Meet the Commish The DIII University Athletic Association recently tapped Sarah Otey '07 to lead the organization.
Sarah Otey ’07 considered herself a good athlete — until she arrived as a first-year student at Washington and Lee and realized she’d been a “big fish in a small pond.”
“I was a successful basketball and softball player [at Hampton Roads Academy] and assumed I was going to equal that success, that it was going to easily translate to the DIII level,” says the recently named (and first woman) commissioner of the University Athletic Association (UAA). “I like to joke with my student-athletes that W&L pretty much gave me a uniform and a locker and ‘let me show up’ to [basketball] practice.”
Otey has done a lot more than show up since graduating magna cum laude with a psychology degree from W&L. She served as — again, the first woman — commissioner of the Ohio Athletic Conference for three years until the UAA came calling, and it was “one of those opportunities I couldn’t pass up.” The UAA is the only DIII conference comprised of private Research 1 institutions (nicknamed the “egghead eight,” it includes Brandeis University, Carnegie Mellon University, Case Western Reserve University, Emory University, New York University, University of Chicago, University of Rochester and Washington University in St. Louis). “Three of the top five athletics schools in the country right now, based on NACDA Directors Cup Standings, are UAA schools,” says Otey. “So, they’re tremendously successful athletically as well.”
Before becoming an athletic conference commissioner — where she facilitates all strategic and operational aspects of the organization — Otey spent nearly nine years at the NCAA national office. She says her W&L psychology degree proved useful in the waiver-processing aspect of her role because she could explain mental health diagnoses to coworkers and describe the impact those diagnoses might have on student-athletes. Otey says she also frequently thinks about something she learned in a class taught by Julie Woodzicka, professor of cognitive and behavioral science: “There’s an old study that looks at cyclists and how much faster they were in a time trial when there were people on either side of them [versus] when they were sitting there by themselves,” Otey says. In both cases, the cyclists were told to ride as fast as they could, but they did better when they competed against each other. “And, so, it’s been fun to remind student-athletes that they are making each other better in competition.”
When asked about being the first female commissioner of both the Ohio Athletic Conference and the University Athletic Association, Otey says it’s an opportunity to “demonstrate that it’s a no-brainer to hire women in leadership positions like this,” adding that she’s never felt a professional door was closed to her because of her gender. But, she says, there are generations “just barely ahead of me” that can’t say the same thing: “I am a beneficiary of the people who came before me, and it’s my responsibility to make sure that those doors stay open for the people who come after me.”
One door that almost closed was Washington and Lee. “My dad went to W&L,” says Otey, the eldest of four children who grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia. “And I refused to visit it until high school because I didn’t want to go to the same school that my dad went to. But as I realized that I wanted my athletic career to continue, and being challenged academically was also a priority … once you step foot on the W&L campus, it’s impossible not to love it.”
Otey, who also holds a master’s of education in exercise physiology from the University of Virginia, no longer plays much basketball (“Every time I try to play these days, I hurt myself!”), but she does compete in Ironman triathlons and has qualified for the Boston Marathon.
“One of the things I think is special about Washington and Lee is that I defined myself more as a student-athlete, holistically, than as a basketball player specifically,” says the two-time academic all-Old Dominion Athletic Conference honoree. “My friends that I still keep in close touch with, there are a couple that played basketball, but some of my college roommates were soccer players, field hockey players … there’s just something about our experience that’s created that bond.”
Division III institutions, she adds, “more intentionally balance athletic obligations with academic obligations … they see athletics as a component of the higher educational model rather than as ancillary to it.” And despite working with some “tremendous leaders in Division I” while at the NCAA, Otey says her heart has always been in Division III. “I’m a little bit biased because I played a Division III sport, and that’s what I know most intimately.”
