Director of Athletics Allison Rich

NEW HAMPSHIRE RELEASE ANNOUNCING THE HIRING OF ALLISON RICH AS DIRECTOR OF ATHLETICS

There have been six Directors of Athletics at Princeton since the position was first held by Ken Fairman, back in 1941.

That's it. Just six.

Those six people grew the athletic program from where it was in the 1940s, when it was an all male school and where the Ivy League was still a decade away, to where it is now, which is to say a model for what college athletics should be. As TigerBlog wrote yesterday, Princeton had an incredible 2021-22 athletic year, winning 16 league championships and finishing 18th — by far the best by a non-Power Five school — in the Learfield Directors' Cup.

The culture of an athletic program is set by the athletic director. The expectations, the values, the policies — those all start with the person at the top. To that end, all six deserve the credit for what Princeton Athletics is today. From Fairman on, their efforts are all still being felt today in one or another.

At the same time, the ability to have a functioning athletic department requires a great deal of people, and it requires them to be pulling in the same direction. There has been an army of people who have worked to achieve the path the ADs have put forward, and all of those people deserve their credit as well.

There have been way more than six people who have worked on the Princeton Athletics senior staff through the decades. These men and women have complemented the ADs as they have gone about their tasks in areas such as business and finance, compliance, fundraising, external relations, events, programming, facilities and everything else that has needed to be done.

To work at Princeton on that level, you need a few things. First, you need to check your ego at the door. As TB said, these people deserve credit, but they also rarely get publicly recognized. 

Second, you have to buy into what is going on at Princeton and in the Ivy League, especially with the concept of broad-based athletic participation, which translates for the Tigers into 38 varsity teams and 1,000 athletes a year. If you don't, you won't last.

When you have a program as successful as Princeton's, others notice. They also look to bring your people into their own programs.

Look at Ivy League women's basketball, for instance, where three of the other seven schools in the league now have a former Princeton assistant coach as their head coach. 

This extends to the administrative side as well. Princeton Athletics has a long history of having its senior staff members go on to become ADs elsewhere. 

To that list you can now add Allison Rich, who was announced yesterday as the new Director of Athletics at the University of New Hampshire.

They don’t come any better than Allison Rich. She’ll be sorely missed here at Princeton, but I know she will do a fantastic job leading @UNHWildcats. #AlwaysATiger https://t.co/jNCyZ2e9Zv

— John Mack (@jlmack00) July 5, 2022

Allison is a 1991 Princeton graduate who has spent the last nine years on the department's senior staff, as the head of the compliance efforts and as the Senior Woman Administrator. Her role in the department and the University was much more than just that, though, and she was especially involved in the extensive efforts in Jadwin and across the campus related to student-athlete welfare. 

She has also been a leader on many issues on the national level.

TB can't begin to count the number of games Allison was at during her nine years, and, much like TB, Allison is very much a hybrid between administrator and fan, which took her to a ton of games because she simply wanted to watch.

Allison fits to a "T" what TB said above. There aren't too many others whom TB has worked with who more closely bought into the department vision and values, and she definitely was content to be in the background doing the important work she did, with direct results on the two most important areas there are in an athletic department: student-athlete experience and student-athlete wellness.

Now she heads to New Hampshire, a member of the America East Conference for most of its 18 sports, though also a member of Hockey East.

TB knows that Allison never looked at her time at Princeton as a prerequisite for moving on to her next job, and he's pretty sure she's cherished the last nine years and always will.

She made a real impact on the department, and more importantly, on the student-athletes themselves. TB wishes Allison all of the best as she moves from being a Tiger to a Wildcat.