After all of these years, Sean T. Frazier is still disturbed by the numbers.
Frazier is one of 14 Black athletic directors in the 130 Division 1 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).
“Sometimes I feel like a damn endangered species,” says Frazier, who is the associate vice president and director of athletics at Northern Illinois University (NIU).
Now, more than ever, Frazier says that institutions have to do a better job recruiting a diverse group of individuals to work in intercollegiate athletics.
“It’s disheartening,” says Frazier, who adds that that there has been little progress in diversifying the field over the past two decades.
That lack of progress is one of the reasons why he has endorsed the National Study of Intercollegiate Athletics (NSIA) which officially launched last month to a national audience, eight years after NSIA was founded in 2011 and piloted in 2014.
The mission of the organization is quite simple: to generate an empirical understanding of the organizational culture of the more than 13,000 professionals currently working in intercollegiate athletics.
