Marquette Professor Explores Modern NCAA Issues Alongside Students

By Andrew Goldstein, Marketing Communications Associate

Teaching a six-week class on the National Collegiate Athletic Association would barely scratch the surface even at the best of times. Made up of over 1,000 member institutions, the NCAA is America’s dominant governing body for dozens of college sports, covering more than a half-a-million athletes.

Trying to put the NCAA in present day perspective during one of the most tumultuous times in the organization’s history can feel like a nearly impossible task for Dr. Adrienne Ridgeway.

“Sometimes I think it has changed more in the last two days than in a lifetime before that,” Ridgeway says.

By day, Ridgeway is the executive associate athletic director of academic services and student programs, overseeing a department that provides more than 300 student-athletes with resources to succeed inside and outside the classroom. By night, Ridgeway teaches sports leadership classes in the Graduate School of Management, including a course titled “NCAA: Exploring Current Issues.”

What got you interested in teaching on top of your other responsibilities?

Teaching creates a different avenue to continue my learning because I feel like when I teach, I discover something new and find resources that I’m excited to share. I also have a commitment to furthering the sports industry. It’s so important to have people working in these professions who know how to access information and who can share that knowledge.

Where do you even start when tackling a subject as broad as the NCAA?

We start with looking at the history and the governance of the NCAA going all the way back to 1906 when it was founded. We look at why it was founded, its purpose and what it looks like today. A lot of people don’t realize how many member institutions, like Marquette, make up the NCAA, so we dig into that relationship too.

Your job is centered around improving people’s lived experiences within an organization. How is that perspective valuable in a business context, and how is the practitioner’s approach to the classroom different than the way a full-time researcher might approach it?

I get a chance to see a lot of these topics in action and what they look like when they’re applied. To understand, for example, the economics of college sports, you must see how it changes a student-athlete’s experience or results in an institution’s ability to keep a sport functioning. I can speak to what we do with athletes and the outcomes we see.

You have to focus on the people in your organization because they’re the ones that are most impacted by your decision-making. We want to prepare practitioners to lead in these spaces, and I don’t believe you can lead in these spaces without considering the people.

There’s been an incredible amount of change in college athletics; where do you see this all going? Do you see a future where athletics and academics become uncoupled?

It’s going to take some forward-thinking institutions to keep those two things together. I think we can continue the idea that you can get a degree and still be an athlete, but that’s not to say there won’t be some breakaways. Down the line, we can ask the question about whether college football will remain part of college or whether it will become a more professional minor league. But I think we’ll see academics and athletics stay together, yes.

The NCAA is a prime target for criticism by people from around the college sports world. You’ve gotten to know the organization very well; is there anything that you think its detractors miss?

For a number of years, I had the opportunity to serve on, then chair, the NCAA Research Committee. That was such an eye-opening opportunity. The NCAA does very complex, longitudinal studies on students who participate in college athletics around jobs and career outcomes. That’s important research! Somebody has to ensure that students actually have a better life because they were a college athlete, and that’s what the NCAA does. The NCAA also provides grants to researchers, and I think most people have no clue that it’s happening.

They also put on a ton of leadership programming, job fairs and other things to connect athletes with opportunities.

There are going to be a lot of people who take your class who will go into non-sports careers. What value do you hope they get out of the course?

I like for people to be informed, no matter what the subject is. If you’re going to be a sports fan and passionate about sports, what better opportunity is there to be a more informed consumer of the product? The industry we cover in this course happens to be sports, but students are grappling with a lot of things like organizational structure and financial governance that apply to a lot of different industries.