NCAA names Gov. Charlie Baker as New President
FROM SPORTS BUSINESS JOURNAL, BY MICHAEL SMITH
Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a former Harvard basketball player and avid sports fan, has been selected as the NCAA’s next president. Baker replaces outgoing NCAA President Mark Emmert and will start March 1. His second term as governor is slated to conclude Jan. 5. The NCAA’s choice of Baker signifies the association’s desire to have a leader who is well-versed in the ways that Washington, D.C., works. With the NCAA facing so many legal and legislative challenges, the Board of Governors, who made the hire, focused on someone from the political arena early in the process and Baker emerged as someone with the experience and expertise to navigate the governmental and athletic worlds that often collide in college sports. Baker represents the first NCAA leader who does not have a background in college athletics or higher education.
“Gov. Baker has shown a remarkable ability to bridge divides and build bipartisan consensus, taking on complex challenges in innovative and effective ways,” said Linda Livingstone, president of Baylor University and chair of the NCAA Board of Governors, who led the presidential search committee. “As a former student-athlete himself, husband to and father of two former student-athletes, Gov. Baker is passionate about ensuring that student-athletes receive the support they need to study and compete in a fair, inclusive, and fulfilling environment. These skills and perspective will be invaluable as we work with policymakers to build a sustainable model for the future of college athletics.” Another key NCAA stakeholder described it this way: “You’re really operating 50 different ways in 50 different states. You can’t have a national association if the national doesn’t apply. The whole idea of having a national association like this a competitive balance so that everyone is playing by the same rules.”
Len Perna, chairman of TurnkeyZRG, assisted the NCAA with the search. The longtime search executive explained to SBJ how he came across Baker: “I was networking around the industry. One of my calls was to Sam Kennedy, CEO of the Red Sox. I mentioned to Sam the NCAA is looking for an executive who has four things: passionate about higher education; ran a business as CEO; was also in government; and was a student athlete and could dunk a basketball. Sam laughed and said: 'I think I might actually have somebody. Ever heard of Charlie Baker?'” Emmert announced in April that he would step aside after 12 years in that position. The former Univ. of Washington and LSU president was the second NCAA chief who came from the academic world. Emmert’s predecessor, the late Myles Brand, was a former president at Indiana. Emmert made $2.99M for the fiscal year that ended in 2021.
PAST NCAA LEADERS
Charlie Baker, President: 2023-
Mark Emmert, President: 2010-2022
Jim Isch, Interim President: 2009-2010
Myles Brand, President: 2003-2009
Cedric Dempsey, Exec Dir: 1994-2002
Dick Schultz, Exec Dir: 1988-1993
Walter Byers, Exec Dir: 1951-1988
The NCAA went into its search to replace Emmert looking for several qualities in its next president. Those include an ability to work with Congress on a variety of issues, especially NIL, the legal challenges associated with the future of student-athletes as employees and an understanding of how to generate more revenue for the NCAA’s membership. Livingstone outlined the association’s needs at the start of the search. She said that feedback from the membership indicated a need to:
Build and re-establish trust with the membership of 1,100 colleges and universities
Solve complex governance and business issues across its stakeholders
Diversify and grow revenue streams.
In addition to the needs outlined by Livingstone, a formal job description highlighted this period of “unprecedented change” in college athletics, both legal and legislative. The description summed up the search by saying the NCAA sought a “once-in-a-generation, transformational leader … who believes in education and intercollegiate athletics.”
The NCAA’s seven-person search committee, which was formed earlier this year when Emmert announced that he was stepping aside, was made up of mostly university presidents across all three divisions of the governing body. Livingstone, the board’s chair, also sat on the search committee, along with Springfield College President Mary-Beth Cooper; Ohio Valley Conference Commissioner Beth DeBauche; former NBA great and Duke All-American Grant Hill; Georgia President Jere Morehead; Minot State President Steven Shirley; and Isaiah Swann, former athlete at the Univ. of Texas at Dallas. The search committee submitted finalists for the job to the board of governors, which made the ultimate decision. A Washington, D.C., communications and PR firm, Bully Pulpit Interactive, has been consulting with the NCAA on the news of the hire. BPI previously has been an NCAA consultant with the Transformation Committee.
Among the questions that come with the new hire:
What does this mean for the Division I Transformation Committee, which has been working throughout 2022 to modernize the collegiate model?
What is the new president’s viewpoint on NIL, especially from the standpoint of enforcing the interim set of rules that have been established, but not necessarily followed?
How will the new president look to proceed with the next NCAA media rights negotiation, which is expected to play out in 2023? Those rights, currently owned by ESPN, are set to expire in August 2024 and include the championships for 30 mostly Division I sports-- women’s basketball, FCS football, baseball, softball, volleyball and others. The big question is whether the NCAA will unbundle the media rights for women’s basketball and sell it separately from the other sports.
SBJ‘s Bret McCormick contributed to this report.
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