Running a high school athletic department is an all-encompassing, and sometimes thankless, job. There are a number of challenges that come with the job, from allocating the budget to hiring coaches, to building relationships with players and parents. As we come to the end of Women’s History Month, we take a look at two local athletic directors who are taking on the challenge — Saugus’ Terri Pillsbury and Swampscott’s Kelly Farley.
Pillsbury took over as the Saugus athletic director in September 2018. She had previously been the athletic director and head athletic trainer at Norton High School for five years, and in total she has spent the past 30 years as an athletic trainer all around Eastern Mass.
For her, making the jump from athletic trainer to athletic administrator was one of the early challenges she faced.
“The transition is always an adjustment, and that was probably the toughest part at first,” Pillsbury said. “Moving up to an administrator position was difficult at first, especially since I had to balance being an athletic director and an athletic trainer. Coming to Saugus was kind of a welcome change. Coming into Saugus as solely the athletic director, I was able to devote all of my time to just running the department.”
Pillsbury gets to do what she loves the most about her job — interacting with her student-athletes.
“Getting to know the student-athletes is by far my favorite part of the job,” Pillsbury said. “To get to see them progress through life and succeed is incredibly fulfilling. It’s great too that next year we’ll be moving into the new building and the middle school students will be joining us. Since I’m in charge of middle school athletics as well, it’ll be great to get a jumpstart on building those relationships.”
But that new building, which will house high school and middle school students starting in the fall, has also brought about some challenges for Pillsbury, in addition to the regular ones that come with running an athletic department.
“There are always the universal challenges, like dealing with the budget and making sure all the programs are taken care of,” said Pillsbury. “But there are also challenges with the new building taking up some practice field space and taking our gym away for the time being, so it’s been an adjustment.”
Over in Swampscott, Farley has been at the head of the athletic department since 2015. She started her career as a physical education teacher in Somerville and Beverly before taking a job as the athletic director at Nazareth Academy in Wakefield in 2006. She also spent time as the AD at Cathedral and Manchester-Essex before settling at Swampscott.
With all the movement between communities, Farley was able to pick up bits and pieces of great experience along the way.
“I’ve been very lucky to have learned a lot from colleagues who had done the job before me and could tell me things to expect,” Farley said. “As you go along, you learn different things from different people and then you can take those lessons and use them to define how you want to run your program.”
As an athletic director, Farley’s favorite part of the job is being able to have an impact on young student-athletes.
“I consider myself privileged to be in a position where I can teach leadership skills to young student-athletes,” Farley said. “I love being able to have an impact, however small, on each student-athlete’s life and high school experience.”
As a woman in a normally male-dominated profession, Farley has come across her share of detractors over the years. But she has never let it faze her.
“There are always going to be some folks who think I don’t know what I’m doing because I’m a woman, that’s just how it is,” said Farley. “I’ve had people come right up to me and say that I don’t know what I’m doing. But nowadays, people don’t even blink an eye at me doing what I’m doing. It’s all about results, which is how it should be.”
As far as advice the two athletic directors have for those aspiring to a similar position, there’s plenty to go around.
“First of all, you need to have solid leadership skills and you have to be able to communicate with different people,” said Pillsbury. “In my opinion, you can’t be an introvert and do this job effectively. You’ve got to be able to reach out to all different kinds of people and really build those meaningful relationships.”
“My advice would be to start small and get a feel for the job and how you want to do it,” Farley said. “It’s all about how you balance work and the rest of your life, because this is a 24-hour-a-day job. You can’t do it part-time, and there’s a lot that goes into it. You’ve got to be fully invested.”