Karen Weaver's Playbook for College Athletics

March 4, 2025

Karen Weaver smiles, wearing a red blazer and seated at a desk in front a full bookshelf

Karen Weaver was a world-class field hockey player. She was an All-American, one of the first women to earn an athletics scholarship under Title IX, and even qualified for the 1980 Olympic team (though the US boycotted the Moscow games). She turned that level of skill and passion for a sport into a distinguished professional path, becoming a head coach at Salisbury University in Maryland and the Ohio State University before running athletics departments of her own.

Her education at Penn GSE, where she earned her EdD in higher education management, illuminated the chasm that existed not just in the practical knowledge that university leaders lack about college athletics and how its governing body, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA), works, but also the academic literature on the subject. Weaver has spent every year since working to fill those gaps, becoming a national expert on the intersection of college sports and higher education.

After more than 30 years in athletics administration, Weaver joined the academic side of the house, teaching sports business at Drexel University before joining the Penn GSE faculty as adjunct assistant professor in 2020. She now teaches in the higher education program and developed and runs GSE’s Collegiate Athletics for Senior Campus Leaders certificate program through the Center for Professional Learning.

She has two books coming out in 2025, the second edition of her textbook Sports Finance: Where the Money Comes From and Where the Money Goes (Kendall Hunt) and College Presidents and College Athletics: Money, Power, Politics (Johns Hopkins University Press). Ahead of their release, she spoke with us about her transition from working in athletics to researching it and some of the biggest changes in the field over the last decade.

How did you make the transition from athletic administrator to becoming an academic whose area of expertise is athletics?
One simple answer: Penn GSE’s Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management program. I enrolled in 2007, a year after I moved back home to Philly. When I was in the program, so many light bulbs went off for me. The conversations that I had with my cohort-mates allowed me to think about where the gaps were in administrators’ understanding of athletics—because most presidents and other leaders come up through academics and are nowhere near athletics. The conversations we had were just mind-blowing, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that there was a real gap in the literature and the teaching. How athletics is financed, what the legal challenges are, the impact on the student-athletes, the work that the coaches do—there’s so much unknown to college leadership.

Why are higher ed leaders so unprepared for this major part—and frankly, major moneymaker—for their campus?

Well, there is some doubt about whether it’s a money-maker because nearly all the money that comes in for Division I goes back into the athletics departments, not the wider school. You could argue that athletics drives tuition sometimes and it drives alumni engagement sometimes, but it’s not consistent by sport. But to answer your broader question, I think the issue of preparation for a presidency places a high value on understanding shared governance, the role of faculty in determining the future of the college academically, on finance and enrollment, and on research, which is a dense area. At some point, you just run out of time. You think, “The athletic director will handle this.” But what we’ve learned in the last decade is that the presidents are the ones who are ultimately in charge of the institution, and if they don’t understand the choices the institution is facing in athletics, both short and long term, it can be problematic.

What do you want higher ed leaders to know about college athletics?

That they have to get involved. They have to be comfortable discussing it. . . . I’ve heard, “Well, it’s just athletics,” so many times in my career, but athletics issues have major reputational impacts on institutions. . . . I guess what I’m hoping my book does for college presidents is that it starts to encourage more dialogue between leaders to understand how this industry works. Athletics is not an “ancillary” enterprise anymore. Whether you are Division I, II, or III, it offers a tuition and enrollment strategy, an alumni engagement opportunity, a public relations and branding vehicle, and a peer-group association.

One of your new books is the second edition of your sports finance textbook. What’s changed in that realm in the last four years since the first edition came out?

A huge amount! When I was first contracted to write that book, I was still working at Drexel, and I was teaching mostly undergraduates . . . who were experts in one sport. So, I wrote the book to give them a broad-based understanding of the industry based on governance structures—financial, legal, whether they have any antitrust exemptions. No other book had been written like that. . . . We were in the middle of a pandemic—we didn’t even have fans at baseball or basketball games, and the finances were in complete disarray. People were worried about having to borrow millions of dollars just to cover their payrolls. So we wrote the book in that era, and it now has to be completely updated in every single facet. We added chapters on three new emerging topics: Formula 1 racing and pickleball—two exploding sports—and increasing fan engagement. There are other new things that are really impacting all of these sports—AI, the influence of tech, and the growing role of the media via the role of TikTok and YouTube. Today, Gen Z and others are consuming sports differently, and how teams monetize that consumption is very important to driving new revenues. We also have the explosion of private equity coming into many sports, and a few presidents are starting to ask questions about how that could work in college sports.

One of the biggest stories in college athletics has been the ability of student-athletes to profit off their name, image, and likeness, shorthanded to “NIL.” Can you explain how that change came about?

Up until 2021, you or me or my dean or anybody could endorse a product, but the NCAA had long ruled that college athletes were different. They didn’t get the same rights as everybody else because they were called an “amateur athlete.” Now, that’s easy to buy if everybody else around you is making a typical wage, but not when you have coaches making $10 million, not when you have assistants making $2 million in college football. When you see the size of the athletics budgets and everybody’s getting paid except for the athletes, it’s a problem. Some people will argue it’s fine because the athletes are getting a four-year degree in return, but two-thirds of the athletes in Division I programs weren’t even getting full scholarships. They were being told, “You can’t make any money. You should just be excited that we admitted you and put you on a scholarship, even if it’s only for $2,000.” The NCAA was trying to set some NIL rules and guidelines, but then the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) produced an amicus brief in support of the plaintiff in the O’Bannon v. NCAA case, which was focused on the athletes’ likenesses in video games only. The DOJ recommended to the Supreme Court—and the Supreme Court agreed—that athletes are not to be treated differently, that the NCAA did not have permission to violate US law. . . . So now, athletes who already realize that they do have a right to their NIL are taking advantage of sponsorships from car dealerships, condos, private planes, and the NCAA wants to put further regulations on that. So, we’re going to have more lawsuits. And, in the O’Bannon case, schools are now also permitted to offer “unlimited educational benefits.” So the question becomes, what do those look like? Paying for graduate school? Study abroad? Paying for laptops? It’s an open-ended question.

As an early beneficiary of Title IX, what are your thoughts about how it has shaped collegiate athletics over the last 52 years? And what do you think still needs to be done in the realm of promoting equity in college sports?

Well, it took 50 years to get women athletes to a level where they’re noticed—just look at the WNBA. But it’s taken a long time—too long—to get to that point. And I believe that the universities made a calculated decision to emphasize earning more money over providing equity, because how else were they going to pay for their athletic programs? . . . But obviously, when you’re bringing in money, you get noticed. The University of South Carolina’s women’s basketball program is incredibly successful, with Philly native Dawn Staley as the head coach. It brought in $3 million in revenues last year. Everyone’s like, “Wow! We didn’t know women’s sports could do that!” Yes, they can, but you have to really believe and invest in the programs. Adding flag football right now as a girls’ sport in Pennsylvania high schools is a huge deal. I’ve never seen so much excitement for adding one sport, but it helps that the NFL is behind it. They’re throwing money at it, so no wonder everybody’s excited. So equity can and will happen. We just haven’t seen it broadly yet.

This Q-and-A originally appeared in the fall/winter 2024 issue of Penn GSE Magazine.