When Donna Lopiano stepped down as chief executive officer of the Women’s Sports Foundation nearly a year ago, she knew she wasn’t retiring so much as moving on to a new challenge.

After closing out her 15-year tenure with the foundation, Lopiano opted to explore one of the few untried avenues in her long and influential career – establishing her own business. In April, she launched Sports Management Resources, a consulting firm aimed at helping high school and intercollegiate athletics departments address complex issues. 

Lopiano is targeting athletics directors primarily since their jobs have changed so much over the last two decades. She said her vision for the firm is to help schools avoid repeating mistakes.

“Once you figure out a problem, you never want to revisit it,” she said. “The only way you never revisit it is to install a best-practices system that makes sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Lopiano hired longtime colleagues and veteran athletics administrators Connee Zotos, the AD at Drew; Christine Grant, the former women’s athletics director at Iowa, and former Kansas athletics director and current Kansas faculty member Bob Frederick to assist in the new venture.

Lopiano said the firm hopes to help athletics departments navigate the tough issues dominating the intercollegiate landscape, including maintaining the academic integrity of their programs and identifying ways to moderate spending.

“It’s a very difficult time and these are huge problems for the NCAA to confront,” Lopiano said. “As the pressure to make money increases, as the pressure on kids increases, the pressure on academic integrity increases, too.”

The company will focus specifically on helping clients with gender-equity assessments, developing five-year plans for compliance, creating policies to respond to equity-related concerns over that period to avoid litigation and establishing tiered solutions for achieving gender equity. In addition, the firm will provide assistance in strategic planning, enhancing old (and developing new) revenue streams, and assessing brand and risk management. 

The firm has eight clients in four months of operation.

For Lopiano, the new venture is allowing her to build on some of the initiatives she began at the Women’s Sports Foundation.

“I knew I’d done as much as I could at the Women’s Sports Foundation and needed a new thing,” she said. “Did I want to stay and work at maintaining something I’ve built or build something new? I’ve always been a builder, not a maintainer.”

She decided to pursue the consulting route after considering other professional avenues. Her interests ranged widely – from seeking another nonprofit executive job or a full-time academic position to serving as a “crisis CEO” in which an interim chief comes in and resolves issues before the permanent successor steps in.

Multiple factors played into Lopiano’s decision to become a consultant, including the fact that she had never started her own business. She also wanted something that would complement another Lopiano initiative – writing a book about how to be an athletics director.

“I wanted to do the most positive thing with what I’ve learned from my own mistakes and successes, and I wanted to work with the people I most admire – Chris, Bob and Connee – and for the people I most admire – athletics directors and heads of nonprofit organizations,” she said.

Even though she has embarked on her newest challenge, Lopiano continues to work with the Women’s Sports Foundation on initiatives she started while she was in charge of the organization. One project involves addressing the under-representation of people of color in American sports, and the other focuses on lobbying for varsity teams for kids with disabilities.

Lopiano said that purposeful discrimination in college athletics against minority and disabled populations is rare. Rather, the problem has to do with a lack of attention to socioeconomic factors that influence access to sport.

“I am not seeing national governing bodies or schools and colleges stepping up to the plate saying this has to change and here’s a plan to do that,” she said. “How do we get people to do that? Where are the varsity teams for kids with disabilities? We know that kids with disabilities make up 10 to 20 percent of school populations.

“These are issues of under-represented groups and lower socioeconomic groups that are critical over these coming years if you have any sense of social justice.”

A four-sport standout in field hockey, volleyball, basketball and softball, Lopiano formerly was director of women’s athletics at Texas for 18 years and an assistant professor and assistant athletics director at Brooklyn. A past president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, Lopiano credits her athletics participation for her sustained success in the field.

“Everything I do today regarding how I go about my business is just a replication of what it took to be an accomplished athlete,” she said. “I don’t see any difference between being an athlete and being a CEO. CEO just means you’re captain of the team.”