UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday. October 18, 1994
8A
Right: Stephenson's collection of sports memorabilia includes this basketball from an NCAA tournament. She worked for the NCAA for eight years, starting as a secretary and ending as director of Division I Men's Basketball.
Far Right: Stephenson and her niece, Holly Wetter, Kansas City, Kan., cheer for the KU women's volleyball team.
Stephenson attends the tournaments as part of her job to supervise KU's 16 nonrevenue sports.
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familiar electronic voice.
"You'll learn to hate that message," Stephenson warns.
She has joined the ranks of a program that traditionally has been filled with all men, legends such as Phog Allen and James Naismith.
At the tender age of 33, Stephenson is near the top of a field that is male-dominated.
But that is not important to Stephenson. Never has been.
"Betsy and I don't see color or see gender or see age. We see people," said Sally Welter, Stephenson's older sister and friend.
Stephenson also sees work.
With a black phone attached to her ear, her eyes scanning a pile of papers and her fingers punching the keys on her Macintosh. Stephenson keeps busy.
She approves basketball posters and football T-shirts. She talks to co-workers about buying new supplies for the crew team and scheduling games for the woman's basketball team.
She rips through her job with a determination and persistence that has led her to one of the top spots in KU athletics.
In 1992, KU Athletic Director Bob Frederick created a new sports supervisor position. He said he wanted a woman who could be more directly involved with the coaches and athletes and fill the role of senior woman administrator, an NCAA requirement. After a national search, he knew Stephenson was the best choice.
Frederick had worked with Stephenson before, when she was Director of Division1Men's Basketball Operations at the NCAA. There she supervised NCAA ticket sales and Final Four site surveys and evaluations. He was impressed with her work ethic.
"When I asked her boss at the NCAAI if I could talk to her, he said yes but that losing her would be like me losing Rov Williams." Frederick said.
Her first responsibilities were to supervise the 16
Not just one of the boys
Along the way, she has picked up many more responsibilities and has become an invaluable asset to Frederick and KU.
nonrevenue sports (all University sports excluding football and men's basketball) and to shepherd the gender equity bill through Student Senate. The bill proposed a student fee increase to fund the nonrevenue sports and two new women's sports. The bill was adopted, raising women's crew and soccer clubs to varsity status.
She perfected that work ethic while working at the NCAA.
"She is one of the most talented athletic administrators in the country," Jernstedt said. "She is quickly becoming one of the real leaders, nationally, among woman administrators."
For Tom Jernstedt, chief operating officer for the NCAA and her former boss, losing Stephenson meant losing a woman who had ascended from a secretarial position to a director's position in only eight years.
"Betsy is a doer." Frederick said.
"A lot of people come up with ideas, but most never carry them out. She gets things done."
"Betsy found it nearly impossible to control her emotions for the Jayhawks, "Jemsted told. "Everyone would joke with her and give her a hard time because she was supposed to hide her bias and not let her Jayhawk blood run so freely."
Although Stephenson was supposed to be objective, Jernstedt said, she bled crimson and blue. Her alma mater means a lot to her.
But she always had emotional ties to KU.
So much that in December 1982, Stephenson left the NCAA offices in Overland Park to return to the
school where she once studied and played. With all the praise, she maintains her modesty.
"Bob gave me the tools to do the job and while I bring something unique, anybody could have done it," she said.
It is 1979. Betsy Stephenson is at the foul line with only seconds left in the game. The Chase County Middle School Bullpups are one point behind. Two free throws would win the game. But Stephenson isn't focused.
She looks. She shoots. She musses.
It was probably the first time that athletics, her refuge, her passion, hurt her.
She looks. She shoots. She misses.
T. G. Stephenson, Betsy's father, remembers.
"Betsy, you didn't have to win the game, and you didn't lose it," he told her.
"But it was no consolation to her." he said.
But it was no coincidence, he said.
Back then, Stephenson participated in all the athletic events she could. Volleyball, basketball, track and cheerleading filled her time.
Time that she didn't want to spend at home.
Stephenson says she felt like an only child when she was growing up. Her brother and sister had left for college, and she was left at home with her mother and with her father, an alcoholic.
"He wasn't himself," Stephenson said. "He was in an altered state, and he wasn't very nice or dependable."
But sports bridged the time, gave them something to talk about, something they could communicate about. Something that was not difficult, she says.
And finally, sports brought her family back together.
Her job at the NCAA came at the same time that her father was in treatment. Her new job seemed to give her family a new start, too.
Today, Stephenson and her father, 10 years sober, are close friends.
"When I got the job at the NCAA, it was a blessing because our family had things to do together," she said. "The.basketball!"
ments became our family vacations "
"He has all the qualities that I always knew he had, but now they are all there at the same time. I admire him," she said, then added, "I admired him when he was a mess."
She admits she once, in the jargon of alcohol treatment, enabled her father's drinking, and now her
father helps her see the co-dependencies in her professional life.
It is one of the problems Stephenson is trying to fix.
What T.G. Stephenson teaches his daughter is that she cannot control the outcome of a situation, one of the lessons he learned in Alcoholics Anonymous.
one of the problems Stephenson is trying to fix.
"I am a co-dependent," she said. "I always want to help everyone and do everything that needs to be done, if it is my job or not. My father has helped me realize that everything is not going to work out the way I plan it. But I am not going to give up being like that. I just need to be reasonable."
But, Stephenson said, there are advantages to being a fixer.
"I like results," she said. "Sometimes I think I should be a painter because then I could see where I had been and what I had left to do."
She is the dark-haired woman amid the graying men. She stands out, alone, the only female in a framed picture of the NCAA Men's Basketball Committee that hangs behind her desk in Parrott.
She is used to it, she says. It does not bother her.
"I have to deal with other people's reactions and problems with it, but I don't care. Other people do," she said.
Stephenson grew up in Elmdale, a town that nurtured female athletics from an early age, her sister said. Girl's sports made them both confident.
But Stephenson's sister admires Betsy's skills in a world of men.
"We know we are capable of doing anything we want," she said. "We have no boundaries. We are just people that happen to have female parts."
When working with men, "it is so hard not to be too much of anything," she says. "But Betsy never crosses that fine line. She gives both men and women the respect they need."
At 33, she is single. She has a lot of attached, male friends and goes out to dinner with them often.
But having a significant other is not her priority right now.
"When it happens it happens," she said. "I can't set aside enough time to be a consistent or quality companion for anybody right now."
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At 8 p.m. on a Sunday, Stephenson is off to the office to prepare for the coming week. Frederick is out of town, and she is in charge of the athletic administrators' staff meeting Monday morning.
It is a killer schedule, one that those close to her say leaves little time for anyone but Gizmo, the alley cat that a friend gave her after finding it outside a bar.
"He knows when I start to pack my bags that I am going out of town," she says. "Then he hides."
She'll be back tonight, but soon she will be off to Kansas City or Austin for Big Eight Conference meetings. And Gizmo hides and waits.