IU women’s basketball coach Teri Moren talks about Assembly Hall
Indiana University women’s basketball coach Teri Moren talks about her early memories of Assembly Hall.
IndyStar, Indianapolis Star
BLOOMINGTON – On the day IU dedicated the newly renamed Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall, after the ceremony itself had ended and fanfare had passed, the woman namesaking Indiana’s old arena sat with its basketball team.
Not its men’s team, the one that had graced the arena with five national championship banners, but its women’s team, then in the early stages of a transformation from stuck in second gear in the middle of the Big Ten, to one of the conference’s toughest and most consistent teams.
There would be NCAA bids, Big Ten titles, an Elite Eight and national relevance in the Hoosiers’ future. That day, standing to one side, then-Deputy Athletic Director Scott Dolson watched as a room full of women’s basketball players listened to Cindy Simon Skjodt, who’d given Indiana $40 million to breathe another 50 years of life into their home.
“I remember vividly looking at our student-athletes, all of our women’s basketball players,“ Dolson said, “It was less about the money, but the fact that there was a female leader who had stepped up and made this whole project happen. I could see how they were inspired by that.”
Roughly four years later, Dolson recalled the moment sitting in front of the search committee that would eventually name him full AD. Across the course of that search, Dolson laid out the pillars of his vision for the department he’s served nearly his entire professional life.
Chiefly among them: invigorating women’s sports at an institution that counts just one of its 25 national championships (across all sports) from among them.
Four years on from his selection, and through conference consolidation and a pandemic, Dolson, with help from his predecessor, is beginning to realize that goal.
24 Sports, One Team.
Women’s sports at Indiana enjoy an illustrious history.
Bea Gorton led women’s basketball to two national quarterfinals and a national semifinal in the AIAW days, before women’s sports came under NCAA governance. Legendary former Stanford coach Tara Vanderveer started at guard.
Doc Counsilman and Hobie Billingsley, transformational coaches in swimming and diving, tutored Olympians including Jennifer Hooker Brinegar, Lesley Bush and Cynthia Potter, a member of the international swimming hall of fame.
Lin Loring, now retired, remains the winningest all-time coach in NCAA Division I women’s tennis history. His 1982 team won what remains the department’s only national championship in a women’s sport.
What women’s sports have not enjoyed at the same across-the-board rate is consistent success. Dolson, like Fred Glass before him, aimed to change that.
Women’s sports at IU suffered the same financial shortfalls men’s did in the late 1990s and 2000s. A department not flush with football money and beset by a series of poor fiscal decisions fell behind in infrastructure and investment.
Volleyball, like wrestling, competed at a converted high school gym two miles from the department’s administrative offices. Multiple programs, men’s and women’s, homed their locker rooms at Assembly Hall and dressed for practices and games offsite. That lack of investment saw IU fall behind regional and conference rivals in traditionally strong Midwestern sports like volleyball, basketball and others.
Bursts of success touched programs across the 20 years from 1994-2014. Far too few were sustained.
In 2014, Glass, then AD, instituted a principle he called “the spirit of Indiana” — 24 Sports, One Team.
Glass acknowledges now it was met with some derision. But it was meant to be a guiding principle for his department, that every sport at IU had value to contribute to the whole.
Resources would be spread more efficiently. All-staff meetings and all-coaches meetings would foster greater engagement and camaraderie between programs. Athletes would mix together in leadership and extracurricular programs, and as much as possible, department facilities would be open to everyone.
“The 24 Sports, One Team philosophy had the effect providing more resources to programs that had been historically underresourced at IU,” Glass said. “A lot of those were women’s sports, unfortunately.”
Money met the moment.
Already, prominent donors had pushed money toward women’s sports. Simon Skjodt’s gift was announced in December 2013. When Bill and Gayle Cook gave the university $15 million to assist in constructing IU’s standalone basketball practice facility, included among their conditions was the expectation conditioning, sports medicine and training areas inside what is now Cook Hall would be shared equally among men and women. Andy Mohr, now an IU trustee, committed seven figures to the baseball-softball complex opened in 2013. Indiana’s softball field now bears his name. “In addition to Cindy,” Dolson said, “we’ve had several strong female donors showing support: Sandy Eskenazi, Pat Miller, Dena Ray Hancock. That all these women led major gifts, ultimately, it didn’t matter where the money went. It was more that it was symbolic to our female student-athletes.”
Facilities upgrades and replacements were crucial.
Glass, an IU alumnus, often referred to an observation he’d made in his earliest days on the job — that Indiana’s facilities didn’t look terribly different in 2009 than they did when he graduated, in 1981.
“I just looked around and said, ‘We need to rebuild this place,’” he said.
In addition to stadiums and arenas, Glass followed his own rules when overseeing new facilities in Memorial Stadium’s north and south end zones: A new nutrition center, state-of-the-art sports medicine, mental and emotional health support, academic and other athlete-facing services — wrapped into what became known as IU’s Excellence Academy — available to every program in the department.
“Maybe counterintuitively, that’s not only good for the traditionally underresourced sports, but it’s good for the traditionally highly resourced sports,” Glass said. “I remember when Tom Crean was there, he said, ‘You don’t understand … this makes everybody feel like they’re in the same boat.’”
Finally, ever-widening revenue streams from a series of lucrative media rights deals (chiefly among them the Big Ten’s television contracts) gave Glass the financial leeway to offer competitive salaries and resources to coaches in non-revenue sports, and regularly fund capital projects that propelled sports upward.
“You cannot overemphasize the impact of the Big Ten Network,” Glass said. “We were able to utilize a lot of that in our rebuild.”
Passing the torch
Glass announced his decision to retire from college athletics in December 2019. Almost immediately, Dolson became one of the leading candidates to succeed him.
Unlike Glass, Dolson was an insider. He’d graduated from Indiana, and spent the bulk of his professional life fundraising for the department. He was one of Glass’ primary competitors for AD in 2008, and Glass named Dolson his No. 2 almost immediately upon taking the job.
That put Dolson at the center of so many of Glass’ initiatives. His relationships with donors and alumni were key to facilities-targeted fundraising efforts. His work as a sport administrator waded him hip deep into the day-to-day of the department. And his history with Indiana lent Dolson important institutional knowledge.
If Glass restored the foundations necessary for those “underresourced” sports to succeed, Dolson wanted to build upon them. When he sat down with the search committee that eventually picked him, one of the key focuses Dolson outlined as part of his vision for the job was lifting women’s sports at IU, across the board.
“Give Fred Glass a ton of credit, because I think Fred really brought our department together,” Dolson said. “The next step, when I took over as AD, was then to take that to a different level.”
Under Dolson’s leadership, IU created the Women’s Excellence Initiative in August 2021.
It was designed with a fundraising component in mind, and has gathered approaching $10 million for capital improvements since then. Much of the money raised goes to smaller asks like foreign trips and projects Dolson wanted to be able to say yes to without the constraints of the larger budgetary process.
“From a historical perspective, because women’s athletics haven’t been around as long as men’s sports have, there’s less of a history or alumni base to draw on,” Dolson said. “What we’re able to do by bringing all women’s sports together as one, uniting that group that really wants to elevate all women’s sports, that has really helped to drive the ability to make a difference.”
Dolson was at pains to emphasize, though, that the Initiative was “not just a fundraising effort.”
Philosophically, the Initiative was built around the idea that if Indiana invested not just money but focus into women’s sports, and pulled them closer together, then a rising cultural tide could lift all boats. “It’s really bringing people together to support women’s athletics in multiple ways to really enhance our female student-athlete experience,” Dolson said. “You can see our women’s programs becoming united and I think the overall experience for our female student-athletes I think is improved as a result of this specific effort.”
From the beginning, Dolson leveraged built-in advantages to help smooth the road ahead.
The unsung heroes
Sport administration is built into the job description for several senior employees at an athletics department.
In addition to daily responsibilities — anything from business operations, to media relations, to academic services — sport administrators serve as a link between IU’s 24 varsity programs and Dolson’s office. Personnel concerns, resource requests, athlete welfare and a host of other issues arrive at the feet of sport administrators every day.
At Indiana, Dolson counts several longtime employees in those roles, and their institutional knowledge makes a world of difference.
For IU women’s basketball coach Teri Moren, that’s Mattie White, one of IU’s two deputy ADs and the department’s senior women administrator.
“Mattie White’s been so instrumental,” Moren said. “Always offering, ‘What do you need to be successful?’ I don’t know if you get that at other places, but we get that here. I get that all the time. There are occasions when I might not get what I want, but it’s not for lack of trying.”
White’s background is important, but it’s also instructive.
A 19-year veteran of IU’s athletic department, she arrived in Bloomington as an academic advisor. She worked her way up through assistant and senior assistant positions, expanding her remit to include not just academic services but also athlete wellness.
White was integral to the planning and completion of Glass’ Excellence Academy, which she describes now as “like my heart.” She’s one of the department’s key leaders in the NIL space. In 2020, Dolson tapped her as one of his deputies, elevating her alongside Stephen Harper into the most prominent positions in the department other than full-fledged director.
In total, White serves as sport administrator for not just women’s basketball but also football, track and field and wrestling. She credits her deep roots at Indiana as critical to her ability to do the job.
“I couldn’t survive in my role if I didn’t have great relationships with our colleagues on campus,” White said. “A lot of that’s because I’ve been here for a while.”
Crucially, White’s story is not unique.
In total, Indiana’s nine sport administrators share 33 years of experience between them in those roles. Most have worked for IU athletics in some capacity for more than a decade.
“You end up being as invested as the coaches themselves,” said Senior Associate Athletic Director Jeremy Gray, who serves as administrator for five programs. “It feels like a true kind of partnership.”
If administrators feel the importance of that relationship, it impacts coaches several times over.
“I’ve had really good sport administrators,” IU volleyball coach Steve Aird said. “I haven’t had to convince them to put in the time, the energy and the effort to help me build.”
Sport administrators often travel with teams. They attend practices. They meet athletes on recruiting visits, getting to know them throughout their college careers.
Gray, for example, met current assistant swimming coach Noelle Peplowski during her campus visit, remained the sport administrator for swimming and diving throughout her career and remains in the same position now supporting her sister, Anna, an Olympian this summer in Paris.
“They’re incredible,” Peplowski said. “I don’t think I could say thank you to them enough.”
Wins, wins and more wins
Results didn’t simply start with the Initiative, but they’ve certainly sustained or risen through it. Across the athletics campus, years of patient investment have begun yielding tangible returns.
∎ Women’s basketball has now won 20-plus games in nine-straight seasons, after just six such seasons before Moren’s arrival. Indiana’s 2023 regular-season Big Ten title was the program’s second ever, and first in 40 years.
∎ Women’s soccer earned its first NCAA tournament berth in a decade last fall, taking a program-record 20 points in Big Ten play.
∎ Softball earned back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances for the first time in 38 years in 2023 and 2024. The Hoosiers reached the Big Ten tournament championship game in both seasons as well.
∎ Women’s golf won its first team Big Ten title in 26 years last spring.
∎ Volleyball equaled a school record with 21 wins in 2023. Eleven Big Ten victories marked the Hoosiers’ most in 24 years, with Aird enjoying considerable recruiting success nationally.
∎ Water polo ended last season ranked No. 12 nationally.
∎ Rowing earned its second-straight NCAA invitation and finished second in the Big Ten, its best-ever finish, last season.
∎ Women’s swimming and diving won its first Big Ten title in five years earlier this year, and its seventh-place NCAA finish equaled a program best. Half a dozen current Hoosiers or program alumni represented IU at the Olympics in Paris.
Each job is its own challenge, but there are through lines that touch most or all of the aforementioned success.
Virtually every one of those programs has either renovated their facility in the past 10 years or, in many cases, moved into a brand new one.
Their bosses have been patient — of IU’s 12 head coaches who work with a women’s sport (some manage men’s and women’s), eight have been with the department at least five years, four at least 10 years, and two more than 20 years.
And sport-specific spending has risen across the department along with revenues. In 2012, IU reported $13,347,765 in overall expenses related specifically to women’s sports. By 2023, the latest fiscal year for which such data is available, that number had nearly doubled, to $25,538,328.
As a portion of total expenses, women’s-sports spending has stayed relatively steady. The totals mentioned above accounted for 19.1% (2012) and 17.6% (2023) of overall athletics expenses in their respective years. For comparison’s sake, if football — by orders of magnitude the most expensive sport in major college athletics — was set to one side, men’s sports-specific spending would’ve accounted for 22.9% of the departmental budget in 2012, and 21.7% in 2023.
Spending compares favorably to some of Indiana’s peers in the Big Ten as well.
In the fiscal year 2023, IU reported more women’s sports-specific operating expenses, for example, than Purdue, Maryland or Illinois. And those expenses accounted for a greater percentage of the overall athletics budget in the same fiscal year at Indiana than they did at Purdue, Illinois or Michigan State.
Those numbers will always come with caveats. Schools sponsor varying numbers of varsity sports, cost of living will make operations more expensive for some departments compared to others, not every school charges full tuition for athletic scholarships, etc. But Indiana’s commitment reflects well financially when placed side by side to some of its closest competitors.
“Women’s sports here are very well supported,” said women’s soccer coach Erwin van Bennekom. “There’s nothing we’re missing.”
When Fred Glass brought Aird to campus during the search process in 2017, Aird asked Glass directly about financial support for a facility to replace the old U Gym. Rather than pulling out renderings or talking about plans, Glass walked Aird across the Memorial Stadium parking lot, past Cook Hall and onto the site of what is now Wilkinson Hall.
The cement had already been poured. Beams were being steadied into place. Glass wasn’t asking Aird to fundraise for an arena that someday might be. As with much of the past decade’s worth of investment in women’s sports at IU, he introduced him to reality.
“The money,” Aird said, “was in the bank.”
‘Now, it’s the culture.’
Neither Glass, nor Dolson after him, ever imagined time or money alone solved Indiana’s problems.
Glass always envisioned 24 Sports One Team as a long-term investment, an idea that would permeate the department and outlast his tenure. According to coaches, administrators and former athletes interviewed for this story, it has.
Across both Glass’ and Dolson’s tenures, the department encouraged student-athlete courses and programs that mixed all the department’s sports. As facilities were added or renovated, they became increasingly all-sport inclusive.
The result has been an esprit de corps within IU athletics noticeable to both coaches and athletes alike. Virtually everyone interviewed for this story said they’ve seen increased cross-sport support, not just at high-profile events but in the day-to-day life of the department.
“Now, it’s the culture, man,” Glass said. “2009 starts to be a long time ago. Everybody has grown up with these common facilities, and 24 Sports, One Team, the Excellence Academy. We used to have contests to get students to go to each other’s games. Now, they’re everywhere. I remember going on a road game with football at Northwestern. I look up and the entire swimming and diving team is in the stands.”
Peplowski, a former IU swimmer now on Ray Looze’s staff, participated in one of those leadership courses during her athletic career. “I’m a swimmer, but I came in with someone who was a pole vaulter as my mentor and then I went back into that program sophomore through my fifth year and got to be mingled with baseball players, basketball, wrestling, women’s soccer, so I got to meet a bunch of people that way,” Peplowski said. “You have a way to support people in their other sports.”
It ‘starts at the top.’
The last ingredient, according to numerous people interviewed for this story, is Dolson himself.
Coaches see him so often at sporting events, home and away, they wonder when he finds the time. Dolson sits with recruits. No ask ever feels too much, programs like the Women’s Excellence Initiative fill important gaps and Dolson takes care to be accessible to all his coaches.
Moren, citing his predecessor as well, said the uptick in success in women’s sports at IU “starts at the top” with Glass and Dolson.
“If I would call Scott right now,” van Bennekom said, “he would probably pick up, and if not, he would text me and say, ‘Can I call you back in 10 minutes?’ … I hate to say it, but other schools that I’ve been at, I’ve seen the athletic director once or twice.
“Scott was at my wedding. That just doesn’t happen (elsewhere).”
From that day sitting with the search committee that hired him forward, Dolson has made strengthening women’s sports across the board a priority for Indiana.
He inherited that charge from Glass, whom Dolson credits for much of the foundation laid in the last decade. He carried that work forward to such an extent that Glass bounces virtually all that praise back onto his successor.
The results, right now, speak for themselves.
“This is what Fred and Scott have always wanted to create,” Moren said. “We want that national spotlight.”
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