Kragthorpe: Utes administrator enjoys helping athletes, 'making sure they're cared for'

In some ways, Nona Richardson always will be the 5-foot-6 ½, walk-on middle blocker who arrived on the Michigan State campus without knowing anyone and became a scholarship athlete and team leader.

“I guess you have to be gritty, gutty, resilient and a little stubborn,” she said.

The traits that made her an overachieving volleyball player in the early years of Title IX, when other Spartans women’s athletes were suing the school for scholarship equity, have carried over to her work in the University of Utah athletic department with a job title that has earned her a national award and merits its own paragraph.

Senior associate athletic director for student-athlete support services/senior woman administrator.

If that sounds like a lot of ground to cover, it is. Schools do more these days for athletes than Richardson ever could have imagined in the late 1970s and early ’80s, when her subsistence featured “potato chips and Twizzlers,” by her account.

“The kids who are currently with us, they have no idea about what we went through back then to get just a small percentage of what’s available to them,” Richardson said. “Nutrition? Fueling stations? Dining halls?”

She’s not complaining. Richardson recognizes the increased expectations and demands of college athletes in this century. She loves being able to provide assistance that never existed in her era, in areas including food science, psychology, academic tutoring and strength and conditioning.

“It’s exciting to see,” she said. “I like to say that our students should want for nothing while they’re here.”

Utes women’s soccer coach Rich Manning appreciates Richardson’s devotion to the athletes, modeling Utes athletic director Chris Hill and her predecessor, Mary Bowman, in “making sure they’re cared for,” Manning said. “They’re going through a lot of on-the-field and off-the-field stuff. The first thing is always, ‘Let’s get them some help.’”

Richardson will receive an Administrator of the Year award next week during the Women Leaders in College Sports convention in Dallas after being selected from among 130 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision. She’s significant in Utah history as the highest-ranking African-American woman in a college athletic department in the state, having advanced in the profession after pursuing a volleyball coaching career.

“The access is there, if you’re mobile,” she said. “If I don’t go and try to break that open, then who actually will try to do that? That’s the good thing. I’m not afraid to go out on a limb. I’m in Salt Lake City, Utah. … I adapt pretty well to different situations and people adapt to me.”

She always has been conscious of making a good impression. In her first job as a Kentucky assistant volleyball coach, she was known to counsel black players about their appearance and behavior. “There were times she was really hard on those kids, in a big sisterly kind of way,” said Kathy DeBoer, then the Wildcats’ coach. “That was her way of getting the next generation to know these are the standards.”

She’s continually being judged while summoning the determination that stemmed from her own volleyball career. “You still have to be resilient,” Richardson said, “because there’s a lot that comes your way, and if let it stick, you won’t stay in this profession very long. … I’ve been told that I’m pretty tough, as far as thick skin and not letting a lot of things get to me. And very resilient.”

DeBoer, now the executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, admires Richardson’s self-confidence, sense of adventure and leadership style. “She’ll go along and get along, but yet she stands for things,” DeBoer said.

Richardson said, “I’ve had tough bosses who sometimes think they know everything and don’t need the support of their staff. … One of my sayings is, you either adapt, migrate or perish.”

She has blended in well at Utah, where her multidimensional job description took her to a ski hill in New Hampshire last March. In one of the six sports she oversees, the Utes men’s and women’s skiers won the NCAA championship. Smiling about the memory, she said, “We froze our butts off.”

That’s just another episode of Richardson’s adapting to her environment, and thriving.