Longtime athletic director reflects on her career ahead of retirement

On Feb. 6. 2025, Susan Bassett ’79, associate vice president and director of Intercollegiate Athletics and Campus Recreation at Ithaca College, announced her plans to retire at the end of the 2024-25 academic year.

Bassett has worked in intercollegiate athletics for 45 years. She was a renowned swimming and diving coach at both William Smith College from 1980-1987 and Union College from 1987-1995. Between the two schools she coached 114 All-Americans and in 1993 was named the NCAA Division III Coach of the Year.

Prior to becoming an athletic director at IC, she served in that same role at William Smith from 1995-2005 and Carnegie Mellon University from 2005-2013. While at Carnegie Mellon, Bassett became the first active athletic director to serve as president of the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators, now called Women Leaders in College Sports.

As Bassett wraps up her final semester at the helm of IC athletics, she sat down with Sports Editor Jacob Infald to reflect upon her career.

Jacob Infald: You’ve had a very long career — how did you know it was time to retire and move on to another chapter in your life?

Susan Bassett: I would say over time there were certain things I wanted to accomplish. I probably would have retired sooner, if not for the pandemic. Once we went through that experience, I felt like it was important to stay to stabilize the budget, the department [and] our staffing. Then when we renovated Butterfield stadium, it was imperative to me to be able to build the new track. So it was really a number of things coming together that led me to a feeling that it would be the right time to move on and the right time to turn over the department to new leadership. One thing I would say that I would want everyone to know is I have enormous energy and passion. I still love what I do, and it’s not anything about wanting to leave what I’m doing. It’s more a matter of, what do I want to do in my life before I’m not able to do certain things.

JI: Can you talk about what it means to you to develop a well-rounded student-athlete as both a coach and an athletic director? 

SB: To me, the value of intercollegiate athletics is fundamentally the educational experience it provides. So it is absolutely the truth in my thinking, that sport helps people develop discipline, character integrity, sportsmanship, teamwork, the ability to persevere during setbacks [and] the ability to bring out the best in everyone around you. And so if it weren’t for that, everything else would be meaningless. I think winning is a nice thing that happens on your way to excellence. I don’t think winning is the be-all [and] end-all. Of course, if we’re keeping score, we want to win, and more than that — at Ithaca College and everywhere I’ve had the privilege to serve — we want to win the right way. We want to follow NCAA rules. We want to treat people fairly. We want to, in the case of Ithaca College, aspire to run both a sport equity model and a gender equity model. And what I mean by that is we want a student in any one of our sports to feel equally valued as anybody. So we have some high visibility sports, obviously, but we put the same energy, effort and commitment, financial resources [and] facility resources behind all of our programs. It is very, very important to me that all of our students in all of our sports, whether they’re male or female, individual sport or team sport, feel supported, valued and like they have the opportunity to achieve their individual and team goals.

JI: Throughout your career, women’s sports has progressed a lot, both in terms of athletics and in opportunities in administration. If you could go back and talk to your college self or your high school self, what would you tell her? And what would you say you’re most proud of yourself for accomplishing in terms of gender equity in sports?

SB: Oh, boy, that’s a big one. Ithaca College’s support as an institution has improved exponentially since the 1970s where, if a team got into a postseason tournament, they wouldn’t necessarily be supported to go. And now, of course, we do that for everybody. So what I would have told myself back then is: you are not going to believe how big women’s sports are going to become. I have been to women’s basketball Final Fours the last few years because one of my college classmates and one of my continued best friends, Lisa Boyer, is the associate head coach at the University of South Carolina, which has been in the top of Division I basketball and just seeing these arenas absolutely filled from a NCAA regional to the NCAA Final Four, and the amount of support and resources going into that is just incredible. So I would say, “Susan, hang on, it’s going to be a wild ride, and you’re not going to believe what women’s sports is going to become and the opportunities that you’re going to have.” And there is absolutely no way that I ever would have thought in 1979 when I left Ithaca College that I would come back and be the director of athletics here — it’s beyond my imagination. And I’ve always been somebody who had high aspirations and high goals, but I just never would have guessed that I’d get to be here in this job serving an institution that I love at a really critical time, and then feel incredibly fortunate to have had that opportunity.

JI: You had such an abrupt end to your sporting career with that tragic car accident during your first year at Ithaca. That could have put a damper on how you see sports, and could maybe deter you from having sports play a factor in the rest of your life. From that moment on, how did you know that you wanted sports to be a factor in the rest of your life? And how did that moment impact the rest of your career? 

SB: Yeah, well, obviously that was life changing, and in a nanosecond, the whole world changed for me. And I would say this, Jacob, I have lived my life with the idea of being a survivor, that there had to be a reason, that I lived as a result of that accident when my best friend from high school died. I’ve always had this idea that I had to do it for both of us, that I was living my life to prove that I was worthy to have that opportunity. I’ve never thought of it as a burden. Of course, the initial realization that I wasn’t going to be the kind of athlete I thought I could be set in. … My first semester as a first year I started on the field hockey team, I thought, wow, I can do all these things. And I was also a really good basketball player, so I was deciding between swimming and basketball. … I missed the spring semester. I took classes over the summer so I could keep up with my electives, and I came back the next year, and I went to see my adviser to figure out what I would have to do and he said, “Well, you might want to think about getting a different major,” because I was a physical education major, and you have to actually perform activity classes and learn how to teach different skills. And so I thought about that, and I just said, “Well, no, I’m not changing what I’m doing,” And I just went and got a different adviser. I did have this idea that because I wasn’t a competitive athlete anymore, that I couldn’t be a coach, which obviously I proved was wrong, but I started looking at other ways to be involved. So I went through the athletic training curriculum. It was very different than it is now. It was an area of concentration in the physical education major, and then I got certified but I never used it. … When I came back here to visit, I went to Indiana University for graduate school, and when I came back for spring break to visit people here and visit with some of my coaches, Doris Kostrinsky, who was the field hockey and softball coach, said, “There’s a job up at William Smith looking for a swimming coach and a field hockey and lacrosse coach. And at the time, that was kind of an unusual combination. Usually, if you’re an individual sport athlete, you’re not doing team sports. And I had a background in field hockey and basketball. I hadn’t played lacrosse, but anyway, my coach saying that to me led me to go that way. I never would have guessed that I would end up going down the path of a career in intercollegiate athletics, coaching and being an administrator. I always thought that I would go back to where I grew up, which was downstate in Westchester County, and be a high school teacher and just coach whatever the season was. I wouldn’t trade a minute of anything I’ve gotten to do.

JI: What do you hope your legacy is? Because clearly, you’ve had a pretty big impact on a lot of coaches and athletes throughout your time at different schools.

SB: I hope that people believe that when you have high expectations and when you work really hard towards your goals, anything is possible. And when you commit to something and persevere, you can achieve a lot, and you can help those around you become the best version of themselves. That’s why the Leadership Academy is so important to me, because I feel strongly that on the college level, we’re trying to develop young people into responsible adults who learn how to make decisions for themselves and learn how to hold themselves and others accountable. I think the honesty, integrity around that and accountability is really, really important. I also think what I hope for Ithaca College is that we should always, as an institution, think big, and that’s why I’m proud of the fact that we set a Division III record for attendance at MetLife Stadium in 2019 and we had over 40,000 people in Yankee Stadium in 2022 out-drawing the last six Pinstripe Bowls. I never sat back and said, “Well, I’m making a Division III decision today, or I’m solving a Division III problem.” I always thought, “How do we take our resources, our assets, all of our skill, ability and talent, and achieve the most we can achieve?”