131. Growing Into Leadership Roles with Emory Director of Athletics Keiko Price

Growing Into Leadership Roles with Emory Director of Athletics Keiko Price

Introducing Keiko Price

Today I’m talking to Emory University Director of Athletics Keiko Price about growing into leadership roles.

Her Career Journey

Keiko earned her BA at UCLA during an incredible swimming career, winning the PAC-10 championship and racing at Olympic trials. She then earned her master’s in education at the University of California, Berkeley in order to begin making an impact on the lives of student-athletes. She started as an academic advisor at Cal then St. Mary’s College, before becoming assistant athletic director at Stanford. She served as the senior associate athletics director at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before taking her current position as the Assistant VP of Campus Life and Clyde Partin Sr. Director of Athletics at Emory University.

Growing Into Leadership Roles

After her swimming career, Keiko took stock of her values and realized her mission is to help student-athletes. She took a leap of faith and applied to a graduate program that would help her learn the industry of college athletics and found she loved every part of the process. As her career developed, Keiko communicated her goals to her mentors, who gave her the opportunity to take on new roles and learn skills she would need one day as an AD. Now leading an athletic department herself, Keiko is building a department that reflects the student-athletes it serves by deliberately seeking out those from historically underrepresented backgrounds and giving them a chance to lead.

Inside this episode:

  • Keiko advises student-athletes to major in what they love and trust that a career will come from it with time. She majored in African American studies because she had enjoyed the classes she’d taken and decided in the year after college that athletics administration was the direction she wanted to take.
  • Through her master’s program at Berkeley, Keiko learned about academic advising and the industry of athletics while continuing to swim with the team there, giving her a unique perspective from both sides, simultaneously.  
  • Keiko draws from her experiences as a Black athlete in a predominantly white sport to address the needs of the Black student-athletes. She’s helped athletes form student groups while also making sure she’s hiring a staff who represents the athletes they’re serving.
  • She considers herself lucky to have had mentors throughout her career who gave her the chance to gain the skills needed to become an AD. She communicated her long-term goals with them and they recognized that she was going to do the work that it took. 
  • Now in her third year at Emory and with many of the pandemic concerns settled down, Keiko and her team set goals for themselves, as a department, giving them the motivation to turn to when things get tough.

Resources

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