The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University.

The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers.

Comment on this article

The New A.D.
Tom Beckett is a former varsity athlete who played professional baseball before helping Stanford rekindle its athletic flame. Can he do the same for Yale?

November 1994
by Tom Verde

For more than 25 years, a gilt-framed portrait by Frederic Remington ’00BFA has hung above the mantlepiece in the Ray Tompkins House office of Yale’s director of athletics. The shadowy oil painting depicts a heroic, helmetless Eli scoring a touchdown against Princeton during the Bulldogs’ Thanksgiving Day 32–0 trouncing of the Tigers in 1890.

When Yale’s new athletic director, Tom Beckett, arrived in New Haven this past July, fresh from 11 years at Stanford, he immediately embarked on a host of changes, but decided to leave the painting where it was. He did, however, tack a bit of his own artwork to the wall just below the Remington—an organizational chart in the shape of an inverted triangle illustrating his goals and priorities for Yale athletics. In the uppermost and largest tier, in bold block letters, is written “Yale Community, NCAA, Ivy League.” Below that: “Students, Teams, Coaches, Alumni, Fans & Customers, Faculty & Staff.” The Director of Athletics and the President of the University share a humble spot at the bottom. The chart, says Beckett, is intended as a reminder of where he plans to focus his energy as Yale’s new A.D.

“We need to identify who our fans are, find outwho our customers are,” Beckett says. Although he is careful to avoid criticism of his predecessor, Harold (&ldrqo;Ed”) Woodsum ’53, ’58LLB, who served as athletic director for six years, Beckett nevertheless emphasizes what he sees as the need for reform. “When I came here, there seemed to be no sense of just who we are, who we are appealing to,” he says.

If Beckett’s approach to Yale athletics sounds like an advertising executive’s pitch to a client, this should come as no surprise. During his years at Stanford, most recently as associate director of athletics, Beckett played a key role in boosting local and national broadcast coverage of Cardinal football games in what is the fourth largest media market in the country. Largely as a result of this increased exposure, Stanford fans bought more football tickets last season (over 25,000) than ever before, a dramatic upswing from the sagging attendance of previous years at Stanford Stadium. Larger audiences also helped in fundraising efforts. According to the school’s department of athletics, Stanford over the past three years received $50 million in donations, which it used to help maintain its 17 athletic facilities (one of them built just last year) and support 32 varsity teams, 385 annual sporting events, plus several outreach programs that link student-athletes and coaches with local schools and youth organizations. And while Beckett would be the first person to attribute Stanford’s athletic successes to the students and the coaching staff, it was nonetheless during his tenure that the school earned 32 NCAA national championships and won the NCAA “Champion of Champions” award seven times in the past eight years. “Tom and the group he worked with were responsible for incredible accomplishments here,” says Stanford’s current athletic director (and former Dartmouth A.D.) Ted Leland. “He is a professional who can work under extreme pressure in difficult situations.”

Beckett will certainly need those skills at Yale, where he faces several major hurdles, not the least of which are budget deficits and some badly deteriorating facilities. While Yale is especially burdened by those constraints among its Ivy competitors, all of them also suffer from the pressures brought to bear by the lack of athletic scholarships, which were outlawed in football at the Ivies almost a decade before their official association as a league in 1954, and have applied in all other sports ever since.

If there is one thing that Tom Beckett’s colleagues—both old and new—agree on, it is that he is a dynamic and genuine individual, a “people person” with a “can-do” attitude. He took the time during his first week on the job to meet individually with all of his head coaches and administrators. He quickly endeared himself to the durable Carmen Cozza, now in his 30th season as head football coach, by arranging to have the dining hall of Silliman College stay open later to accommodate the practice schedules of football players (and other athletes). Beckett won the admiration of other members of the coaching staff by eliminating many of their secondary responsibilities—such as working in the sports information office or teaching—so that they could focus more of their attention on their sports programs. “He is exactly what this place needed,” says women’s soccer coach Felice Duffy. “He’s new and fresh. He comes from a school that does well athletically and academically, he has a lot of experience, and he believes Yale can be a leader.”

Associate Director of Athletics Barbara Chesler sees Beckett’s appointment as one more positive addition to what she describes as “a team of vibrant, modern thinkers, including President Levin,” who have recently come to Yale and who will be making important institutional changes. Chesler’s colleague in the department, Colleen Lim, says that the arrival of Tom Beckett signals “a new era in Yale athletics.”

Members of the search committee that eventually recommended Beckett for the athletic director’s job expressed similar hope and enthusiasm for the man they chose over the 100 or so other applicants. In the process, they became well aware of the sheer magnitude of the task before him. “The job is an enormously complex one,” observes Ford Foundation Professor of Law and Social Sciences Stanton Wheeler, who chaired the committee. With 150 staff members, the athletic department is the College’s largest and, between its grounds and facilities, occupies 15 percent of the central campus. Yale offers a total of 33 intercollegiate varsity sports (16 for men, 17 for women)—almost twice the national collegiate average—plus a host of intramural programs, not to mention club sports and recreational programs.

Beyond dealing with coaches, marketing, fundraising, the alumni, the Ivy League, and the NCAA’s administrative bureaucracy, the athletic director’s primary responsibility, as Beckett sees it, is to Yale’s students. The search committee agreed. “For example, it is the A.D.’s job to hire and supervise the coaching staff,” notes Wheeler. “Students who play sports for all four years are likely to spend far more time working intensively with coaches than with any single professor. Coaches can be very important role models, and it is up to Beckett to make sure they are the right people.”

Coaching experience was but one of Beckett’s strong selling points. He also understands what it means to play competitively. A three-year letterman in baseball and basketball at the University of Pittsburgh (where he captained the baseball team), Beckett was an infielder in the farm system of the San Francisco Giants organization (a fact that particularly delights Yale University President and native San Franciscan Richard C. Levin) from 1967 to 1971. He served as assistant baseball coach at Pittsburgh, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in 1968 and a master’s in education in 1972. After serving as head coach of both baseball and basketball at Butler Community College in Butler, Pennsylvania for eight years, Beckett went on to become associate director of athletics at San Jose State University from 1980 to 1983, and then joined Stanford’s athletic department as an associate director.

Asked about his intentions for Yale athletics, Beckett answers simply: “To see Yale become the Champion of Champions in the Ivy League, to see that every athletic program is in a position to battle for an Ivy title.” Such promises could draw either tears of joy or of laughter from the eyes of alumni fans who continue to follow Yale athletics, depending upon which sports fan you ask. Men’s soccer has been strong recently, with three Ivy titles since 1986. The baseball team was 14–4 in 1992, 16–4 in 1993, and took titles in both of those years. There have been recent flashes of brilliance in men’s ice hockey, squash, and lacrosse.

Still, the last time Yale captured the Ivy title in men’s basketball was during the Kennedy administration. The once unbeatable men’s swim team, winners of more league championships (30) than any other team in the history of the University, has won only one title—last season—in 20 years. The story is the same for men’s outdoor track, minus the recent championship. The graduating class of 1982 was the last to celebrate a men’s heavyweight Eastern Association of Rowing Colleges championship, and many alumni now speak of Yale football in the same passionate terms historians use to describe the glory that was Rome. (Things have improved this year.)

Looked at statistically, if Yale College hadn’t opened its doors to women in 1969, it could not now lay claim to half of the Ivy League championships it has won over the last decade. Hampered by inadequate facilities, lack of funding, and the general prejudices that come with being treated as second-class citizens, Yale’s increasing numbers of women athletes have shown that they are as committed to—not to mention as capable of—winning as the Oldest Blue. With the help of Title IX—the civil rights law governing equal treatment of women in athletics and academics in schools receiving federal funds—Yale’s women athletes have made Yale one of the leading schools in the country in efforts on behalf of gender equity in sports (see Nov. 1993). The results show in the record books: In the 25 years during which women have played intercollegiate sports at Yale, women’s teams have won four titles in cross-country, three in swimming, four in tennis, three in crew, two in squash, and a sprinkling in soccer, basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, and fencing.

Lack of participation in athletics is not (nor has it ever been) an issue at Yale. About 20 percent of the student body, or nearly 1,000 athletes, take part in intercollegiate sports, while more than 55 percent play intramurals, and fully 80 percent regularly use some part of the recreational and physical facilities. What Beckett would like to see is increased attendance at Yale’s 54 annual paid sporting events.

“I want to work with the student body to convince them that they will have an enjoyable time at these events,” Beckett says. Some of his first steps in this direction have been to provide students with free tickets to home football games this season, and to expand the student section of the Bowl by 2,000 seats. By relocating and compressing several rows of infrequently-used reserved seating, Beckett has put the students closer to the action, which he hopes will help get them “more involved.”

Money to pay for those tickets—which used to sell for $3.00 apiece—had to come from somewhere, and Beckett’s background in marketing and promotion provided a solution that some might view as mildly controversial: corporate sponsorship. Three commercial vendors—Southern New England Telephone’s Linx Cellular Service, the Yale Co-op, and Coca Cola—will be advertising their products and sponsorship of the tickets with posters, announcements at the games, and presentation booths outside the Bowl.

“The goal is to get more members of the community interested in Yale athletics,” says Wayne Dean, the athletic department’s assistant director of sales and marketing. The arrangement was sanctioned by the University, and both Dean and Beckett are quick to quell the fears of those who might suspect the next step will be billboards in the Bowl itself. “The policy is very strict on in-venue signage, and University policy is very conservative on sponsorship,” says Dean. “The sponsors will get ads wherever we publicize Yale football, such as in student publications, in the residential colleges, in local newspapers, and on radio.”

Like it or not, such tactics do help offset expenditures for athletic programs. According to a recent NCAA report on college athletics revenues and expenses, ticket sales account for 13 percent of revenue. With an annual $13.9 million operating budget and only $4.7 million in revenue (the difference is covered by the University), Yale’s athletic department is not in a position to be overly high-minded about pursuing new sources of income. “To the fullest extent possible, athletic programs must support themselves and not be a drain,” says Wheeler.

While Yale has traditionally provided strong support for its athletic programs, the department’s needs continue to grow. High on the list—and one of Beckett’s biggest challenges, observers agree—will be finding the money to pay for long-overdue repairs to a deteriorating Payne Whitney Gymnasium and the Bowl.

Last spring, the University hired the engineering firm of Ellerbe Becket—specialists in academic and sports facilities—to analyze Payne Whitney and propose remedies. The first part of the firm’s investigation targeted the swimming pools (exhibition and practice) and the weight room (all are too small), as well as the basketball court (the floor has reached the end of its functional life). The final report, expected by late fall, will assess the feasibility of three different strategies for the gym—remodeling the existing structure, partial demolition, or complete demolition and replacement with a new building. “Obviously, demolition is not a desirable option for many alumni, not wholesale demolition anyway,” says senior facilities planner Shubhada B. Watson. “But right now we are only exploring all three options on a theoretical basis.” While the final price tag for the gymnasium’s overhaul remains uncertain, cost estimates of addressing its immediate needs will probably exceed $10 million, Watson says.

The estimated cost of renovating that shrine of modern football, the 80-year-old Yale Bowl, is $12 million. A 1991 survey by the architecture and planning firm of Beyer Blinder Belle noted widespread water damage, major cracks in the concrete walls, exposed electrical wiring, and broken seating, among other “miscellaneous problems.”

Temporary repairs to the Bowl’s seating and lights are underway in preparation for the 1995 Special Olympics, which will take place at Yale as well as at other area colleges next summer. Some of the renovations may surprise and, perhaps, alarm some alumni. The familiar bleachers and wall in the upper tier, for example, are being replaced with a promenade and railing. The bleacher seats were installed during the 1930s when the 64,000-seat Bowl proved too small to accommodate the crowds, bringing the capacity up to 70,000. What many Old Blues may not realize is that the promenade was actually a feature of the Bowl’s original design. “We were fortunate to have the original blueprints,” says Larry Regan, senior architect in Yale’s facilities office. “There were some other features, such as a gatehouse and grand staircases up to the promenade that never ended up in the final building.”

While permanent solutions to the suffering of Payne Whitney and the Bowl remain under study, renovation of several other facilities has already been completed. Thanks to a combination of University money, major gifts, endowments, partnerships, and the fundraising efforts of the individual sports associations, the Lapham Field House at the Joel E. Smilow (’54) Field Center (formally Lapham Field House) underwent extensive restoration and expansion last year. The refrigeration system and roof of Ingalls Rink were replaced in 1991. Coxe Cage, the golf course, and the soccer-lacrosse stadium have all received recent attention, and plans are underway for a new boathouse on the Housatonic River.

A new strategy embraced by Yale has accounted for the expansion or salvation of other major facilities. Twenty-two of Yale’s tennis courts, as well as the 15,000-plus-seat stadium next to the Bowl, are now maintained by sponsors of the Volvo International Tennis Tournament. Through a $3.34 million collaborative effort between Yale and the owner of the New Haven Ravens baseball team, Yale Field has been restored to its former splendor and now serves as the Ravens’ home park. (The carefully refurbished stadium was praised in an August 1994 Sports Illustrated article as “the real thing” in an era of new ballparks designed to look antique.) Regan says that the University is exploring similar partnership options for the Bowl, but admits that finding new uses for the facility will take some creative thinking. Concerts have been tried, but the noise irked too many neighbors. Soccer has been a strong candidate, but the field is the wrong size and shape and would require major changes if Yale wanted to attract World Cup–class matches.

As far as Payne Whitney Gymnasium goes, a partnership arrangement would not be practical, says Regan. And there are those, like former athletic director Woodsum, who question whether or not the University ought to sink millions into returning Payne Whitney—no longer a state-of-the-art facility—to its original condition. “It would be like having a beautifully restored 1932 Ford. It would be lovely, but not what Yale needs,” observes Woodsum.

Beckett agrees and says he will be working closely with the President’s office and its management team to come up with solutions. “I am a very strong supporter of our athletic programs and want to continue to make progress in addressing their needs,” said President Levin. The administration, he promises, “will be pushing ahead with fundraising efforts to support” Beckett’s department. However, Levin expressed his confidence in Beckett’s own fundraising talents, citing the free football tickets and the corporate partnership initiative as a good example of Beckett’s enterprising approach.

While increasing attendance at the Yale Bowl may be one trick, courting the various athletic associations, which last year accounted for approximately 5 percent ($870,000) of the athletic department’s budget, is still another. Beckett would like to increase that amount, if possible, but his support of a proposed plan to merge the individual associations (those supporting a particular sport) may stir up some resentment among those alumni who may not wish to contribute to a general fund. He points out that several existing sports associations are already coed—golf, tennis, swimming, squash, fencing—and that there is another precedent, the Ray Tompkins Association (established by Ed Woodsum), which channels funding to all of the sports programs. While acknowledging that “sport-specific giving is very important,” Beckett says one of his goals is to work with the associations to follow the Ray Tompkins Association model. Some observers feel Beckett has his work cut out for him on this issue. Says one member of the athletic director search committee: “Change doesn’t occur quickly here. It’s like turning an ocean liner around. It doesn’t exactly turn on a dime.”

But those who know or have worked with Beckett say lack of money from one quarter or another is not likely to dissuade him from accomplishing his goals. “Fundraising was a never-ending battle, and Tom would joke that he needed to raise a million a month to keep programs running,” says Gary Migdol, senior media relations director in Stanford’s department of athletics. “But he would get out there and do it, meeting with donors, alumni, supporters and making them feel like a part of the effort.”

While Beckett and athletics department staff members (not to mention President Levin) maintain that it is their duty to enhance athletic programs and facilities for the current student body, they acknowledge that they are also doing so for the student-athlete who has yet to come to Yale. “Ninety percent of our job is recruiting,” says Duffy. “We do more recruiting than Division I schools, because we have to try harder.”

Duffy and the rest of the coaching staff have to work so hard to attract student athletes here because, unlike an Oklahoma or a Florida State—or Stanford for that matter—Yale and the rest of the Ivy schools offer no athletic scholarships. The policy was a conscious decision made by the Ivy presidents to ensure that “players shall be truly representative of the student body and not a group of specially recruited athletes.”

Such a move would have been unthinkable in Walter Camp’s day. Back then there was no question about special treatment for athletes, especially those who played in the high-profile sports of football, basketball, and baseball. Camp, Yale’s legendary gridiron coach from 1888 to 1892 and the so-called “Father of American Football,” felt so strongly about his own “group of specially recruited athletes”—football players—that he hoarded gate receipts at the expense of other sports in order to build them (and some said himself) a monument: the Yale Bowl.

Camp’s tactics were certainly not unique to Yale. The issue of maintaining an equitable balance between academics and athletics under the mounting pressure of intercollegiate competition and the lucrative glare of media spotlights is one that has been debated by college administrators for nearly a century. Several landmark reports over the years—the earliest, a 1929 Carnegie Foundation study and the most recent, a 1991 Knight Foundation Commission report—have reached consistently similar conclusions, as John R. Thelin observed in his 1994 book Games Colleges Play: Scandal and Reform in Intercollegiate Athletics. “[The reports] emphasized that college and university presidents must be centrally involved if athletic programs were to be an appropriate, accountable part of higher education,” Thelin wrote. “They warned against commercialization of college sports and its imbalanced dependence on media and constituencies outside the campus. Finally, the reports portrayed the excesses of recruitment, athletic scholarships, and special privileges as corruptions of the student-athlete ideal.”

Yale’s participation in the formation of the Ivy Group, with its focus on keeping athletics rooted in the overall academic experience, plus its high academic admissions standards, helped to avoid many of the win-at-all-costs scandals that have plagued other major universities nationwide. (In a 1980 investigation at the University of Southern California, for instance, it was revealed that the school had admitted more than 300 scholastically deficient athletes over the course of a decade.)

Still, by 1980 Yale President A. Bartlett Giamatti felt that the Ivy League had “drifted away from [its] original statement” of principles regarding athletics. In a memorable 1980 address to the Association of Yale Alumni, Giamatti cautioned that the focus on athletics had become disproportionate to academics, and that it was the University’s responsibility to see to it that students have “more time and energy for studies than for sports.” The result, he observed, was that coaches spent far more time recruiting than teaching, and he warned that the Ivies were developing a hunger for “that bigger-league look and feel,” which he felt violated what “the role of organized athletics in our institutions ought to be.”

Many diehard Yale football fans trace the decline of the Bulldogs to that address, as well as to the Ivy League’s 1989 decision to cease playing teams like Army and Navy and compete in the lower-level Patriot League against schools such as Holy Cross. “That was the end,” declares Robert Nowak, a Massachusetts attorney. Nowak, who has not missed a home game since 1966, even though he is not an alumnus of Yale, often commiserates by telephone with fellow Yale football fan and Texas resident Marty Rodgers ’49, who recognizes the need to maintain academic excellence, but nevertheless feels that “somewhere along the line the school has lost its fire” for competitive sports.

Another factor often cited by critics of Ivy League athletics as contributing to their general decline is the “Academic Index,” a separate admissions standard for athletes in football, men’s basketball, and ice hockey. The index measures applicants’ academic records based on class averages for the previous four years. Because scholastic standards and student test scores at the Big Three—Yale, Harvard, and Princeton—are historically higher than those of the five other Ivy League schools, coaches claim they have a more limited pool of athletes from which to chose. “It makes it very difficult [to recruit]” says Carmen Cozza. “Some players like the fact that they can play in the Yale Bowl, but that’s not enough.”

Such was the case with former star place-kicker J.D. Carlson. He had passed up a football scholarship from Tulane in favor of coming to Yale in 1987 until the University of Michigan invited him out to Ann Arbor to just come take a look at the school. That was all. Just look.

“I walked into [Michigan Stadium]” Carlson told the New Haven Register in a 1991 interview, “and said ‘Oh my gosh, 105,000 [seats]. This is it.’ You’ve got to look at who gets the national exposure. Is Yale gonna compete with Ohio State, Michigan, or Florida? I mean, Michigan is on national TV.” And so was Carlson. For five years, he broke all kinds of records as one of the best place-kickers in the history of Michigan football, while enjoying an athletic scholarship as an undergraduate and graduate student. Did he ever regret passing up a career at Yale?

“I knew Yale was a special place and that I would be getting my money’s worth there,” he says. “But it’s kind of hard to have regrets when you realize you got a BA and a master’s without having to pay for them.”

Carlson is just one of many Yale athletic might-have-beens who, when forced to chose between an Ivy League education and a free ride at another school with competitive academic standards—Stanford for example, or Duke—have chosen to go elsewhere. Yale’s director of undergraduate admissions, Margit Dahl, says she sees it happen all the time: “When a student says I want to go to Yale, but I’ve got X-amount of money from Yale and Y from another school, there is nothing we can do.”

Dahl says some students pass up scholarships to come to Yale because it is Yale; but, with the high cost of tuition and an increasing number of Yale undergraduates (and their families) seeking financial aid, many simply cannot afford to make the sacrifice. Nor should they have to, according to critics who share the attitude of National Public Radio sports commentator Frank Deford, a 1961 Princeton graduate. “I’ve always believed that it’s patronizing for the Ivy League to say we’re looking for excellence, while we cede that excellence in basketball and football,” says Deford. “It’s almost irresponsible. They can posture all they want, but it is a failure to recognize the marketplace. The Ivy League should stand for excellence in all areas, and academics aren’t the only measure of excellence.” He points out that several successful sports stars—John McEnroe, John Elway, Mike Mussina—all went to Stanford and that their professional careers are a testament to the support they received in college.

“These people are all the best at what they do,” says Deford. “Anybody who believes in the ideal of the pure college athlete is being naïve. It’s thanks to Yale more than anybody else that that ideal does not exist. Walter Camp broke that ideal down years ago, and it’s a little late now to put the snake back in the bag.”

Despite critics like Deford, Beckett supports the no-scholarship rule and backs up his position with a healthy dose of reality. “We’re trying to win the Ivy League,” he says. “We are not going to challenge Stanford for a national championship.” He insists that his goal, instead, is to recruit the students who make their determinations about where to go to school based on factors that do not hinge on scholarships. “We want to try to reach as many of those people as we can,” he says, “and one of the strongest selling points we have at Yale is the combination of academic and athletic programs.”

While there seems to be little chance of adopting athletic scholarships anytime soon, the League has gradually been undergoing change on several other fronts. It recently relaxed its rule against freshman participation in varsity sports, and last season sanctioned spring practice for football, which Coach Cozza says “made a difference” in how his team is playing this fall.

Carolyn Campbell, senior associate director of the Ivy League, believes that Tom Beckett—along with two other new Ivy League athletic directors, at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton—will be playing an important role in helping to shape a new Ivy League. Associate athletic director Chesler agrees and says that she and her colleagues trust that Beckett’s successful record at Stanford will mean better days ahead for Yale. “He has already instituted a lot of changes here in a short period of time,” she says, “changes which he believes will work here because he’s proven that they work elsewhere.”  

©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved.

Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu