Deborah Yow
Deborah Yow served for 29 years as a Division I Director of Athletics, following eight years as a head coach in Division I women’s basketball and five as an administrator. She is considered a pioneer in both careers, averaging 20 wins per season as head coach at Kentucky, ORU and the University of Florida. Each basketball program achieved its’ first-ever national ranking in the “Top 20” under her leadership. She began her administrative career at Florida, as the first woman hired by Gator Boosters to serve as a fundraiser in 1985, followed by a stint at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro as assistant and then associate AD for External Operations. Her work as AD at Saint Louis University began in the Summer of 1990, where the hire of Coach Charlie Spoonhour in 1992 resurrected the men’s basketball program, resulting in his selection as National Coach of the Year in 1994. In the Summer of 1994, she accepted the Athletics Director position at the University of Maryland and became the ACC’s first and only female athletics director for the next 22 years, until Pitt, Virginia and Duke hired women to lead their respective programs. In 2009, the NCAA News named Maryland as one of the Top 10 athletics programs in the nation. Under her leadership, Maryland’s teams won 20 national championships,16 NCAA and 4 cheer, while establishing their best-ever federal graduation rate at that time of 80%, for the 2009-2010 school year academic results. She returned to her home state in June of 2010 to lead the NC State Wolfpack for 9 years, where her older sister, Kay, had coached basketball for 34 years and her younger sister, Susan, was State’s first All American in women’s basketball. NC State made a transformational leap in the national Director’s Cup rankings from a national ranking of #89 in 2010 to #15 in 2018, achieving a key goal Yow identified at her introductory press conference of realizing national Top 25 status.
Street and Smith Sports Business Journal cited Yow among the most influential people in college athletics by naming her to the “Dream Team” of college and professional sport executives as ‘the Builder’. The Chronicle of Higher Education named her as one of the “10 most powerful people in college athletics” during her time at UMD. She has served as Chair of the ACC TV Committee, represented the ACC on the NCAA Council and served on the NCAA Committee on Academics, as well as the NCAA
Subcommittee on Finances. The National Collegiate Wrestling Association named her as the National Contributor to that sport for her contributions to reconfigure the national scoring system to provide a more fair means for any school sponsoring wrestling to see their athletes reach the national tournament, broadening the appeal of wrestling and encouraging schools to maintain the sport. She has served since 2008 on the board of the National Football Foundation, as a trustee at Elon University for 16 years and was a charter board member for the National Minority Football Coaches Association. Debbie also works with the national LEAD1 AD’s organization (formerly Division 1-A) as a speaker and member of the Diversity Fellows Committee, designed to enhance minority representation among collegiate athletics directors.
Forbes Magazine listed her as one of the 20 Most Powerful Women in Sports in 2015. In 2019, she was the recipient of the James J. Corbett Award, the highest administrative recognition in collegiate athletics provided by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics. She was also selected in 2019 as the first female to receive the National Football Foundation John Toner Award for support for college football. In 2019, she was named as the national Under Armour Athletics Director of the Year. The Street and Smith Sports Business Journal awarded her their Pioneer and Innovator’s Award in Sports Business in 2019, as well. In the same year, she was tabbed for the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, one of the most prestigious honors awarded by the Governor of North Carolina to individuals who have a proven record of extraordinary service to the state.
Debbie has served as President of the National Association of Collegiate Directors ofAthletics (NACDA) and as the first female President for LEAD1. She has co-authoredbooks on Strategic Planning and human behavior to inform and inspire athletics professionals, delivering presentations in prestigious settings such as Harvard University, NACDA and the LEAD1 Institute, among numerous others. She has been inducted into six Halls of Fame: The State of North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the
NACDA Athletics Director’s HOF, the University of Maryland Athletics HOF, the ORU Athletics HOF, the Saint Louis University Athletics HOF and the State of Maryland Women’s HOF. President George W. Bush appointed Yow as one of only 15 members of the Commission on Opportunities in Athletics in 2002, during the 30 th anniversary of the passage of Title IX legislation.
She has hired collegiate head coaches who were subsequently selected in their respective sport as National Coach of the Year in the sports of football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, women’s lacrosse, men’s lacrosse and wrestling.
In 2018, the NC State athletics program tied for the #1 ranking among all campus academic and auxiliary units for having the best scores for employee engagement and satisfaction, as employees responded to the required survey administered by the NC System of Higher Education. That is a treasured achievement because she strived to foster a work environment that affirmed achievement and also encouraged individuals to erase self-imposed limits on their capabilities.
Yow holds an English degree from Elon University, where she co-captained their women’s basketball team, and a master’s in Counseling from Liberty University, as well as three honorary doctorates for lifetime achievement. Debbie completed her fulltime work as an AD in the Spring of 2019. The Board of Trustees honored her by naming her as the first-ever emeritus AD at NC State at that time. She now serves as a trusted confidant to administrators and coaches and as a consultant.
She has been married for 39 years to Dr. William Bowden, a native of Texas. They continue to reside in the Raleigh, NC area. In their free time, they enjoy visiting Debbie’s hometown of Gibsonville to see friends and to eat at Pete’s Grill, a local landmark that seats 38 and serves traditional American fare, along with peach cobbler or chocolate cake.
