One to watch

Sporting News, The, Sept 5, 1994 by Staci D. Kramer

The Yow family of Gibsonville, N.C., was dumbfounded the day 13-year-old Debbie announced that she was going out for basketball. In the Yow household, basketball was a sport for anyone who wanted to pick up a ball. As far as the family knew, however, until that morning Debbie's main goal was to be a majorette.

Family members also knew Debbie could excel at anything. If she was going to be a majorette, she was going to march her heart out. If she was going to play ball ... well, like her mom, Lib, and big sister Kay, she probably would be captain of the team at Gibsonville High and a standout player.

They didn't know athletics would be her life, that she would hold three major coaching positions before switching to a career in administration. They didn't know she would be one of the first women athletic directors in Division I, and they never imagined that she would wind up in their backyard as the first woman A.D. at the University of Maryland and in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

But that's where Debbie Yow will be when Maryland opens the football season Saturday at Duke. Her first official day on the job was Thursday, just two weeks after the announcement she would be leaving St. Louis University. It also was the day she turned 44.

Michigan State A.D. Merrily Dean Baker cheered out loud on a beach when she read about Yow's appointment. "I feel encouraged, as I'm sure the others do, that in the last couple of years we're beginning to see people judging A.D.s on abilities more than gender," says Baker, pointing out that the number of women heading schools that play Division I-A football doubled to four in August with the appointments of Yow at Maryland and Cary Groth at Northern Illinois. "One of the differences is there are so few women that when you make a move ... you need to establish your credibility all over again. That doesn't happen with guys."

One of Yow's first stops at Maryland was football practice. She took off her 1984 SEC championship watch, a souvenir from her days as assistant director of Gator Boosters, Inc., at Florida, and told the sweaty players, "It's an old watch, it isn't running very well and although I don't expect you to take care of that need for the next year or so, could you please keep it in mind that if I had a new watch that said, |Terrapins were the ACC champions,' I could put this one back in the jewelry box."

Helping raise the football team out of the ACC cellar is just one of Yow's challenges at Maryland, where the athletic department's deficit of $6.7 million is larger than was her annual budget at St. Louis. Balancing the budget and fund-raising are top priorities. She also intends to move from the bottom of the ACC in overall standings to the upper half in five years.

"Debbie really loves a challenge," her mother said years ago. It is true.

During her tenure at St. Louis, Debbie Yow's first post as A.D., she led the private Jesuit school into the new Great Midwest Conference, snagged high-profile coaches for men's basketball and women's volleyball, negotiated the move to the new Kiel Center, raised the graduation rate to 92 percent and tripled the number of scholarships in some sports. The Billiken Club formed at her instigation three years ago to channel private donations directly to athletics has more than 1,000 members.

Perhaps most impressive, she lasted longer than the four previous A.D.s.

The accomplisments didn't come cheaply. She faced criticism that she was reaching too far and paid dearly for a ticket snafu that left many alums snarling. Even worse, she immediately was pitted against Rich Grawer, the popular men's basketball coach who had nurtured a falling program back to respectability and the National Invitation Tournament but was losing ground. A local sportswriter even sat in her office and listed the reasons she was guaranteed to fail.

Two seasons later Grawer was out and Yow had a chance to use her recruiting skills. Charlie Spoonhour was happy at Southwest Missouri State University. Others had tried to woo him away. Yow succeeded.

"She just had such enthusiasm for this position and what it could be," Spoonhour says. "She had a vision about our league and what this school could do and what our basketball team could do."

That team was nationally-ranked in the second half of last season and produced five sellouts, doubling the attendance from Yow's first year.

Ed Macauley, an All-America basketball player for the school in 1949, was skeptical of Yow at first because she lacked experience as an A.D. "I felt that St. Louis University could have gotten (someone who was already) an athletic director if they were willing to spend dollars, that they were taking a risk hiring an unknown," says Macauley, one of the alums most angered by the ticket snafu. "This is where you have to compliment Debbie. It was a gamble and it paid off because Debbie learned. Debbie did get it organized.

"When Debbie came in, she didn't understand the community. She's going out with nothing but praise."