are there any other defining characteristics that, you feel, draw athletes here? What helps athletes overcome the name allure, so to speak, of playing for Harvard, Princeton, or Yale?

JH: We don’t win as many recruiting battles with Harvard and Princeton as we’d like to, but you just sell what you believe in. We aren’t in a city. Students will never be a number when they come here and I think the coaches do a really great job of selling Dartmouth. As they used to say, some people think Dartmouth is halfway to nowhere, some people think it’s halfway to paradise. So once you distinguish what a student really wants—I think that’s how our coaches do such a great job recruiting.

We have 34 varsity programs that they recruit for, from one of the smallest student bodies. So when people complain that 20% are recruited athletes, you say, “Well, there are 34 teams.” So they do a really good job of weeding out. We do not have a lot of attrition in our teams, we can’t afford to. But, it’s my job, just like it’s the Dean of the Faculty’s job, to provide the best environment. Our coaches have to recruit harder and work harder. And I’ve had an experience where I’ve had a head coach go to Harvard as an assistant coach, because she was able to get a master’s while she was the assistant coach. And she would explain to me when she’d call a recruit and say, “I’m calling from Dartmouth College whatever,” the difference, as an assistant coach when she said, “Hi, I’m Sue so and so and I’m calling from Harvard University,” and it would be, “Mom, it’s Harvard! It’s Harvard!” Now we always have to recruit harder and we have the work ethic and the mentality to do it. I think a lot of our students are that way; they have to work harder.

TDR: In that case, what are some specific qualities that make a really good recruiter? What do [Women’s Hockey coach] Mark Hudak and [Women’s Lacrosse coach] Amy Patton know that maybe some other coaches can’t get as well?

JH: Well, there’s one thing that comes with that: success. It’s always easier to recruit to a program where you have really built a history of success. And the next people who help you recruit are your student-athletes. So if the interaction of your coach with the present student-athletes is open and fair, the expectations are clear: the next line of the sell job comes from student-athletes. So, it’s kind of like a domino. If you have a really good X-and-O coach, but the interaction between the students is not there—maybe they’re judgmental, maybe they’re harsh, maybe they’re unfair—you’re not going to be able to recruit. I used to say to kids that I’d bring in, “You know what I’m like. We’ve talked. But I can’t tell you what the experience is like that you will have. You need to so-and-so and you need to ask him the really hard questions.” And once you bring those two together, “I really like the coach, his kids really love him, they have a terrific program.” Those are the times you have kids walk away from Harvard and Princeton.

So it’s a sales job at two levels: the coach, and the other part is being able to identify the pool of students. And we’ve had a lot of success going where other coaches don’t go. I can remember standing and watching lacrosse players with Princeton and Harvard and myself; I’m going, “This is not good news.” I know I’m looking at the right kids, but I’d better find some other pools.

You have to find a niche. Say, Bobby Gaudet in ice hockey, he’s found a niche. So, what happens is, he goes back to that pool because there’s such good history. So, the kids that he’s recruited, the kids that play for him, the kids that go home and [talk up the program]; that’s the way it is. Recruiting is harsh these days. It’s hard.

TDR: I think despite across the board success—we finished 34th in the Director’s Cup this year, so that is a pretty good indication—the most public faces of any athletic program at a college are going to be football and probably men’s basketball. And both of those teams have struggled a little bit of late. Do you find that, because of this, support for other programs or Dartmouth athletics has been lacking or does it cause the success of other teams to go even lower under the radar?

JH: The second, definitely. When the alums tell me, “How come the women’s programs win and the men don’t?” And I say, “Wait a minute, there’s two men’s programs here that aren’t winning the way they should. Do you want to talk about soccer? Do you want to talk about cross country? Do you want to talk about men’s ice hockey?” So then it’s kind of like, “Yeah, we only care about football.” So, it has an impact on the perception really. And this is why we’ve made two coaching changes in the last year.

TDR: Right, whatever it takes.

JH: Yeah, exactly. And I have a great deal of faith in Buddy and Terry. But, it takes a whole cycle of maybe three classes. And it’s not that the kids that are playing are not working really hard and not putting a lot into things. There’s as much chemistry that goes into the success of teams as talent. And energy level. I mean, half the people would run through a wall for Buddy Teevens right now, and he’s not an easy guy to play for. He has a lot of expectations, but he’s made them pretty clear.

TDR: It seems that football is going to be very successful in the next few years thanks largely to Coach Teevens and also reinvigorated alumni backing. But looking back on it, there has been several coaching changes. What do you think the root of John Lyon’s difficulties here was?

JH: Let me say it this way, one of the reasons I got out of lacrosse when I did: things were changing. I had to make an adjustment. I think sometimes when people coach for a while and get really tough breaks, which John did in many cases. There were some seasons when there were more guys on crutches than there were in uniforms. And you start to get the bad breaks and you start not to get some of the resources that you’ve asked for; it takes a really strong person to turn lemons into lemonade. And, you know, you have a couple bad breaks and it could not even be the coach’s fault, per se. Plus, we don’t have a lot of depth in a lot of our teams. But if you get to the point where kids start to believe they can’t be successful, you’re really in deep trouble, and for no actual pinpointing fault of the person in charge. We do come to that in coaching sometimes, because we’re very different from the other divisional coaches, we will not simply hire and fire on win-loss. But let’s be realistic, if you lose enough it’s not a good experience for anybody, including the coach. And then you start and think, “What do you we need to do? This office is really dull. Do I just sit here and think it’s dull or do I find some way to paint the walls a different color.” And if I sit here and think it’s really dull, then I become ineffective.

TDR: How important is alumni involvement with a given team?

JH: It’s huge. It’s huge. Because I have met many alums, even the critical ones and even the ones who help you decide who is going to play and what game, I really have recognized that it’s out of a passion for the place. It’s out of a passion to recreate the experience that they had. But that’s also one of our selling points: the face of our alums. It’s huge. And the fact that they will interact with our teams. It’s interesting because the NCAA sometimes creates rules that make it difficult for places like Dartmouth or other Ivies, but they do it to stem the problems they’ve experienced in other places. Our alums are really restricted as to how they can approach a prospective student. But the real interaction comes when they send the coach information, when they come on campus, when you’re ready to graduate and you can get on the phone and call [General Electric CEO] Jeff Immelt and say, “I’m really interested in doing this.” I mean, they are absolutely invaluable. And people will tell you, there’s nobody like Dartmouth alums. But it’s a hard balance because some of them are pretty aggressive. They want to be as helpful as possible and they can’t understand why they can’t get on the phone and call a kid in the neighborhood who’s terrific and bring them to Dartmouth and show them around the way they used to. You can’t do that anymore.

TDR: Some of the most successful teams recently have been the women’s teams. Particularly hockey, lacrosse, basketball, the list goes on. What are challenges that exist for women’s sport program, both the team itself and for Dartmouth as a whole, that people might not think of in men’s programs?

JH: It so interesting: when I was recruiting, I can remember parents sometimes feel that we are somewhat isolated and, yet, you turn that into a fact of “but it’s a lot safer environment.” The success of Dartmouth programs is helped by the fact that, in most cases, parents feel that this is a pretty safe community. The interesting thing which is changing in women’s athletics is that women’s recruiting now, because of the growth of women’s programs, actually has the same recruiting wars as the men. That wasn’t the case for a while because the Ivies—take lacrosse—the Ivies were the core of women’s lacrosse. Even though Duke’s men were great, the women got a lacrosse team. Northwestern now has a lacrosse team. UNC now has a lacrosse team for women. Stanford went varsity with its lacrosse team. When kids were really looking at a good education and a good lacrosse program they were looking in the Ivies; now they’re looking everywhere. The same thing has happened where women’s sports has transitioned where we aren’t the only party in town. I think you’re going to see our women struggle with recruiting the way our men have. It’s kind of a phenomenon. When they brought women’s teams on board here in the 1970’s, Dartmouth was really good about the equity issue and our women’s programs were funded probably better than 98% of the women’s programs in the country. So we got a real jump on names. That’s how you find a dynasty in basketball and you find a [Women’s Basketball coach] Chris Wieglus.

TDR: What was your initial personal reaction when you heard about [Dean of Admissions] Karl Furstenberg’s letter to the president of Swarthmore?

JH: I heard about it first and saw it first with Don Lawlor, sitting right on that chair on the other side of the table, and he said to me, “Have you ever seen this?” And I looked at it and I went, “[Deep sigh].” And I went through all kinds of emotions, but that was after we had decided to move on and not renew John [Lyons]’s contract and I am, personally, very glad I didn’t see that letter beforehand. I was able to make the decision on my judgment of what I saw.

But it was devastating; it was devastating to see how hurt people were. And I had a lot of alums who think there should have been a firing. And I, actually, have never felt that way, because one of the things, whether people like it or not, he took the charge of was what Jim Freedman asked him to do. The faculty are very excited and happy. I did not want athletics to be the reason that an admissions director lost a job. It would be perceived as the tail wagging the dog, and it would have been devastating for us down here. We already wrestle with some professors. Ninety-eight percent are so cooperative and so great, but we do get into a tug of war periodically where, you know, kids says, “Oh, I cant come to class because I have to do this.” And then sometimes they say to their coach, “Oh, I can’t come to practice because I have to do this.” There’s that constant tug of war that has gotten a lot better because of good communication, but I did not for a minute want the faculty or anybody else to think that we thought we’re running the show. What happened out of that is better communication; I think we made lemonade out of lemons.

And once again, it was a little bit like the swimming. Nobody could understand the passion of our students involved in our sport programs until a kind of D-Day. I could’ve said to alums, “We’re not going to nickel and dime everybody; we’ve got to get small.” And alums tell me, and kids tell me, “If you’d just asked them, you wouldn’t have had to cut us, we’d have gotten the help.” I don’t believe it. If I go to an alum now and say, “This program’s not doing well,” they’re very, very generous. But if I’d have gone and said, “We’re going to have to cut programs, unless we can raise this amount of money,” I don’t believe it would have happened. I don’t think if the whole institution had not observed how passionately students felt about their experience here athletically.

TDR: And alumni support for the swim team has, I take it, significantly increased in the past several years.

JH: Within six months they raised two million dollars. They didn’t endow the program, but what they did was put this money aside and that’s been used. And the institution said, “If you raise this amount of money and we operate on that until we get our self squared away, we’ll take over the program expenses when that money runs out.” So that’s how that came about. And, I mean timing, again, is essential.

For example, when we were bleeding profusely from the Furstenberg affair, we interviewed about ten other football coaches off campus. That was plan B. We had some really good candidates. Who would have ever thought that Buddy Teevens would’ve gotten fired from Stanford? Now that kind of came out of the blue. I actually had been talking and had been in some conversations with Don Shula. So I was in Florida and the next week I was in California. I said, “Buddy, just take a look. Just take a look at this.” Because we were bleeding pretty bad and a band-aid approach wouldn’t have done, the ability to get Buddy back here was huge for us. We’d have hired a good football coach, but circumstances warranted that we needed to hire a special football coach. And the combination of somebody who’s been in the big time, who bleeds green, who graduated and then played here, and then coached here and had two Ivy championships out of four years—as far as I’m concerned, that was made in heaven.

I’ll be forever grateful that timing was everything. And it’s pretty exciting when we’re looking at the support Buddy’s gotten, his Friends [of Dartmouth Football] support has almost tripled, people are engaged, and we’ve gotten some good donations for the second varsity house, and everybody’s going to benefit from that. I don’t know where we would have been, actually, to be honest with you, if all this timing hadn’t just fallen into place.

TDR: Do you feel that the Dartmouth administration and Parkhurst has redoubled its efforts to facilitate and accommodate athletics, especially in the wake of the swim team debacle and the Furstenberg letter?

JH: I think they always valued what was here, but I think the magnification of the passion really did help. I could tell you all day that we have alumni that are just so passionate about their sport and their experience, but unless you get in the midst of them you can say, “Yeah, yeah, I know.” And the Campaign was good timing too. I don’t think there’s anything people don’t want to do; I think the hard part comes down to when you have so many resources and choices. Like I said, the Campaign will hopefully bring 20-25 new faculty; that’s a pretty big commitment. But at the same time, you have other areas that have their hand up as well, and it’s a hard balancing act.

TDR: If you had to make a prediction today, which do you think will be the next Dartmouth team to win a national title?

JH: A national title? Wow. I think there are a couple teams that, if all the stars line up, and they say, “Which would you rather be, good or lucky?” And you say, always say, “Both.” But you can be good, and if the puck hits the crossbar enough, you need a little bit of luck or move a little to the right or a little to the left. I think teams can be competitive nationally; I think women’s ice hockey; I think men’s ice hockey; I think both soccer teams, and right now, where the program is, women’s lacrosse. I think that we could be in a position, which we haven’t done for a while—wow, a long while—I think in two or three years, we could be in a position to win an Ivy League title in basketball. The parity in the league, just like the parity across the country, is changing. I think with Chris and what she does, we’ll always be pretty competitive in women’s basketball.

And tennis. I think with a couple breaks there, considering the Boss Tennis Center, we might draw a youngster that could be competitive, or ranked, nationally. But resource-wise, I’d be thrilled if we get through a first round of an NCAA for basketball; could’ve happened this year. Can we compete at the ultimate level? No. But anything’s possible. Look at George Mason this year. Villanova, the year they won a national title; who would have thought? I think anything’s possible; if I didn’t think that, we’d save a lot of money and just not play the games. But resource-wise and how we rank in the country, I think we have a shot otherwise. The prize, for the most part, is the Ivy Title and the other stuff’s gravy. But by striving for that…it’s not a very level playing field out there.

TDR: Finally, could you talk a little bit about your experience with being the first woman athletics director?

JH: It was really interesting in the Ivies, because everyone said if there was ever going to be a woman athletic director, the last place it would happen would be Dartmouth. And a funny story is, you know you worry about it a lot, I’ve been in athletics long enough to know. I’ve called somebody or somebody’s called me when I’ve been AD and they’ll say, “Can I talk to the athletic director?” And I’ll say, “Yes, this is Josie Harper.” “No hun, not you, the athletic director.” I mean there’s been story after story.

I didn’t know some of the football players my first year, that was 2002, but I wanted to get to know them, so I invited them in here. And we sat and we talked and they said what was important to them and all. And I said, “I have to ask this question: what do you think football players, ice hockey players, men’s teams would think when they hear there’s a woman AD?” They looked right at me and said, “When we decided to come we didn’t know who the AD was.” And that put things in perspective. It was a sobering experience for me.

I’ve had alums saying, “Oh my god, we can’t win in football, and now we’ve got a woman AD.” And I basically said, “Okay, so who was in charge before me?” I said as long as John, at that point in time, doesn’t send a note, “Josie, it’s third and ten, what do we do?” I think we’re okay. My job was, and my job is, to get every resource we can and to make sure we hire the best possible people. It’s not my job to coach soccer. It’s my job to provide the resources so the coaches can be successful. And my counterparts in the Ivies, you know, they’ve always been very respectful. As the senior associate when Dick was AD, when we’d go to meetings I would be with him anyways. So it wasn’t like all of the sudden there are eight of us sitting around a table and they’re going, “And there’s a girl here.”

I will say it’s kind of funny when you’re at a table with all men, the one thing that I do notice, periodically, is that I can make a suggestion and they are respectful and they hear and it goes around the table. Fifteen minutes later, same suggestion, and it’s a revelation. It’s hard to have your voice heard sometimes. And plus, I think it was hard because they saw me as a coach moving into administration. It wasn’t like I was coming with a ton of expertise in the world of athletic directors nationally, although I’m actually more active nationally than a lot of our counterparts.

So it’s been interesting, but I’ll tell you, the alums they are great. And I can remember being invited to speak to alums, and their sitting there looking at me and I said, “Okay, fellas let’s talk about this. You weren’t even sure you wanted coeducation and now you’re looking at a woman AD.” And they’re going, “How’d she know?” It’s like taking a pink elephant off the couch. And yet, I’ve had some really back-handed complements from alums who are quite elderly, “I didn’t think it was a really good idea to hire a woman, but I think we’re okay.”

I tend to be a pretty upfront person. I know what I have to do; I know what my responsibilities are. And my responsibilities aren’t to coach a team, my responsibilities is to resource those who coach teams. And I’m not a shrinking violet, and if I have something to say I’m going to say it, no matter who it is. I have never felt such chaos in this place in the last two years, but I have never felt a brighter future for us.

TDR Interview: Josie Harper

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