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.
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.
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.