Bears-Bulldogs Match Kicks Off HBCU Conversation

A door opened for high school senior Devin James at The Lab at ConnCORP.

The occasion was a Friday evening conversation, moderated by ESPN’s Michael Eaves, on ​“Athletics & Academics at HBCUs” with Dena Freeman-Patton, the first female athletic director at Morgan State University. 

Freeman-Patton was in town for Saturday’s NAACP Harmony Classic between her Maryland-based school’s Bears and Yale’s Bulldogs. Yale would prevail 45 – 3.

Organized by the Connecticut NAACP ​“to inspire peace, fellowship, and harmony on college campuses,” and hosted by the Connecticut and Greater New Haven Chapters of the NAACP, the Harmony Classic is in its 10^th year, with Yale marking its second year of participation.

Toward the end of Friday’s conversation, James, a student at Highville Charter School who specializes in shot put, discus, and javelin for Hillhouse Track and Field, asked for advice on how to get recruited for both academic and athletic ability.

“I got this one,” said Greg Jones, host of the event, founder of the Legacy Foundation of Hartford, and among the small but fiery band of orange-and-blue-clad Morgan State alums, including Dixwell Alder Jeanette Morrison, who ventured out to the Morse Street institution in Friday night’s monsoon-like conditions.

That was when Devin James learned about the Pennington Fellowship, which was announced by Yale last December to support New Haven high school graduates who attend HBCUs with up to $20,000 toward tuition and fees for each of the four years. 

“College coaches love the good academic student,” said Freeman-Patton, a Baltimore native who played basketball while studying sports management at Liberty University.

“Now I see I was doing what I do now even when I was in high school,” she said. ​“I was always getting on the basketball and football players about doing their work so they could get to college.”

At first, she said, ​“it was about having a seat at the table, a voice in the decisions of the people I cared about.” Then, ​“as I started to grow in the field, I realized I needed to be at the top so I could have a say in what happens to our student-athletes.”

The way she became a Division I athletic director — a position of which 14 percent are women and 3 percent are Black—was, she said, ​“putting myself in uncomfortable situations,” as, for example, a high-powered athletic director symposium with predominantly white male speakers and the men’s Final Four because ​“that’s where the presidents and ADs were at the time.”

“Sometimes you have to be intentional about putting yourself in those uncomfortable positions because oftentimes no one asked you to go,” said Freeman-Patton, who was named Women Leaders in College Sports Administrator of the Year in 2018 and appointed as chair of the NCAA Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee in 2020. 

“You have to put yourself in that position and be uncomfortable until you get comfortable and also until they get comfortable with you.” 

Asked what she brought to the role as athletic director, her answer was plain.

“The life after part,” she said. ​“What are you going to do next? So every place I’ve stopped, I’ve tried to create some sort of program to benefit student-athletes after college.”

One example is the influx of money to college athletes as a result of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) deals. ​“I have no problem with it,” she said. ​“I believe it’s the student-athlete’s right to earn money off their own name. I see it as an opportunity.” 

Toward that end, she’s ​“making available avenues for our student-athletes to educate themselves on how to brand themselves for life, for the future, for business,” she said. ​“It’s about getting them to think about how to monetize their gifts and not depend on anyone else for that.”

On her seemingly meteoric rise to a position in an institution that, as alum James Nicholas, Class of 1970, put it, ​“has grown from one little building, one gym, to this magnificent infrastructure,” Freeman-Patton was blunt. 

“I was always told don’t worry about the reason, take advantage of the opportunity,” she said. As a student at Liberty, ​“the director of my sports management program told me, ​‘you’re in a field in which there are a not a lot of you, there are doors that are going to open for whatever reason, whether it’s that you’re Black or you’re a woman. All I can say is walk through them.’”

“I took that advice,” she said. ​“I threw out the first pitch at the Orioles game for HBCU night. I did a coin toss at the U.S. Open for HBCUs. It’s all about exposure for HBCUs.” 

It was no different, it seems, for Saturday’s Harmony Classic. ​“All of this attention, let’s take advantage of it, let’s use it to showcase who we are,” she said. ​“We need to win this game but it’s bigger than the game. It’s our cheer team, it’s our alumni there supporting, it’s our marching band. Let’s use all that to let people, especially young people, know who we are.” 

It’s an opportunity to show Morgan student-athletes that the university is invested in them as well. ​“That’s why we got a charter flight here,” she said, as opposed to enduring a bus ride from Baltimore. ​“That’s about giving our student-athletes that experience, so they don’t feel they’re less than. It’s about helping them not miss as much class, not be as tired when they’re competing.”

Maybe Devin James becomes one of them. Maybe he gets that Pennington Fellowship.

Whatever the case, ​“it’s about giving our young people the opportunity to grow, and the support to rise,” Freeman-Patton said. ​“It’s about opening that door.”