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Grounded in graciousness

By Gary Brown
NCAA.org

 

“I’ve always been me,” says University of Mary Athletics Director Roger Thomas – which is saying something for a guy who’s been through several professional iterations of himself.

Thomas, who’s been in athletics for almost three decades, can go from laughing at being teased in a committee meeting to being looked at for the answer to a sticky challenge all within moments.

His ascent came from the ground up. 

First, there’s Student-Athlete Roger Thomas, who was a running back and quarterback at Augustana (Illinois) in the 1960s. “I was highly average,” Thomas says of his playing days on the gridiron. Thomas also played baseball and was an All-America pitcher his junior year.

Then there’s Professional Football Coach Roger Thomas, who after a trail of assistantships at both Augustanas (his alma mater and the one in South Dakota), North Dakota, Cal State Fullerton and Minnesota, became the quarterbacks coach with the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. “Somewhere along the way I thought, ‘You know, I really like the college-age group better,’ ” Thomas reflected at the time. “Nothing against pro athletes, but they love money and they do have a sense of entitlement.”

Don’t forget Head College Football Coach Roger Thomas. Few people could forget his tenure at North Dakota, where he won three North Central Conference championships and was coach of the year nine times from 1986 to 1998. “I was recently at a reunion with the 1993 team I coached at UND – and when you’re with people like that, you realize now the impact you had on them that you wouldn’t have realized at the time you were coaching.”

Then there’s Athletics Director Roger Thomas, who from 1998 through 2005 sat atop the North Dakota hierarchy during the ongoing battle over the Fighting Sioux nickname, threats from an eccentric millionaire donor and calls from constituents for reclassification from Division II to Division I. “Being the AD while all those were going on was tough. And as an administrator, you still have to budget, hire and do all the things you normally would, but you have a three-ring circus going on, as well – from protesters outside your office and a finicky donor to the likelihood of a women’s ice hockey program that brought with it gender-equity concerns – and then to top it off all the people who wanted us to be Division I. These were all job-related issues, but they weren’t in my contract – just in my cards.”

And then there’s Commissioner Roger Thomas, who guided a North Central Conference riddled with defections to its dignified retirement. “At the time I took that job, the NCC was in trouble. I’m not trying to sound like a hero, but somebody needed to go do that. And for some reason at that time it appealed to me to see if we could save it, because I had been in the league for years and it meant a lot to me.”

After all of that, it’s back to being Athletics Director Roger Thomas at Mary, a 2,800-student school in Bismarck, North Dakota, that is only three years into its tenure as an active member of NCAA Division II. “It’s up to me to note that while there are plenty of existing ingredients here to be competitive, here’s how we can adopt a Division II model and begin believing we can succeed even against the more established programs in the Northern Sun.”

That’s a lot of “me’s,” but through it all, Thomas (who also has worn many hats in the NCAA governance structure) has been, well, himself. His peers in athletics administration – and the thousands of student-athletes he has touched over time – are the beneficiaries.

“All those experiences mature you,” he says. “You find the line down the middle and you learn skills as an administrator – to be a thinker and a negotiator – and those skills translate well into other functions, whether it be committee service, hiring athletics personnel or calling the plays from the sideline.”

 

Roger Thomas bio

Position: Athletics director, University of Mary.

Previous positions: Commissioner, North Central Conference (2005-08); athletics director, North Dakota (1998-2005); head football coach, North Dakota (1986-98); assistant coach, Toronto Argonauts (CFL) (1984-85).

Education: Bachelor’s degree in physical education and history from Augustana (Illinois) in 1969; master’s degree from South Dakota in 1972.

NCAA committee service: Division II Management Council (2003-07); Division II Membership Committee (2007-present).

What you didn’t know: Thomas’ favorite story is when his 1993 team beat rival North Dakota State by one point. “While it doesn’t happen often in Division II,” he said, “our guys tore down the goal post, which meant that we didn’t have a goal post for our game the next week against South Dakota. So I asked the players, ‘Guys, where’s the goal post?’ They said, ‘Well, it’s all over campus.’ That was like Tuesday or Wednesday, and I said, ‘Guys, we need it back.’ And I’ll be darned, we got every piece of it back. They laid it on the field and welded it back together. It looked pretty shaggy, but we were in compliance for the home finale.”