Meet Dr. Bradley D. Hatfield: Maryland's Faculty Athletic Representative:
Alyssa Muir, Staff Writer
9/16/2022
There are many unheralded faces behind-the scenes that make college athletics work. At Maryland, Dr. Bradley D. Hatfield is one of those important faces.
Hatfield has served as the Faculty Athletic Representative since September 2020. In his role, he reports directly to the president and serves as a senior adviser outside of the athletics department to the president on matters related to intercollegiate athletics, sports programming, student-athlete academic progress, student-athlete welfare, and athletic compliance issues. Hatfield is also a tenured Professor and Chair of the Department of Kinesiology who has taught at the university for 40 years.
Hatfield can name almost any obscure Maryland athletics fact dating back for decades. He sits among Maryland football helmets and framed Maryland Field pictures in his office in the School of Public Health. However, Hatfield is firm that this true role is not within the athletics department—he is there to serve President Pines and to be a liaison between the faculty and athletics.
“I have a great love for Maryland athletics and the athletics department, but I’m very cognizant that my role is to represent the president and the faculty in terms of institutional and academic integrity,” Hatfield said. “There is a need for the university to be vigilant that something could go wrong.”
Luckily for Hatfield, the high character individuals he works alongside, including Dr. Sue Sherburne, Mark Sherburne, Cody Gambler, Brady Rourke, and several members of the sport science staff, make that a much simpler task.
“The leadership team is so high-quality that they make my job really easy,” Hatfield said. “They’re so on top of the academics, they’re so on top of compliance, and they have a lot of communication with me. It’s one of the finest groups of people I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been here for 40 years.”
When Dr. Nicholas Hadley left the position after serving in it from 2011 to 2020, Hatfield was immediately interested in the role. For Hatfield, it would permit the opportunity to further pursue one of the things most important to him—the increased unification of athletics and academics on Maryland’s campus.
“I saw it as an opportunity to bring more communication between athletics and the campus,” Hatfield said of the job. “I’ve never seen athletics as separate. I saw it as an opportunity to have more integration within the campus.”
Furthermore, Hatfield, as someone who played football while earning his undergraduate degree at the University of New Brunswick in Canada and later served as a football graduate assistant at Ohio University, viewed himself as a strong advocate for the concept of a student-athlete.
“There’s some people who have doubts about the validity of the notion of a student-athlete. My feeling on that is what these young people go through in terms of strategy sessions, the dedication of overcoming an injury, the discipline and time management and learning about their bodies and minds, it’s like experiential learning. It’s a classroom in itself and I don’t think that’s a stretch. The concept of a student-athlete is very much real.”
“Have you ever seen the playbook for the offensive line in football? It looks like a textbook for organic chemistry,” Hatfield added.
Within his job as the Faculty Athletic Representative, Hatfield has been able to be a part of important decision-making groups such as coaching search committees and the Hall of Fame nomination committee. He also values the friendly relationships he’s been able to form with Maryland coaches throughout his 40 years as a Terp including Ralph Friedgen, Frank Costello and Sasho Cirovski. He’s even interacted with some coaches in an academic setting. In fact, he was Missy Meharg’s Master’s thesis advisor.
Hatfield chairs the Maryland Athletic Council, which functions as the faculty voice in intercollegiate athletics on issues of academic policy related to student-athletes as part of his role. There, he works closely with Dr. Jay Goldstein, a faculty member in Kinesiology who assists with the business and activities of the Athletic Council.
Hatfield also represents the university and its faculty in the university's relationships with the NCAA and the Big Ten and has been incredibly impressed with the Big Ten’s consistent commitment to academic excellence.
“There is front-and-center a pointed concern that the brand of the Big Ten is about academics,” Hatfield said. “Of course, they want to win and want the big TV contracts, but I think that concern is really sincere. I don’t think you’re ever going to see a prioritizing of winning and glitz and glamor over academics in the Big Ten.”
Hatfield prides himself on two main projects he has helped accomplish during his 40 years at Maryland.
The first came before his FAR appointment but is a well-recognized one across campus. Hatfield was one of four people tasked with presenting the benefits and potential of the Cole Fieldhouse project in front of the Board of Regents in 2016. The project was approved and eventually became Jones-Hill House.
The second was an improvement he eyed since he was appointed—furthering the partnership between athletics and the rest of campus.
To do this, Hatfield played a key role in revamping the Athletic Council handbook and establishing four new committees within the council: Academics & Compliance, Health, Safety & Wellness, Sport Research and Innovation, and Governance and the Future of Intercollegiate Athletics. These remodeled committees now feature more faculty and members of the general campus in addition to athletics employees, something that Hatfield feels very passionately about.
“There’s a lot of smart people on this campus who can help athletics,” Hatfield said. “They might be in the law school, they might be in engineering and understand technology, they might be in the business school and they know analytics, they might be in kinesiology and understand physiology. The idea over time is that we will continue to increase the number of people around campus on these committees. Think of it like an octopus with tentacles, we will have more input, more opportunity and more reach.”
Hatfield is immensely proud of not only the work he’s done to further the integration between campus and athletics, but of everything he’s done to serve the school.
“It’s a privilege to me to hold this position and to interact with the people I do. What a quality organization it is. I don’t take my role lightly.”
