Ben Schachtel
Perched atop a tall bookshelf in the corner, a mud-caked hat seemed out of place. The rest of the office was clean, save for a veritable mountain of paperwork on the desk. The man who had been sitting across the table from me had risen now and was walking towards the hat, which, it turned out, had been worn by head lacrosse coach Fran Shields during a face-first celebratory mudslide that followed an especially memorable victory on Harkness Green, now part of Temple Green.
Over ten years have passed since Fran Shields has worn that hat, yet the way he recounted the story made it seem like the game had been won yesterday. Fran Shields is now the Athletic Director (AD) of Connecticut College, and the hat on his shelf is only one of many hats that Shields wears on a daily basis.
As the AD of the college, Shields has responsibilities that extend far beyond any gym, pool or practice field. Shields estimates that he receives around sixty non-spam emails daily, regarding topics ranging from advocating the college to the NCAA and NESCAC, balancing team recruiting budgets for the accounting office, discussing an array of student life issues and working with coaches and students to schedule facility use.
Shields’ bread and butter, however, is not the breadth of administrative and managerial duties that he oversees, but instead the drive with which he represents the college to the absolute best of his abilities.
I asked to follow Shields around during a Saturday game day to see what the experience of being AD was like. Shields made it clear to me that although I was welcome to do so, Saturday was the day when all of the hard work he had put in during the week came to fruition, and that it was the only day when he could finally sit back and be a fan.
The “fan” hat, however, does not allow for passivity; though an avid Camel sports fan, Shields often finds himself at work on the sidelines. He is constantly chatting with parents and alumni, working crowd control and performing real-time facility maintenance.
Shields’ job description should not be underestimated. The AD has made it a personal mission of his to involve student-athletes in other activities on- and off-campus.
Aside from the “Kids, Books and Athletics” program in which varsity coaches and players take New London kids out to play sports at Conn’s facilities, Shields has championed a “Camels for Whalers” program in conjunction with New London High School in which student-athletes at Conn tutor student-athletes from the local high school. Shields also opens Conn’s pool to area students in the Rotary camp, free of charge. Shields is especially proud of these varying and effective attempts to breach the ivory tower that is Conn’s campus so that we may proactively interact with the surrounding community.
Recently, Shields has been encouraging partnerships between Conn sports teams and relevant organizations and causes in the southeastern Connecticut area.
Last spring, the men’s lacrosse team hosted Kean University in a benefit game for the Women’s Center of Southeastern Connecticut, an organization that supports women affected by sexual assault or domestic violence. The men’s hockey team played a game last February against Tufts that they dedicated to Green Dot, a program geared towards raising awareness for sexual violence on college campuses. The team donned green laces in their skates and raffled off t-shirts to support the cause.
In addition to these two causes, Shields enumerated the Think S.A.F.E. (Sexual Assault Free Environment) training program as one of his proudest accomplishments. Shields has been working with the Office of Student Life to change the disproportionate reputation of athletes as sexual assault figures. The program focuses on bystander intervention, and this year required the captains of the various sports teams to arrive back on campus before the rest of the school in order to undergo training that would then be passed on to their teams.
Shields’ outward facing responsibilities do not end there.
Sports, as the AD pointed out, are one of the best ways to market a college. If we played in a different athletic conference such as the Centennial Conference, Connecticut College might not be mentioned alongside the elites such as Williams, Amherst and Middlebury. Instead, Conn athletes fight tooth-and-nail every week to earn a spot in one of the most difficult athletic conferences in the country.
Shields is well aware of Conn’s growing endowment and President Higdon’s commitment to athletics, and has worked with alumni donors and the president to orchestrate locker room renovations that touch more than ten teams, as well as new state-of-the-art lighting fixtures for Silfen Field and new grass surfaces on Freeman and Harkness Green.
All of these improvements, combined with Shields’ commitment to portraying the college in the best possible light reinforce three Rs by which Shields says his coaches abides: Recruit, Retain, Reconnect.
Shields works closely with coaches and the admissions department to recruit high school athletes. It is then part of his job to retain these athletes, and to create an investment in the program and in the team.
Conn’s 1900-person population is thirty percent student-athletes, which means that almost a third of all alumni are former athletes. It is up to Shields and his coaches to reconnect these athletes with the school after graduation, and to garner their support for the athletic department.
There is no beginning or end to the work that our athletic director does, and no Voice edition long enough to include all the responsibilities that fall upon Shields on a daily basis. Rest assured in knowing that the man in charge of athletics at Connecticut College bleeds camel blue, from the stacks of paper on his desk to the mud on his dark blue hat.
