Coppin State athletics director steers athletes toward graduation

Ramsey was in Indianapolis, Indiana, last week for the NCAA Leadership Counsel meeting of which he is a committee member. During his stay, he met with the NCAA staff to conduct this interview.

BALTIMORE, Maryland -- When Derrick Ramsey became athletics director at Coppin State five years ago, the school’s Graduate Success Rate was 58 percent. Today, that number has grown to 75 percent, and Coppin State student-athletes average a 3.0 GPA.

This year alone, the rate climbed six percentage points—the biggest jump of Ramsey’s tenure.

“The thing I was up against at Coppin was I had to change the whole culture of the athletics department,” Ramsey said. “Prior to me coming there, the athletics department was a culture of eligibility, not graduation.”

Ramsey accomplished this shift through a holistic focus on academics that combines summer classes and classes over winter break with a fifth-year degree completion program and an innovative program that integrates campus faculty with the athletics department. In 2012 Coppin State was awarded an NCAA Accelerating Academic Success grant worth $900,000 over three years to assist with those initiatives.



The AASP grants are aimed at developing methods to help schools meet the requirements of the NCAA Division I Academic Performance Program. One of those standards calls for increasing the graduation rates and academic success of student-athletes at Division I institutions outside the Football Bowl Subdivision. Schools eligible to apply for the program are in the bottom 10 percent of resources as determined by per capita institutional expenditures, athletics department funding and Pell Grant aid.

“Now with this grant we’re able to compete with anyone in the country,” Ramsey said. “We’ve never had a semester over the last five years when we’ve been below a 3.0 GPA average.  Now with these monies we’re going into a higher gear.”

That higher gear means dedicating even more resources toward an integration program that pays for faculty to travel with teams. The grant allows Ramsey to pay for travel expenses as well as enrichment programs that help faculty understand the value of intercollegiate athletics.

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