By JULIE CARLE
BG Independent News
Stephanie Paris has had a nontraditional career path from collegiate athletics to finance and banking. Her unique perspective has earned her a seat on a trailblazing panel during the NCAA Women’s Final Four on April 5 in Tampa.
The panel is part of “Netting Transformation: Women Advancing Change in Athletics,” a first-time event at one of the biggest stages in women’s athletics.
Hosted by the National Association for Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) and Teamworks, a technology company focused on empowering athletes and those who support them, the event celebrates women’s sports and the transformative power of leadership. Three sessions during the day will feature the voices of women in senior-level leadership roles across various industries.
Many of the speakers represent collegiate athletics, but others like Paris, bring a different view to the conversation.
Paris grew up participating in dance as a young athlete, adding softball and basketball along the way. In high school, she narrowed her sports to softball and basketball and eventually was recruited to play Division I softball at the University of Tennessee-Martin, where she was a standout collegiate athlete.
After college, she started as a teacher and coach, teaching business classes, accounting, financial planning and economics, “Those types of career classes that we really need to focus on,” Paris said. She spent five years as an assistant coach at Colorado State University at Pueblo before earning the head softball coach job at Division I Austin Peay State University.
“That was my goal to be a Division I head coach, but then I burned myself out of coaching,” she said. “My quality of life was not great. I completely left college athletics, which I thought I would never do, and became a financial advisor for about a year and a half before I was recruited over to banking in Nashville.”
She also worked as director of strategy and development for a nonprofit in Tucson before moving to Bowling Green, where her husband, Derek Van der Merwe, was recruited to be director of athletics at Bowling Green State University. Not long after they moved to Bowling Green, she joined the State Bank team.
With her role as vice president and commercial lending officer at State Bank, along with her current and longtime affiliation with university athletics, Paris was a natural choice for the panel. She was asked to provide relevant context for the afternoon session, titled “Beyond Campus,” for unconventional career paths in sports, business, media, technology and athlete services.
“I still keep in touch with a lot of colleagues, and a lot of my coaching friends have moved on to administrative roles,” Paris said. “And with Derek’s role, the sports world is actually a tight-knit group, so you always know where people are moving to and the roles they have.”
Brandi Bryant, a friend from Austin Peay, is the business development manager for Teamworks and the brainchild and organizer for the networking event at the Final Four.
“She called me and said they (Teamworks) does this event at the Men’s Final Four, but they had never done anything like this at the Women’s Final Four,” Paris said. “She asked, ‘Why aren’t we doing this?’ And she decided to make it happen.”
Bryant pulled together senior-level leaders from different areas to speak “to those who can influence student-athletes,” Paris said. The audience will include senior-level administrators, senior-level leadership from various universities and companies.
She asked Paris to participate because she was a former Division I head coach, her role at State Bank is completely different than athletics and “because you are married to a Division I athletics director, you’re still in it (athletics). You would be a very unique person on the panel.”
Joining Paris for the Beyond Campus session are moderator Tiffany Tucker, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; and panelists Meredith Scerba, senior vice president of NACDA; Sherri Anderson, vice president of partnership activation for Tampa Bay Sports & Entertainment; and Marcia Steinberg, vice president of team marketing, business operations for the NBA/WNBA.
“We are going to talk about unconventional paths and how we transitioned from collegiate roles to broader leadership roles whether it’s in technology, media, finance or whatever that looks like,” Paris said. “Some people are coming from companies and going into athletics because of their value. They might become a chief financial officer at a university to work in athletics or vice versa. Or they can come out of coaching and transition into leadership roles.”
She sees the value of the event as a way to help administrators understand that there are alternative career paths that build networks and relationships whether coming from athletics and going into something else or coming from something else and going into athletics.
“They all intertwined. You still need confidence and great communication and leadership skills to excel in whatever role you are in,” she said. “People think this world is completely different than athletics, but it’s not, there is lots of overlap.”
The other sessions are a networking session by Blair Bloomston, founder and CEO of Leaders Uplifted, and “Show us the Money,” a visionary talk on revenue-sharing models and their transformative impact on women’s sports, moderated by Bryant, with panelists Katherine Sulentic, deputy athletics director for regulatory affairs at University of Memphis; Keli Zinn, executive deputy director of athletics and chief operating officer for Louisiana State University athletics; Ashley Leko, senior associate athletic director, chief financial officer and business operations, University of South Florida; and Kristi Dos, founder of Business of College Sports.
I was honored to be asked,” Paris said. “The women on these panels are incredible leaders in what they are doing, and just to be in the same room with them or on the same stage is a really big deal.”
