A legacy of listening: Jacki Silar, Duke’s first SWA, retires after over 40 years
Jacki Silar is enjoying the flexibility of retirement.
After a 40-year career with Duke Athletics of scheduling every practice, game and meeting in pen, she now writes on her calendar in pencil.
“I don’t want to be scheduled,” Silar said.
The mentality is a shift from during her career. While Chris Kennedy, Duke’s senior deputy director of athletics, would ambush Silar in her office two doors down to chat or grab candy, he said she was always a “formal meeting person.”
Silar and Kennedy made up half of the Duke Athletics administration when Silar was hired as the first senior woman administrator in 1995. They both wore many hats, and Tom Butters, the AD at the time, told Silar she could write her own job description.
“The ‘90s were a real transition period from that old-style, small, insular athletic department to the much more highly structured and specialized departments we have now,” Kennedy said.
But Silar was used to being busy. When Butters offered her the SWA position, she’d been asking about shadowing him in addition to her duties as head field hockey coach. She was bored — after coaching both field hockey and women’s basketball for over 10 years, running between practices and not having weekends or holidays off, Silar felt like something was missing.
Whenever students told Silar they wanted to do what she did, she’d switch places with them.
“Don’t plan on making a lot of money,” she’d say. “The only way you’re gonna make money in athletics is if you’re the AD, or women’s basketball, men’s basketball, or football. You don’t know weekends. You don’t know weekends because you’ll be working weekends, and probably some holidays. So your friends that look forward to Fridays and dread Sunday nights because they got to go back to work. Well, you’re not going to know that because you’re going to be working all the time.
“But you know what? You’re gonna love it. If you love it, you have a passion for it. It’s your career. You won’t care. And that’s what I did. I didn’t care. It was my passion, it was my career. It was my love.”
“Fire and ice”
The year was 1977, and Duke had finally hired a full-time women’s basketball coach: Debbie Leonard.
N.C. State and the University of North Carolina already had established women’s programs, which meant the road for Duke’s program had a “slightly higher incline.” But Carl James, the AD who hired Leonard, promised her the world — full scholarships, a sturdy budget.
However, in August, Leonard got a call. There’d been a change of leadership. Butters was now the AD, and when they met upon her arrival on campus, he told her the women’s basketball program would have no scholarships and a minimal budget. She couldn’t hire assistant coaches.
So Leonard turned to Silar and asked her to come on as a volunteer assistant.
“She knew that eventually I would get [the program] going and make it better,” Leonard said. “And she wanted to be a part of that. And she was. She was a huge part of us building that program up.”
The pair met in the fall of 1970 when they were freshmen on High Point College’s basketball team. By the time they graduated, Leonard said they were best friends.
Silar was in graduate school at UNC and working as a grad assistant for its field hockey team when she accepted Leonard’s offer.
“Nobody to this day can say that they coached — in the same year — at Carolina in one sport, and at Duke in another sport,” Silar said.
During the early years, Leonard and Silar presented a sort of two-pronged attack when it came to coaching and establishing their program.
In Leonard’s words, they were “fire and ice”: Leonard was fire; Silar was ice.
One of the times that might have been most apparent was when the pair went to Butters to ask the school to provide the team with jogbras. Leonard marched in, a jockstrap in her hand, and told him “a jogbra is the same thing as this, except for women.”
The meeting only lasted a couple of minutes, and Silar remembers Butters turning red, but they got the jogbras.
“We got the bras without a problem because I think we embarrassed him,” Silar said.
Building an athletic program from scratch is no easy task, but the world of women’s athletics was also vastly different when Leonard and Silar took up the task. Title IX wasn’t even 10 years old.
Sue Gordon, who started playing at Duke in 1976, a year before women’s basketball became a varsity sport, said she felt Duke “almost had a women’s program because they had to.”
“I think Duke didn’t know how to support us,” she said.
But while players might have felt unsupported by the university, they didn’t feel that way about Leonard and Silar — who were only a few years older than some of the players they were coaching.
“We were all so young, but Jacki was kind of the voice of reason,” Gordon said. “Debbie was the pointy end of the spear, but Jacki provided a lot of sound counsel to all of us.”
For Katie Meier, who played at Duke from 1986-90, meeting Silar made her feel like she was home.
“She could say more in a whisper,” Meier said. “She could whisper five words to you and it would feel like a two-hour speech. It stuck.”
When Meier tore her ACL during her junior season and was forced to sit out the following season while still recovering, Silar talked her through it, making sure the conversation wasn’t always focused on basketball.
“Coaching was and is just an outstanding profession because you get to do it all,” Leonard said. “You know, you’re a nurse, you’re a psychiatrist, you’re a coach, you’re a mom sometimes, and Jacki was really good at doing all those particular things, too.”
Leonard also said one of Silar’s greatest qualities is that she’s a good listener. It’s what made Leonard know she would be great in an administrative role.
“She hears and listens so well,” Leonard said. “And she waits, and then when it’s time, she has a strong voice and a voice that people can depend on.”
From the court to the field to administration
Silar’s time coaching both women’s basketball and field hockey allowed her to bring a new perspective to the Duke Athletics administration.
“I started thinking of all these things that I would want as a coach from my administration, and that’s how I put together my job description and started a lot of things that we didn’t have because we didn’t have that many people,” Silar said.
She implemented a monthly coaches roundtable, spent time as an academic advisor and ran the Student-Athlete Development Program. She also served on both the NCAA Division I Field Hockey Committee and the NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball Committee.
Even after her move to administration, Silar tried to be as present as possible with the teams she supervised. For Pam Bustin, Duke’s field hockey coach, Silar’s involvement and knowledge of the sport was refreshing compared to other administrators she’d worked with.
“If I spoke the language, she understood it,” Bustin said. “She didn’t really ever interject any kind of suggestions if it wasn’t asked for. She wasn’t like that.”
It wasn’t just coaches and athletes that Silar mentored, though. It was her fellow administrators as well.
Leslie Barnes, director of student-athlete development, was hired by Silar in 2006. Barnes had never planned on going into administration, but Silar saw her strengths and taught her how to balance the energy she brings to her job.
“Jacki, I think, challenged me and showed me pieces of administration that she knew that I would excel and grow at,” Barnes said. “And so it’s been manageable, it’s been enjoyable because I see administration in a different light through her. That it’s not just policies and meetings and procedures, it truly is mentoring.”
A bridge, a vanguard, a pioneer
When asked how she wanted to be remembered for her time with Duke Athletics, Silar took a moment.
“I would say a woman of integrity that was always willing to listen to whomever came to her door, and had the most respect for Duke student athletes and the family within athletics,” she said.
Unbeknownst to her, that’s exactly how those who worked with Silar said they’d remember her.
“She was always gonna be great in administration,” Leonard said. “She is a great listener. She hears and listens so well. And she waits, and then when it’s time she has a strong voice and a voice that people can depend on.”
Kennedy will miss having Silar around to tell him exactly what she thinks and offer her best take on a situation.
“Jacki being so competent and so articulate and so well respected — she was really in the vanguard of women who asserted their place among the leaders of college athletics in ways that they had not been at and had never been before that,” Kennedy said.
For the women who are in the midst of their athletic careers right now, they know they have women like Silar to thank for working to open the doors for women in the world of college athletics.
“Jacki’s role in that age group, that generation was such a bridge from what athletics had been for so long to what we’re still trying to create today,” Bustin said. “I mean if it weren’t for people like Jacki, I would not, you know, be able to have this position and have it be my full-time job.”
Meier, now the head women’s basketball coach at the University of Miami, even recognized the benefits she was reaping from Silar’s work when she was one of her players.
“They were that group that just gave up everything and really didn’t have the salaries and drove the buses and did laundry and all that,” Meier said. “It was just, it sort of felt like I sort of knew that I was the generation that was getting the benefits of everything Jacki did, you know, and she didn’t have the same experience I had and I didn’t want to let her down.”
Planning in pencil
Silar knew it was time to retire when her father died in March 2019. She thought about doing so right away, but didn’t want to make a knee-jerk decision. So when the time for contract extensions came around, she asked current athletic director Kevin White for just one year.
“I want to do other things,” Silar said. “I have a lot of adventures I want to go on.”
She wants to travel. She plans to do more volunteer work and spend time with her family, including her mother, who now lives in Florida. She plays golf, pickleball and softball to stay active. Last year, her senior softball team won the national championship in Albuquerque.
“I’m enjoying [retirement] already,” Silar said. “The pandemic sort of put a little kink into my thinking. I feel like I have been in a whirlwind. And that’s the only thing — if I have any regrets it’s leaving now, and there’s no decisions made.”
She said Duke Athletics will be in good hands, though, with its new SWA, Heather Ryan, who works with academic services.
“My only advice to her is: it’s not rocket science. You’ll get through it, and I’m here for you. I’m a phone call away.”
This story was originally published July 18, 2020 at 12:19 PM.