The old saying, "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again," certainly applies to Northwestern's hiring of an athletic director.
Northwestern couldn't entice Dr. Derrick Gragg away from his NCAA executive job the first time they approached him about the athletic director position. But after Mike Polisky's tenure as AD fell apart in spectacular fashion after just nine days, school president Morty Schapiro and the search committee reached out to Gragg again.
This time, he said yes.
As a result, Gragg was introduced to the media as Northwestern's Combe Family VP For Athletics & Recreation on Monday at Ryan Fieldhouse in a good old-fashioned, in-person press conference.
Schapiro said that Gragg, who spent less than a year with the NCAA after seven years as the AD at Tulsa, was on Northwestern's initial wish list of candidates, before the ill-fated hiring of Polisky. But Gragg declined the opportunity because he had just started his new job at the NCAA.
The next time Northwestern called Gragg, however, he had changed his mind.
"Are you kidding me? This is Northwestern. Of course I'm here," Gragg said, after Schapiro presented him with a No. 23 Wildcat football jersey as the 23rd AD in NU history. "It's a position that anyone in our business would want to have. My background, where I went to school, how I grew up, everything is very similar to Northwestern, and that made me feel very, very comfortable."
“This is a destination job,” he said. “This is an elite program and it’s separated itself.”
Gragg, who was also the athletic director at Eastern Michigan, credited his mother and step-father for his upbringing and rise in his profession. His mother, who holds three Master's degrees, imparted the value of education to her children, while his step-father pushed his children in athletics. But there's no question that school always came first in the family.
“If you didn't get all A's, you didn't play ball," Gragg said.
Gragg knoes what it’s like to be a student-athlete at an academically demanding college. He said that he entered Vanderbilt University with three things: "a football scholarship, a Pell grant and a praying mom."
And now, 32 years later, he holds a Ph. D and is the athletic director at what he called “one of the most important institutions on the globe.”
Gragg comes to Northwestern at a crossroads in the history of college athletics. Players will likely soon be able to profit off their name, image and likeness. The NCAA is still in the process of figuring out rules in regards to transgender athletes. Gender equity is also hot-button issue.
Gragg said he was thankful to be working in Illinois, a state that has already passed a law allowing college athletes to profit off of their NIL. He worked on NCAA committees that dealt with transgender student athletes and gender equity. His former job with college sports' governing body seems tailor-made for the current environment: he was the NCAA's senior vice president for inclusion, education and community engagement.
A lot of the controversy surrounding Polisky's short tenure was around gender equity and the treatment of female student-athletes on Northwestern's campus. Polisky was named in a sexual harassment lawsuit against the university that alleges he ignored the complaints of cheerleaders who said they were being sexually exploited. A student protest and faculty complaints about the hiring helped bring about Polisky's resignation.
Gragg emphasized the importance of listening to the thoughts of people who have felt hurt in the past and work to repair those relationships.
"That's another one of the things that we really have to lean in on," Gragg said. "Make sure that we have our eyes and ears open and recognize these discrepancies. I've always been in the middle of those issues, so just looking forward to meeting everybody and talking about a lot of those things."
Gragg, who also held athletic administration jobs at Missouri, Michigan and Arkansas, inherits a strong athletic department from former AD Jim Phillips. Northwestern just built a $270-million state-of-the-art athletic facility and sunk another $110 million into the renovation of Welsh-Ryan Arena. Wildcat head football coach Pat Fitzgerald just signed a contract extension in January that will keep him at his alma mater through 2030.
A lot of the heavy lifting has been done, but, as Schapiro admitted, "There’s one big project left, and that’s Ryan Field."
Gragg mentioned a potential renovation of NU's 95-year old stadium as a way for Northwestern to take the next step as a program.
"That's what a lot of people are talking about," Gragg said. "Of course, building a stadium excites any athletic director, but there are a lot of steps that go with that. If that's the next project, jump into it with both feet, and get it done. Our student athletes, they're top-notch, and they deserve to play in the best facilities that are available."
