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By Erica Caasi, PhD Student in Literacy, School of Education

  July 19, 2021

Lydia Bell is the Associate Director of Research for Academic Performance at the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Her role assists in all facets of development and analysis of research on current and former student-athlete academic performance and well-being. Before joining the NCAA, Lydia was an assistant professor of practice and director of Project SOAR in the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. Lydia holds a Ph.D. in Language, Reading and Culture and M.A. in Higher Education from the University of Arizona, and an A.B. in Government & Legal Studies and Sociology from Bowdoin College.

I had the opportunity to talk with Lydia in late-July 2021 and learn more about her experiences with community-engaged work, as well as her current role and work with the NCAA. In the following interview she discusses her background, experiences, research interests, and ongoing work with communities, as well as what it looks like to build, cultivate, and sustain relationships with community members and partners.

Developing an interest in student athletes and their identities

When I graduated my undergraduate degree, for the first three years I was the director of community service at a small liberal arts institution and I loved that job because that was really direct community engagement helping undergraduates engage with the community, supporting our faculty and service-learning opportunities, and serving as the advisor to undergraduate service organizations (e.g., students helping with homeless shelters, mentoring programs, volunteer lawyers projects, alternative spring break programs). I loved serving as the director and working with undergraduates, but at the same time, they all knew me well and I realized, “Who else would ever have given me this opportunity without a master's degree?” So, I decided if I really want to work in this capacity and I really love working with college students, I would like to go and get a master’s degree. I actually went to the University of Arizona to get my master’s in higher education because I really wanted to be at a grad school that was completely different from my undergrad experience (i.e., a small private liberal arts school in Maine). The things that work there can't work at the University of Arizona because Arizona has 40,000 people and we’re in the middle of the Sonoran desert. Everything was so different and I really wanted to be completely out of my comfort zone.

My first paper in grad school was in a student affairs class and we could pick any student population and think about what we wanted to ask. When I was an undergrad at Bowdoin (i.e., a small liberal arts school) a lot of my really close friends were student athletes and there were no athletic scholarships. But even there, my best friend, she was our point guard for our women's basketball team, and some of my closer friends were on the football team, they were all facing this, “dumb jock perception.” They would hear things like, “Well, we know why you're really here,” implying “You know you're not really as smart as the rest of us.” She's now a clinical psychologist and runs her own practice. To think that even at a small Division III school with no scholarships that students would be constantly facing the assumption that they weren't smart enough because they were an athlete... I really wanted to explore that with undergraduates at Arizona (i.e., a very large school with athletics scholarships and “big time” sports). The student athletes, particularly in men’s basketball and football, are hyper visible; everybody knows that they're an athlete and they're often recognized. You see their face, attach the uniform, and then make assumptions, so I really wanted my first paper to be specific around our football student athletes at Arizona. I wanted to ask them about how they negotiated being both an athlete and a student (e.g., what they were grappling with in terms of assumptions about them, assumptions about their hopes, their plans, and assumptions about how seriously they were taking school versus their sport). That was my first paper and I never stopped because they were facing enormous “dumb jock” stereotypes. Issues of the student athlete experience ended up weaving their way through my master's program and it launched me into a PhD. My dissertation topic was athletic and academic identity for Division I football student athletes. At a predominantly white institution like Arizona the assumption is, if you were tall and Black and male you definitely played something. There was never the assumption that they were there for anything else, so for Black men who are not even on a team, they also were ascribed the athletes status.

Caring about the Academic Experience of Students Athletes

I've constantly been really interested in how sport shapes education, how education shapes sport, and what are the interplays. When I finished my PhD I was on the faculty as an assistant professor of practice at Arizona for a couple of years. I ran a mentoring program that was direct community engagement, teaching a course of access and equity in higher ed that our undergrads would take. On the side, I would still teach my sport classes, so every other year they would let me teach current issues in intercollegiate athletics, then I talked my department into letting me teach a course on youth sport every semester. But, my passion for the intersection of sport and education was always on the side, because that wasn't what was most valued in my role on the faculty. When this position came open at the NCAA as associate director of research for academic performance, they were looking for someone to help contribute to our staff in terms of student athlete academic progress, trajectories, retention and persistence, and survey data across all three divisions, which is something I was already interested in. I care a ton about student athletes, but I care about their experience as students. Are you having a good experience? What can we do to make it better? What are some institutional factors that have shaped how you're experiencing college? When you leave your institution what have you gained that you can actually translate into the workforce?

Education Research, Not Sports Research

I’ve now been at the NCAA for eight years and if you asked me about the kind of work I do, I’m in education research, not sport research. So much of what shapes the student experience is not based on, you know how many minutes they have per game, there's so many other factors about their college experience (e.g., relationship with their coach, relationships with their peer group). All of it plays together so that's kind of where I'm at now in terms of service and my thoughts about engaging with the community. We can survey student athletes or gather data about student athletes and have that data analyzed, synthesized, and reporting back to the membership within anywhere from six weeks to six months. So I can use that data to affect change before someone graduates. That's where I see my role now and in terms of community engagement. We're hopefully using large scale data to inform not only the NCAA membership, but the general public and also student athletes themselves. Trying to move beyond the anecdote, but what does it look like for all 500,000 athletes?

What values do you try to uphold within your work?

Authenticity. I try incredibly hard to be authentic with my audiences and to uphold authenticity. Transparency is super important to me, especially when it comes to data work. Why am I asking you for your own personal information? Why am I asking you to contribute to this project or this broader study? Why is what I'm sharing back with you important? If I’m not sharing everything, what am I not sharing and why?

I really appreciate that in our department. The NCAA national office there's about 450 to 500 of us on staff and research is completely separate from our PR arm. They may want to give us suggestions for how we can message something or they may offer, “I think this might be problematic when this comes out.” But, their role is not to censor us, because if you're gathering data on personal experience you're not only going to get a happy experience. Part of it is finding problems, explaining, and helping to unpack and address them. I really appreciate that kind of transparency.

Inclusion is also really important to the national office, but also I believe strongly in it. How am I constantly increasing my knowledge about different communities and how I am weaving them into my data, the stories I'm telling about them, the language I'm using in conveying findings to people. Surrounding myself with colleagues who will also push me to think beyond existing metrics. Right now we're having a great conversation about how undergraduates are thinking about gender more fluidly than in decades past. There's so much in the media right now about transgender student athletes and transgender participation, but that's one piece. There was a recent study in Pittsburgh and they found that about 9% of all high school students identified as gender-diverse. Beyond the issue of transgender participation, when do we think about sport beyond a binary and what does that mean for sport? I love being pushed on those kinds of things. I like to dig deep into the research, listen to different speakers, and have them expand my mind and push me toward a new way to think about such issues. I really appreciate that and also just try to keep current with how we're talking about various populations and trying to be as empowering and impactful as possible. Inclusion is a really important thing to me.

Have you ever run into conflicts in upholding your values? If so, what did you do?

I can think back to my first job, there was a time we had an award ceremony for undergraduates and there was an award for community service engagement. I was the director of community service and no one had really asked me for my opinion on who should be rewarded for their level of engagement. The student whom they selected for the award was someone who had done the bare minimum community service compared to others who were a part of that nomination category. I reached out to the athletics director and I said, “I don't think I can get up on that stage and give the student this award because there are other students in that room who will be there and know that they have done infinitely more and I just feel like it's an enormous conflict.” The director disagreed and said they’d give him the award. I then called my supervisor at the time and explained the situation to her. I was so thankful that she stood up for me. She said you don't have to give it, you're right, we should never have asked you to do it. I was 23 and that was super empowering at that age and I think it's really stuck with me. As supervisors, more like my role now, to be that backup for someone who reports to you and to help them stand up for their values [is powerful]. The beautiful thing is they changed the award structure and they changed the scoring after that issue, so it never happened again and I was involved. It's so important for people to have your back when you want to take a stance that is important to your values, and I think finding ways to demonstrate that can be really powerful even in small gestures. That has always stuck with me.

How have you built relationships with community partners, from the beginning stages to holding relationships throughout a collaboration and beyond?

Regardless of who your community partner is, it’s always really good to meet and have opportunities to engage with the people, to see the work that they're doing and to understand a day (or time) in their shoes. I think whenever you're engaging with a community partner there's always something that you can learn from them. So even if they're engaging with you as an expert, in whatever capacity, whether you're an expert grant writer or expert data scientist or expert fundraiser, there's always something that you can learn from them. They are the experts in their community, whether that community is [geographically] something very small, like the lobstermen of the mid-coast Maine or if it's a community of college athletes. I think to always be there to listen and to learn from people, recognizing they are the experts of their space. And, to often acknowledge them and to make sure that they're part of that conversation in using their expert voice to ground the work in their community, whatever their community is, I think that's incredibly important when you're engaging your community partners.

There's little ways to build those relationships and to keep them strong, regardless of who you're working with, and so I try really hard. I'll randomly send notes or emails or a photo or flowers. I don't need anything from them, I just want them to know that I'm still thinking of them. Maintaining long term relationships, people who have made a difference in your life and letting them know that they have made a difference, I just think it's so little effort, but the reward is so high, so I try really hard to do that kind of stuff anyway. So it's probably partly just who I am, but I think finding connections and synergies for people, even when it doesn't benefit you, is always a way to maintain and enhance those relationships.

What initiatives / strategies / methods do you take to get feedback from community partners, and also participants, in activities? And how often do you do so?

In terms of strategies for reaching out to our audience (that could be useful for anyone), it's to really figure out exactly what you want to know and to ask the best questions to answer that broader question. We spend so much time refining our survey instruments, our documents, asking questions: “Is this the best way?” “Are we using language that's easily understood by anybody?” Is the question that we're asking really going to get the answer we need?” “Are we accidentally asking two questions in one and can we tease them apart?” We do a lot of work on the front end to make sure that we’re approaching it with the best kinds of questions. Once we have those questions, we're trying to think about what's the best way to get our survey or questions to the people and so part of it is thinking are they someone who's going to take a pencil and paper kind of thing or do they need to be engaged by tech. And also, how can we get this disseminated to the right people? Who are the stakeholders that can help build trust that allows people to share their feedback with us?

Despite my fabulous credentials and my lovely personality [said humorously], people may not want to share something directly with me, without some kind of gatekeeper that says, “We trust that they will do something positive with your data.” Regardless of who you're working with oftentimes it's trying to think about who can be your stakeholder that you engage with that confers legitimacy to the work that you're doing.

How have you worked with non-dominant communities (BIPOC, low income, rural, etc.)?

My family was a working class family from rural Vermont and my parents didn't go on to four-year college, so I have sensitivity to people from small rural communities and lower income communities because I was raised in one. Most people I went to high school with did not go on to higher education, especially the males. Many stayed, and still do, mostly manual labor. They’re some of the smartest, toughest people I know, so I have a lot of respect for people who are from smaller farming communities.

At the University of Arizona

I was in Tucson for ten years and in my work at University of Arizona, now a Hispanic serving institution, I was running a middle school mentoring program. All of the schools that we served were Title I schools, they were all majority Latino, most of our community partners, teachers, and counselors were mostly Latino, as well. I also worked with a Native SOAR program. Tucson is bordered by the Pascua Yaqui and the Tohono O'odham nations near our campus community. We also needed to be thoughtful in our engagement with our indigenous communities in Tucson. And, with the Native SOAR program, we were trying to recruit Native identifying college students to have them work with Native youth.

At the NCAA

In coming to the NCAA national office we definitely have a very sizable community of Black student athletes who make up our student athlete population. We seek to be aware of their experiences and many HBCUs are members of the NCAA, there are two HBCU-specific conferences in Division I. There is also an organization for athletic administrators of color, M.O.A.A. (Minority Opportunities in Athletic Administration). I've had the chance to partner with them and share some data with them, specifically. I’ve also worked closely with our office of inclusion at the NCAA, which focuses on the inclusion of women (i.e. Title IX and how do we support women who want to pursue pathways not only as athletes) and also international student athletes, student-athletes of color, student athletes who are LGBTQ+, and finally athletes with disabilities.

I try hard to continue to expand my level of knowledge and the ways that I'm supporting marginalized communities. I always want to be mindful of how representative my research findings are in terms of gender representation, institution type, and racial demographics. I like to push colleagues to be more inclusive and I like to think of myself as an active ally, but you know every ally still has tons of room for growth.

What is something you’ve learned from doing this work that you wish you had learned sooner?

One of the biggest challenges with community-engaged work is that people who are drawn to community-engaged work tend to be passionate people who are highly empathetic and who see so much value in constantly engaging in community work that they struggle to say no. You always want to say yes to another great idea. I think my biggest concern with people who are engaged in these kinds of spaces is that there is such a high risk of burnout because other people often take so much and assume, “Well, she'll say yes and she'll do it.” And, that's true for many people...and at some point people just burn out and they fizzle, I really feel like we need to be better.

What is the most valuable piece of advice you’ve received about doing community-engaged work?

If you're going to be a mentor or a supervisor, be more open about how you are carving out time for you. Of course, there may be days when you work a 12 hour day, but then there may be a day when you only work six because you went and did something else and that's totally okay. Making that more normal ...having conversations about how you actually slept or you went for a run or, you know, you went somewhere on the weekend and did something fun. I wish we would make it more normal to acknowledge that and to emphasize people having lives. A colleague of mine, he made a really bold decision, he brought his staff together and he said, “We are not going to send an email between 7pm and 7am to anybody. I know some of you like to do stuff at night, that’s fine, but let me show you how to delay the send function.” People get these [late night] emails and they feel like they have to engage or else they're missing out. This was going to change that culture. It's year three and it seems like it's been great, I think his staff really see it as freeing. The impact of being open and creating a culture of supporting people beyond commitment to their work, I wish we all were doing it for each other and that we were doing it early on in people’s careers.

Pandemic and post-pandemic: hybrid modalities

How has moving to a remote modality changed your project/practice? If you made changes, which do you hope to take with you moving forward?

I think there's opportunity for expanded collaboration, where we previously saw very strict borders that maybe have now opened up. At the same time, though, last week was our first week back [in the office] and we had this one question and we were able to answer it in five minutes and it was over. Then we laughed because this would have taken two hours in Teams [the online meeting platform]. I also feel like we all ended up having to share a little bit more about our personal lives than we did before, which has brought some people closer together.

One bummer is we haven't been traveling and that's unfortunately my favorite part of my job.  There is no place I'd rather be than on somebody's campus. I love to visit classes and give lectures and just walk around campus and see students. It's my favorite perk of my job and I have missed it so much the last eighteen months. I really hope that while we now know that we can pop somebody in virtually, I hope that we’ll be supportive of people having the opportunity to travel.