INDIANAPOLIS — Dallas Mavericks President and CEO Terdema Ussery told an audience comprised mostly of athletic directors, coaches and compliance officers at the NCAA Inclusion 2013 forum Wednesday that why you want to be a leader is a more important question than how you get in position.
“We need virtuous leaders in the NCAA who are going to be transparent leaders, talking about sports and academics, who are going to have honest dialogue with all our constituencies and are about the business of the institution and not the individual that is running the institution,” Ussery said.
Ussery, who has a bachelor’s degree from Princeton, a master’s degree from Harvard and a law degree from the University of California-Berkley, said he is particularly interested in the NCAA’s focus on graduation rates.
“One of the things that scares me about that is if you are doing that for optical reasons, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. In other words, if you want to be able to say to people, ‘We graduate 80 percent of our student-athletes, and therefore, there should be no heat on us,’ and if you’re doing it for that reason, you’re doing it for the wrong reason, and you’re going to get the wrong result. The objective should not be to graduate 100 percent of your athletes; the objective should be to educate 100 percent of your athletes on the way to graduating 100 percent of your athletes.
“If you’re only doing it for the optics of it, the educational piece is going to get in the way. If you say that someone graduated from an institution, but when you put a microphone in their face and they can’t put together a sentence, something is wrong.”
Ussery, in his 16th season with the National Basketball Association team and a fixture on lists of the most powerful executives in sports, readily admits that his achievements in education and success in the corporate world most likely would not have happened without the help of others at key times during his life. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and his family experienced the rioting in Watts.
In the aftermath of the riots, the federal government put trailers at his elementary school and graduate students from UCLA volunteered to work with the youngsters in terms of academics and sought to identify those who exhibited the ability to excel. Ussery took advantage of those after-school sessions.
