For Charlie Baker, there are a lot of things similar about being a governor and the president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) — the nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics at about 1,100 schools across the nation.
“One of the things that’s similar is the diversity of the constituency,” says Baker, who took the helm of the NCAA in March 2023. “If you’re a governor — at least in Massachusetts — you worry about 351 cities and towns and you love them all because they all matter, and if you’re doing your job, you and your administration are spending a lot of time with everybody.”
National Collegiate Athletic Association President Charlie Baker attends the Celebration Bowl in Atlanta, Georgia.
And part of the way that Baker has tried to marry those two functions is by meeting with all 97 conferences in his first 150 days on the job, barnstorming the nation to get in front of student-athletes, athletic directors, college presidents, conference commissioners and to talk to them on their own terms about a whole host of issues.
“A bunch of the things that we ended up working on came out of those conversations,” says Baker, who was a student-athlete himself, having played basketball during his time at Harvard.
And while it is a far bigger footprint than the one he says he had serving as the leader of a single state, the diversity of opinion and the life experiences is one that he has readily embraced.
“I was surprised to discover that some of the things that I learned, which I hoped made me a more effective governor, were things that were applicable in this job as well,” he says in a wide-ranging interview with Diverse.
