Chris Rogers is Senior Associate Athletics Director for Administration at the University of South Carolina. He reports directly to the athletics director and holds a broad range of responsibilities including serving as a member of the athletics department's senior management team, serving as the primary sport administrator for women’s cross-country, men’s and women’s track & field and has served as the secondary sport administrator for beach volleyball, equestrian and women’s volleyball.
He is heavily involved in oversight and management of several internal initiatives including the athletics strategic plan, student-athlete career success program, special projects and administrative process reviews. Rogers is also involved with several on-campus committees and special projects including the President's Athletic Community Advisory Committee and University Athletics Advisory Council.
In 2015, Rogers was named the winner of the Frank Kara Leadership Award by the National Association for Athletics Compliance (NAAC). The Frank Kara Leadership Award is NAAC's premier award, and the highest honor that may be bestowed upon compliance professionals.
Sports Industry Journey:
Education
D1 Student-Athlete: Cross Country & Track | University of Minnesota
Bachelor's Degree | Kinesiology and Exercise Science | University of Minnesota
Master's Degree | University of Minnesota
Juris Doctorate | Hamline University School of Law
MBA | University of South Carolina (currently enrolled)
Career
Operations Assistant | United States Olympic Committee
Team Administrator | WUSA/San Diego Spirit
Compliance Assistant/Interim Assistant Director of Compliance | University of Minnesota
Assistant Athletics Director of Compliance | University of Utah
Assistant Athletics Director of Compliance | Ohio State University
Associate Athletics Director for Compliance | University of South Carolina
Senior Associate Athletics Director for Administration | University of South Carolina
Twitter: @ChrisRogersSC
LinkedIn: Chris Rogers
What attracted you to work in sports/administration?
Originally I’m from Minnesota. Growing up my entire family was college sports fans. In particular, my parents were (and continue to be) die hard University of Minnesota men’s basketball fans. They have been season ticket holders for 40+ years. We used to live 3 ½ hours away from the arena. I can remember games that my dad and I would go to games and drive 3 ½ hours there and back the same day.
I ended up becoming a Track & Field student-athlete at Minnesota. I then was a GA for the cross country program while I was doing my masters program. I was torn between coaching and administration. I ended up doing a little bit of both and it led me to a full time intern spot with U.S. Olympics committee.
I went into law school knowing that I wasn’t going to practice law at a law firm. I wanted to use my law experience to help me in athletics. I had experience with the U.S. Olympic committee, the professional women’s soccer league and college athletics.
When I was looking around at high-level administrators while I was at Minnesota, I looked around to see who was moving up the ladder and Jeff Schemmel was one of them. His background was similar to mine, he had compliance experience and he had a law degree. I’d ask myself, "How did he end up in these key roles?" I attributed at least some of it to having a law degree. After really thinking about it I realized law school fit me.
Chase the people, not the job.
One of the hardest decisions I had to make coming out of law school, I had a FCS school that offered me a job where the pay was significantly more money than what Utah had offered. When you come out of law school with a ton of debt it seems like a no-brainer to go with the higher paying job. However, the people that were closest to me told me that my would-be boss at Utah was a great person and knew what he was doing. The decision to go there launched me for the rest of my career. Chase the people, not the job.
My boss at Utah ended up leaving for Ohio State and I was then given the opportunity to lead the Compliance office at Utah (essentially what my boss' job was). Two years later, my former boss’ #2 left Ohio State and he called me and offered me the position. I then became #2 at Ohio State.
What is the book (or books you’ve given most as a gift) and why or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
The book that I have given out the most is "Total Money Makeover" by Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey is a financial guy who does a radio show/podcast helping people get out of debt and take control of their finances. When you don’t have financial stress, you can do better professionally and personally. With students who have student loans, it’s a great resource book. It has a lot of practical information and I have loaned and given that book the most.
The books I gravitate to, the ones I really enjoy reading, are Malcolm Gladwell. I love the way he breaks topics down and makes you really think. In particular, Outliers is great.
Patrick Lencioni has a leadership book. The most logical, common sense is from this book. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage are my two favorite books by him.
ES: I’m reading Outliers, and I find it interesting that the best youth hockey teams, if you look closely, all have birthdays around the same time.
CR: If you try to apply it outside of youth sports, it still applies. Let’s say you’re hiring for a position and you’re looking for the best candidate; you need to ask yourself what advantages do these candidates have that maybe others don’t? Are there factors that are the reason one candidate had more opportunities than the other? That’s why I love Gladwell.
How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a “favorite failure” of yours?
I thought about this and I don’t know if I have a favorite failure. I guess from my perspective, if you have a failure (which everyone does), you didn’t achieve the outcome you wanted. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a complete failure because there’s always takeaways. Failure to me is if you didn’t even bother pursuing a goal in the first place—you stopped before you even began. That’s a failure.
If you take on a project or are in a new position, and you give yourself a list of 10 goals you want to achieve, you might consider it a failure because you only completed 7 out of 10 goals. I think sometimes, maybe you didn’t have the best plan, or the people on board weren’t the right people, or you had the wrong strategy. But it gives you the opportunity to see what works, what didn’t work and what you could have done differently. Could you have been 8 out of 10 or 9 out of 10 if you included what you learned from this new perspective?
From my professional career in compliance, if you’re 99 out of 100, that one missed thing could end up in the front of a newspaper. I think it all depends what goals you set out. Not everyone is going to bat 1.000. What can you learn? Would it have changed anything in the final outcome?
If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere in the world with anything on it – and you could get a message out to millions or billions – what would it say and why?
I hope it's an electronic billboard and I hope it can’t be there forever. I’m going to give you a few with hope that it's an electric billboard:
“It’s not that hard to do the right thing” - This probably seems very cliche and you’re probably thinking why would I put that up there? There is not one thing that could be more true than what your company values are, organizations values are, what your values are, and it’s not that hard of a thing to do.
If you want to apply it to college athletics—think about individuals being verbally abusive to student-athletes, coaches, or officials - why? It’s not that hard to treat them like a human being is it? Just do the right thing.
“Control what you can control” - I think that a lot of stress that is created for people, people worry about stuff they can't control...stop worrying about that. Control what you can control. Do the best job you can do with the stuff in front of you. It creates so much stress for you to worry about things that are out of your control.
“No is a complete sentence” - It's okay to say no. You don’t always need an explanation. Professionally it's hard to say no. In athletics, there is no such thing as “that’s not in your job description”. We’re all here to advance our student-athletes, but you can’t say yes to everything. Probably the least profound quote of the three, but most true.
What are your morning rituals? What do the first 60 minutes of your day look like?
More often than not, I try to get out the door for a run in the morning. Then I get the kids off to school. Before I walk into the door for work, one thing I do is scan my calendar the night before to see if there’s anything I need to prep for the next day or week.
Then when I get into the office that morning I’ll see if there is anything I need to prep for immediately. I’ll do a quick scan of emails to see if I need to immediately address anything. I will also look at D1 Ticker, an aggregation of news in D1 athletics. I’ll scan through that to see what is happening in college athletics.
Is there an idea, belief, or trend in the sports industry that you feel strongly about, that others may not agree with and think you're crazy for thinking/saying it?
From my perspective, on the amateurism discussion, I don’t know exactly what the answer is to name/image/likeness and “pay for play” for student-athletes. I don’t agree with the pay for play option but I do think we should be looking at something closer to the Olympic model and how to make that viable even if that means changing what the definition of amateurism is within the NCAA rules.
I know it's not apples to apples with college athletics and the Olympics, but if we want it to work on the NCAA side, we need to take a hard look at if our term of amateurism is functional at this point in time.
What are bad recommendations you hear in athletics or in your area of expertise?
For entry-level people or senior-level administrators, if anyone ever questions you or asks “Is what you’re doing right now really the best use of your time?” don’t feel guilty. Likely what you are doing is the best use of your time. Obviously if you’re surfing the web when you should be working, that isn’t being productive and is not good use of your time.
But for example, I’ve had situations where I’m moving boxes with our apparel and equipment staff—we don’t have interns because it’s summer—and I just jump in to lend a hand. As senior administration, maybe at times I should be focusing on other things. But I believe that sometimes you just need to help your people and get things done—you should never view a task as something that is below you.
The best leaders jump into it and get it done.
We had a tennis match a few years ago and our AD had a blower on the tennis court, helping our event staff to dry the courts so the team could play. The best leaders jump into it and get it done.
My current title is Senior Associate AD for Administration and I work on a number of different projects with different departments. I’m partially in my role because of my willingness to jump into every department and help out. I’ve built up that trust with departments and they know I’ll help them solve the problems.
What are some tips you have for building and maintaining relationships in the sports industry? (It could be with a mentor, client, donor, co-worker, etc.)
There isn’t really any big secret to that. You’re going to start your relationships the same way as your personal relationships. Reach out regularly, remember birthdays, call just to catch up, etc.
How do you put yourself in a position on how to learn about other departments? Do you go to your boss and say you want to learn from 'XYZ' department and have them set up a lunch meeting so you can see how they operate?
You need to be willing to put in time that isn’t just a text message and an email. If I can have a face-to-face conversation as oppose to email or text, I’ll choose a face-to-face (assuming there is time).
In today’s day and age [face-to-face] is just not the normal way of communicating, especially for younger employees who have grown up with social media throughout their lives. When you’re young in your career and your bosses don’t use social media platforms or are less comfortable texting, you have to find a way to connect with them. That’s face-to-face.
It works both ways though, more experienced employees need to be able to connect and communicate with younger staff. With student-athletes, you know if you send an email you will maybe get 20% of people to look at it. If you send a text or a snapchat, open rates and/or responses go up tremendously.
If you could go back in time, what advice would you give to your 20-something year old self?
Taking out student loans for law school—that was a bad idea. When I look at the trajectory of my career, it’s probably not normal in today’s college athletics environment. When I got done with law school and I was applying to compliance jobs, I literally had a job interview at every school I applied to because I has some baseline practical experience and a law degree. At that time, the number of people that came out with a law degree and college athletics experience wasn’t all that high.
Today, you’ll have 100 candidates for an entry-level compliance job and you’ll have 15-20 people with either a law degree, master’s degree or both.
When I first got to law school, I probably would have done a JD/MBA combo program. I say that because I’ve been doing this for 15 years at this point. I’ve been involved with different projects and my law degree has helped from the analytical side of things.
But I wish I had a little more knowledge of finance and different strategies to get projects done. It’s why I’ve chosen to enroll in the Professional MBA program at the University of South Carolina.
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