When Myles Brand was announced as the NCAA's fourth CEO in October 2002, he said he would spend much of his first year listening.

That was an important message coming from a man accustomed to leadership positions in higher education, having spent the last 14 years as a Division I president at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the University of Oregon. It not only indicated Brand's inclusive but decisive leadership style, it signaled his intention to gather all parties interested in furthering the NCAA's educational mission, even if some had conflicting ideas about how to accomplish the goal.

Listening enabled the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and University of Rochester graduate to understand the issues in intercollegiate athletics, the political nuances inherent within the NCAA's vast membership infrastructure, and the various theories and suggestions for resolving the most pressing matters.

During the first six months of his tenure, Brand attended more than 50 conference meetings, governance sessions, seminars, symposiums and summits. He listened to Division I conference members discuss the effect of reform on student-athletes; he listened to presidents and athletics directors deliberate the role of athletics in higher education; he listened to constituents debate Title IX; he listened to concerns from athletics and community leaders about sportsmanship; he listened to basketball coaches talk about the good of the game; he listened to pleas for increased diversity in athletics hiring practices.

"I tried to attend as many meetings as I could, and it proved to be both enlightening and enjoyable," Brand said. "There are wonderful people working in intercollegiate athletics -- committed presidents, athletics directors, coaches, conference commissioners, senior woman administrators and faculty representatives -- it was a real joy to meet many of them.

"More importantly, those meetings helped me as a former president put intercollegiate athletics in better perspective. I certainly understood intercollegiate athletics issues from the academic side, but this year I've been able to understand them better from the athletics side as well."

Brand not only listened to others in the initial months, he urged others to listen to him. Already keenly familiar with NCAA issues as an outspoken supporter of academic reform and already aware of what it takes to resolve complicated athletics administration issues from his years at Indiana, Brand took the podium early and often as an advocate for reform -- and as an advocate for the NCAA. In other words, Brand was not all listen and no lead. He has also taken a critical and forceful leadership role in some significant areas.

Brand's hiring came at a critical time in NCAA history and confirmed the NCAA Executive Committee's desire to hire a sitting president to complete the NCAA's reform agenda. The search committee headed by University of Tulsa President Bob Lawless was confident that it had found the right person for the job, and Brand wasted little time getting started.

During his first State of the Association address at the 2003 Convention -- just days after his tenure began -- Brand made it clear that reform and advocacy were the guideposts that would shape his presidency. He described five principles to support advocacy and reform:

Intercollegiate athletics must be integrated into the academic mission of colleges and universities.

Presidential control of intercollegiate athletics is essential.

The positive value of intercollegiate athletics should be stressed and reinforced.

The integrity of intercollegiate athletics is and must remain paramount.

The norms of ethical behavior and fairness must guide all of intercollegiate athletics.

His goal with the Convention speech was to establish a vision -- his vision -- for intercollegiate athletics, then take the steps necessary to make it happen.

And now, almost 12 months later, Brand said reform and advocacy remain priorities for 2004. "They will continue to be the two guideposts for the future," he said. "That's what we have to accomplish."

The NCAA is close to accomplishing its academic-reform work. In Division I, enhanced initial-eligibility and progress-toward-degree standards began with the entering class of 2003, and the much-awaited incentives/disincentives structure is poised for the Division I Management Council and Board of Directors to adopt in April. Brand credits the Board of Directors Task Force, which was charged two years ago with developing and implementing academic reform, as a seminal group. He said the leadership that Francis Lawrence, then president at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick; Brit Kirwan, then president at Ohio State University; and Mary Sue Coleman, president at the University of Michigan, gave to the task force was central to its success.

"That group's work will go down in the history of reform in intercollegiate athletics as a major event, as a milestone," Brand said.

He said the task force and the NCAA were positioned "exactly right" in helping members achieve their goals regarding academic reform. The task force adopted some of the views that were put forward by different groups of presidents, including a group from six prominent Division I-A conferences that was working concurrently on reform issues. "There was a great deal of crossover and synergy between the two groups," Brand said. "The process worked exactly as it should."

In Division III, the Division III Presidents Council has coordinated a membership-wide effort to develop a nine-proposal reform package that will come to a vote at the Convention in January. These proposals, too, represent a two-year effort -- aided by extensive membership dialogue and input -- to align practices at member institutions more closely with the Division III philosophy.

"The reform efforts in Divisions I and III are making good progress," Brand said. "The success there is in large part because of the presidents who have supported the initiatives. They have sustained the momentum."

Advocating for athletics

As for advocacy, Brand said the charge has been somewhat more challenging, since the idea of advocacy was not as evolved as reform at the time he took office. Complicating advocacy, Brand said, is the confusion that has mounted over time about the "terminology" of the NCAA. Brand in fact said the lack of understanding about what is the NCAA -- both among internal and external constituencies -- has been the biggest surprise during his first year in office.

"Depending on the discussion, 'NCAA' could mean member institutions and conferences, the national office staff or a combination of all stakeholders," Brand said. "To eliminate that confusion, it is important that all constituents use terminology that makes these distinctions.

"The 'Association' is the entity consisting of member institutions, conferences and committees, as well as student-athletes, coaches and athletics administrators. It includes the governance structure, the playing rules and legislation, and the investigatory and enforcement functions. The 'membership' of the Association is primarily the colleges, universities and conferences. It is campus-based. Finally, the 'national office' is the group of employees in Indianapolis who make up the infrastructure of the Association."

Brand said advocating for college sports becomes difficult when those distinctions aren't clear. For example, he said, recent media attention given to conference realignment and postseason football indicates the confusion between the roles of the Association, its membership and the national office.

"Conference realignment and postseason football are the responsibility of individual members, not the national office," Brand said. "Unfortunately, because of the ambiguity of the name 'NCAA.' the media and public often fail to understand this point."

Nonetheless, Brand said, the NCAA has made progress in the advocacy realm. He noted the successful NCAA student-athlete voice messages -- the black and white split-screen television ads that began being broadcast during the 2003 basketball championships, and various efforts with the NCAA's television partners CBS and ESPN (such as "NCAA on Campus") that more accurately depict the student-athlete experience -- as initiatives that have cut through some of the confusion. He said more people are realizing that the NCAA is a large and diverse membership organization and that there are thousands of student-athletes who play something other than football or basketball.

But those realizations are difficult to uncover in light of the high-visibility incidents of misbehavior or academic fraud. This year, the number of such cases seemed unusually high.

"There has been more controversy than I expected, but has it been daunting? No," Brand said. "After all, I was a university president. Crisis management was the order of the day. If anything, it has given me more opportunities to state more clearly what the values and goals are for intercollegiate athletics, and to be more specific about what the role of the national office is and what the role of the NCAA president is."

Brand said the central theme of advocacy hasn't changed. He continues to push for the collegiate model of sports in presentations he has made to various groups the last few months, and he has reminded constituents of the educational value of intercollegiate athletics.

"We understand that the value lies in having college teams consist of college players," he said. "To the extent we professionalize those players or the enterprise, we give up the best of intercollegiate athletics. Those who want to see intercollegiate athletics well-supported have to understand that intercollegiate athletics must adopt the values of the university, and to do that it must be a part of the mainstream of the university.

"Being an advocate doesn't mean that we'll get to a position where nothing will ever go wrong, because human nature is that there will be persons who break the rules, just as there are in every walk of life. The real question is what do we do when that happens? We've enhanced our enforcement efforts and we will continue to do so over the next year. Also, in meeting the recent challenges of misbehavior, presidents have stood up and been counted, and that has made a critical difference."

Success stories

Brand said his leadership is oriented toward setting out a vision, toward creating the future. The steps necessary to carry that out sometimes involve partnership, and other times a more direct and decisive approach. Brand has done both.

In the Title IX controversy that was in full swing when Brand's tenure began, the new NCAA president made it clear that this was not a case of sitting back and letting the chips fall. He was outspoken in support of Title IX, saying repeatedly that the law and the way it was interpreted "was not broken and did not need to be fixed."

In July, the federal panel that had been appointed to review Title IX regulations recommended that Title IX and the three-part test used to judge compliance were in good standing. The panel also made it clear that discontinuing men's sports to comply with the law was a disfavored practice. Brand called the decision a win both for women's sports and for men's sports.

"I'm a firm believer in the educational-development values of intercollegiate athletics and the important role athletics plays in universities," Brand said. "One role athletics plays is in forming the values, attitudes and goals of young people and enabling them to be successful in their lives. If one of the goals of intercollegiate athletics is to provide opportunities, why in the world would we apply that only to one gender?"

Though the controversy is over for the most part, Title IX still figures into sports-sponsorship discussions. Brand, though, thinks Title IX is misidentified as a culprit in those discussions.

"Some people still worry that Title IX drains the budget of men's sports, but I think the real controversy is in the internal decisions made on university campuses about where to best allocate resources in their athletics programs," he said. "Even though athletics budgets in Division I have been going up faster than university budgets, and there is increased pressure from new costs, presidents and athletics directors must set priorities."

Another Brand-driven success story is the move toward creating a less bureaucratic NCAA that is more responsive to student-athlete needs. Brand has charged various legislative committees to give student-athletes more benefit of the doubt in waiver requests and reinstatement appeals where case precedent is not clear. Already, several cases that would have been disallowed in the past have been met with a "yes" under Brand's watch.

"Making the NCAA more student-athlete-friendly and less rigid is an ongoing effort," Brand said. "It has produced some good results, but it is a work in progress."

Direct and inclusive leadership

Title IX served as a good example of Brand's influence as a change agent. It also is an example of his desire to work in tandem with other influential groups. In the Title IX dispute, Brand formed a partnership with the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education and former Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh, among others, to achieve the desired outcome without alienating groups that had different opinions about the matter.

Since then, similar issues have emerged in which Brand has shown he can lead both directly and inclusively. At the Sportsmanship and Fan Behavior Summit in February, for example -- a landmark gathering of more than 150 athletics, educational and community leaders -- Brand spoke out on the issues before, during and after the summit, making sure that the best practices that emerged from the meeting were available for the membership to implement.

This fall, the National Association of Basketball Coaches called a summit, in conjunction with the NCAA, to address ethical behavior in the sport. Brand made it clear that this was a shared venture, but that he would take the lead in supporting NABC Executive Director Jim Haney and the Division I coaches in their efforts to address an important matter and address their most pressing regulatory concerns.

Similarly, the recent discussions among Bowl Championship Series conferences and a coalition of other leagues has found Brand in the center -- not as a controller or agenda-setter, but more as a facilitator with an important voice.

"There are times when leadership consists of creating partnerships with differing groups and constituents," Brand said. "Once these partnerships are developed, my goal is to provide direction toward a resolution of conflict that is based on the underlying values of higher education and intercollegiate athletics.

"Even more important than bringing people together to work cooperatively toward common goals is the role of the president to set out a vision for intercollegiate athletics, then work toward that vision through various kinds of action. Creating partnerships is one such type of action. It is instrumental to the goal of realizing the vision."

There have been situations, however, in which Brand has been criticized for not taking a more direct approach. The controversy surrounding conference realignment, for example, prompted media speculation about the role of the NCAA president. But Brand said choosing to speak out on Title IX or sportsmanship and not on conference realignment is consistent with the president's role. Title IX was a matter of equal opportunity that affects the entire NCAA, whereas conference realignment is clearly a membership matter.

"While the NCAA president is a change agent, that person is not the czar of college sports, as some people would like to think," Brand said. "Member schools retain a great deal of autonomy, and with whom they choose to align themselves is entirely up to them."

Staying within the parameters of the position, Brand offered to mediate discussions among conference leaders but chose not to advocate for a certain outcome. When the Board of Directors discussed the matter, presidents agreed that Brand had acted correctly. One conference commissioner in fact said that an attempt by Brand to wield more authority would only have caused resentment.

"Sometimes I will take direct action, as I did in Title IX, and sometimes I will mediate and bring people together, as I did with the basketball summit and as I am doing with the postseason football dispute," Brand said. "I also will use the bully pulpit -- including speeches and sometimes the national media -- to set out this vision, and I will do so in a provocative manner."

That's exactly what the Executive Committee's search group had in mind when it went looking for a leader.

"He's fulfilling every expectation we had when we made the selection," said Tulsa President Lawless. "We had high expectations and lofty goals when we made the decision to hire him. He hasn't disappointed us on any of those goals.

"His leadership style is effective. His facilitation in the meetings with the BCS presidents and the coalition presidents has been a factor in terms of making for cordial discussions and perhaps making headway in an area believed to be one in which there was not much likelihood of headway being made. In other situations he's taken a stand quickly instead of letting the public waffle about what is the position of the leadership of the NCAA. He's been forthright and has made public statements."

As Brand's second year in office begins next month, the NCAA membership can expect more of the Brand blend of leadership.

"While I need to listen carefully and mediate disputes," Brand said, "I am really an activist president, a change agent. That is how I see the job of NCAA president."