UMC Names Chaffee Assistant Director of Athletics
University of Minnesota, Crookston (UMC) officials have selected Brandy Lietz Chaffee to serve as assistant director of athletics and senior woman administrator for the UMC Athletics Department. She will be responsible for marketing, promotions, monitoring gender equity issues, game management and assisting in fundraising. She will begin her new responsibilities on June 18.
“We’re excited to have Brandy back as part of UMC and our department,” said Stephanie Helgeson, UMC’s director of athletics. “She was a great contributor to our team in the past, and we look forward to working with her and the skills she now brings to the table.”
Chaffee is a 2000 graduate of UMC, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in sport and recreation management. Since March of 2001, she has worked as a program associate at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for New Media Studies in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication on the U of M’s Twin Cities Campus. There she served as the events coordinator, website editor and developer, scheduler, office manager, and budget planner.
Prior to her work at the Institute for New Media Studies, Chaffee was the sports information director for UMC’s Athletics Department. She also served as an assistant coach for UMC’s women’s basketball team during the 1999-2000 season.
Funding for the assistant director of athletics position comes, in part, from a grant UMC has received from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division II Strategic Alliance Matching Grant Enhancement Program. The grant will sponsor the hiring of the assistant director of athletics/senior woman administrator in a matching program that will provide 75% salary and benefits the first year, 50% the second, and 25% the third. UMC will be called on to provide the balance in those years and to fund the position fully in years four and five.
Helgeson and Liz Tollefson, assistant director of development, co-authored the grant proposal. The NCAA program funding the grant has made it a priority to enhance the ethnic and gender representation in all facets of Division II athletics administration, and in the award letter, mentioned that the selection committee felt that UMC, as evident through the grant proposal, had demonstrated a commitment to that priority as well.
UMC is a member of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division II and an official member of the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference (NSIC). UMC's hockey team competes in the Midwest Collegiate Hockey Association (MCHA).
Posted 06/17/2004
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