UM's Yow thrives in '24/7' caldron of college athletics
By Don Markus | don.markus@baltsun.com

February 15, 2010

COLLEGE PARK

   - Within minutes of announcing that she was bringing back football coach Ralph Friedgen for a 10th season at the University of Maryland, Debbie Yow's BlackBerry began to fill up with messages.

The first two, she said, were enough to take the pulse of a constituency that had become increasingly frustrated with Friedgen - as well as with Yow - toward the end of a disastrous 2009 season.

"The first e-mail said, 'This proves you're the best AD Maryland has ever had,' " Yow recalled of that early December day. "The second e-mail read, 'I will have you fired by 5 o'clock tomorrow afternoon and I'm going right to President Mote.' "

Whether Yow is the best athletic director in school history is difficult to judge, but she is likely not going anywhere, unless by her own choosing.

Maryland President C.D. "Dan" Mote Jr. said during an interview with The Sun that he would "gladly extend" Yow's contract if she asked. That deal, which pays her a base salary of $382,575 this year along with potential bonuses of up to $85,000, goes through 2013. Yow, who came to Maryland in 1994 from Saint Louis University in Missouri, will become the school's longest-tenured athletic director on Sept. 1.

Yow's position is "the most visible and public of all university administrators, maybe even more than the president," Mote said. "She's really done a remarkable job."

Having such public support from her boss is a testament to how Yow thrives in the high-pressure world of college athletics. As one of just three female athletic directors in a Bowl Championship Series conference, the 58-year-old Yow is the recipient of praise and a target of criticism among Maryland fans.

She expects her men's basketball and football teams to be among the top 25 programs. Yow retained Friedgen late last year but said he needs a winning record in 2010 to continue on a job that pays him $2 million annually. And the Terps men's basketball team - which is near the top of the Atlantic Coast Conference - is expected to make the NCAA tournament next month.

Often labeled a micro-manager who has had public spats with basketball coach Gary Williams, Yow does not apologize for her style.
 
 

No 'popularity contest'
"Being an athletic director in today's world is not a popularity contest," she wrote in an e-mail to The Sun the day before sitting down for an hour-long interview. "It is about graduating athletes, balancing budgets, following NCAA rules, meeting the federal law requirements of Title IX and fielding competitive teams."

She balanced the athletic department's budget after inheriting a deficit in the tens of millions. And she says she demands results from the school's 27 sports by expecting the best from her coaches. During her tenure, the Terrapins have won 15 NCAA-sanctioned national championships - seven in women's lacrosse, four in field hockey, two in men's soccer, and one each in men's and women's basketball.

But her well-publicized verbal jousts with Williams were a troubling signal to some fans as well as the university's president. While Mote acknowledges that Williams and Yow "don't get along" personally, he says he spoke to both of them about maintaining a mutual respect professionally and being less public about their relationship.

For her part, Yow says she always has supported Williams and the basketball program. Williams declined to comment.

With the visibility of representing Maryland comes scrutiny, and Yow understands how she has turned into as much a lightning rod as Friedgen was last fall or Williams was before the basketball team made the NCAA tournament last season.

"The longer a nonproductive coaching situation continues, the greater and the more likely the focus shifts from the coach to the AD," she said, sitting in her Comcast Center office one afternoon last month.

Yow believes that the most vicious attacks directed at Friedgen, Williams and herself come mostly from what she calls "the fringe," in the form of anonymous Internet posts.

Sometimes, the sniping has come from within the walls of Comcast Center, and before that at Cole Field House, where Yow quickly gained a reputation as a hard-charging and book-balancing administrator whose department at one point had a higher turnover than the rest of the ACC schools combined.

Yow doesn't dismiss the micro-manager label completely.

"I think it's fair to say that I live by the principle that if things are going well in an area, it's likely that area gets a lot greater degree of flexibility. Why not?" she said. "When things are going poorly, am I going to take a much closer look at the situation and try to determine what's going wrong? Absolutely. I think that's my job."
 

'She's intense'
Yow, who calls the athletic director's position a "24/7" job, has been known to whisper messages regarding the next day's schedule on a staffer's office or cell phone in the middle of the night, and deluge some of her coaches with e-mails about their team's most recent performance.

Former Maryland baseball coach Terry Rupp, who resigned last spring after nine years, believes that Yow's administrative style stems from her background as a women's basketball coach.

"Debbie demands a lot of her coaches, and rightfully so. She wants to win," Rupp said. "I think that comes from her coaching days. I'd say she's intense. A byproduct of that might be that people think she's difficult to work for."

While Friedgen would not comment on his relationship with Yow, he acknowledged that "she's the hardest-working AD I've been around."

William E. Kirwan, who hired Yow after at least three more experienced male ADs turned him down, said he gives Yow "high marks" for the job she has done. Now chancellor of the University of Maryland system, Kirwan calls Yow "a tough-minded manager and executive who sets high standards and expects results and, when they're not achieved, is ready to move on."

There was much discussion about Friedgen's job status throughout a 2009 season that ended with seven straight defeats, the team's fourth losing record in the past six years. Yow said Friedgen's first three years (31-8, an ACC championship and three major bowl games) and his strong academic track record gave him the equity Ron Vanderlinden didn't have when Yow fired him after four seasons in 2000.

Even so, Yow found herself under more scrutiny than at any other time while she had been at Maryland.

Yow disagrees that the past year - which included the death of her sister, Kay, the Hall of Fame North Carolina State basketball coach Jan. 24, 2009 - had been filled with "turmoil." Given where she started more than 15 years ago, the on- and off-field struggles were not worse than what Yow had first encountered at Maryland.

"The feeling was familiar," Yow said.

Back then, with a perennial loser in football and a basketball team that had made its first NCAA tournament in six years, the department was facing an $8 million operational deficit and $43 million debt for planned facility improvements. The budget hadn't been balanced in 10 years, Yow said.

"The level of [alumni] support was virtually nonexistent," said former athletic director Andy Geiger, who had left for Ohio State in the spring of 1994.
 

Balancing the books
According to Yow, the debt will be whittled down to $5.5 million by July. And, despite a $470,000 shortfall caused by a drop in football ticket revenue last season, the books will be balanced again, Yow said. Yow concedes that policy changes put in place shortly after she arrived - including having those on full athletic scholarship considered in-state students - helped trim the budget by about $1 million a year.

Said Geiger, who is retired from day-to-day intercollegiate athletics but has remained in touch with Yow, "I know what she inherited, and what she has done has been pretty substantial."

Yow is the only person - male or female - to have been selected to head both the National Association of Collegiate Athletic Directors, which represents about 1,600 schools, as well as a smaller, more select group of athletic departments at BCS conference schools and Notre Dame.

"It's a little unnerving that there are younger women looking up, because then I feel pressure to be as successful as possible to open the door as wide as possible for them to have the opportunity," Yow said. "It's not unnerving for me to do the job. It's like breathing. I love it. I'm not so sure about that pioneer thing."

Kirwan credits Yow for building a program that has become competitive in many of its 27 sports. But her critics contend that Yow has hired only one coach whose team won an NCAA-sanctioned national championship - Brenda Frese in women's basketball - and that Yow spends too much time, and money, promoting nonrevenue sports and paying their coaches at the expense of men's basketball and football.

"I would give her high marks for nonrevenue sports," said Steve Baldwin, a 1983 graduate who has donated more than $1 million to a variety of the university's sports teams. "But the nonrevenue sports don't feed the bulldog."
 

'Nothing replaces success'
Baldwin and others say Yow's level of support for the men's basketball program is lacking compared with other ACC schools, in particular its two perennial powers.

"Duke and North Carolina treat their men's basketball program as an institution, as their most valuable asset, but the athletic department at Maryland doesn't do that," said Baldwin, a paying member of FOG (Friends of Gary) who added that he is close to neither Yow nor Williams.

Yow recognizes that success in football and men's basketball, which won a national championship in 2002 after reaching the Final Four for the first time in school history the previous year, is vital to the athletic program.

"Nothing replaces success in the revenue sports. Nothing," Yow said. "That's not to take away from the success in the Olympic sports - they do matter. It isn't a replacement for success in the flagship sports. We need to be successful in those, and we have been. The men who were successful are still here. There's no reason we can't do that again. I have faith in their abilities. Neither of them has forgotten how to coach."

During an interview in early January, Yow seemed confident the men's basketball team would be in the NCAA tournament again this year - even before it played its first ACC game.

Before Friedgen and his staff put together a recruiting class ranked by many as in the top 40, Yow said she's confident the football team, given the experience many of its underclassmen received last season, will return to a bowl game next season.

Barry Gossett, who would become the athletic department's biggest donor and one of Yow's biggest supporters, said he thinks Yow has done a "credible" job under difficult circumstances. "She has a tough job managing the egos of the coaches," Gossett said.

Yow has acknowledged her relationship with Friedgen became strained last season, starting shortly after the Terps were crushed at California in the opener.

She said she has had a more personal relationship with Friedgen than with Williams, admitting that "we've never shared a meal together."
 

Passing 'Curley' Byrd
But she says she has always been supportive of Williams, even when some fans were calling for the coach to retire or be fired after last year's 41-point loss at Duke. Mote said of the Yow-Williams dynamic that "it's generally understood that they don't get along, personally," adding that he spoke with each "individually" after their spats became public last year.

"The more they keep it out of the newspapers, the better," Mote said.

In September, Yow will pass the legendary Harry C. "Curley" Byrd - a former football coach who would also become the university's president - as the school's longest-tenured athletic director.

While her name has been mentioned for several jobs, Yow said she has come close to leaving only once - in 2002, when Kentucky wooed her.

A former women's basketball coach in Lexington, Yow was tempted. But she thought about her late mother, Elizabeth, a Lefty Driesell fan in a house filled with Tar Heels and Wolfpack fans in Gibsonville, N.C., who died 10 months before her middle daughter became a Terp.

Yow is pleased she decided to stay and doesn't seem to have any thoughts of leaving - or retiring.

"I feel like I'm in midstream. I'm as energetic as I was on Day One," Yow said.

With that comment, her BlackBerry is sure to start buzzing.

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