welcome to the secrets of college planning on the host anthony and today we're going to get some insight into athletics at the ivy league so my guest today is molly mark simone and she is the ford family athletic director for   when did you start thinking about college was it freshman year of high school senior year one that it all began for you i think back then people were thinking about college quite so early so i think i started probably in my junior year and i played soccer and ice hockey and i you know it was a pretty committed student so i had sort of narrowed my choices down to the ivy league schools primarily i mean i had to have a few you know safety schools in there too but i really wanted to play ice hockey and soccer in college and i wanted to go to a great school so i really only applied to the ivy league schools to five of the ivy league schools oh great and you know i visited all of them and was sort of being recruited for both sports so had the opportunity to meet coaches at both really ten coaches because you had soccer coaches and hockey coaches and in the end i really came down to just sort of a feeling of comfort i really like all the schools that i visited but princeton just grabbed me the minute i walked on the campus at the place and i felt strongly comfortable where i felt comfortable and sort of where i felt like i would fit in the best so so you go to princeton university the atmosphere what is it like as a student there getting princeton's in amazing places it's very much of a college you know it's a when you're on campus you really feel like you're on campus and i think that's what what attracted me to the university too is that i grew up in ithaca where cornell is so i grew up in a college town and i love cornell and i loved everything that divorce but you know you want to get out of town in a lot of members of my class my high school class went to cornell and so i want to sort of forge a new path but princeton is i think uniquely you know a college and so when you get on campus you know you're on campus you feel like you're on campus you feel like a part of a community and i think that was the feeling that i got right when i got there is that i was part of something bigger than myself not only the teens but you live in a residential college and you feel really connected to that residential college and you feel connected to the larger university but you also feel connected to the organizations within which you know you participate i happened to be able to play two sports there so right away when i got there as a freshman i was on the soccer team and you have a built in community and then transitioned right down to the hockey team as well great so now you graduate from princeton university and how do you become the athletic director at prince university i you know when i graduated twenty seven years ago i didn't think this is where i'd be sitting this wasn't the path that i had sort of thought i was going to take a little i didn't know i wanted to work in sports in some way when i graduated i ended up going to  school right after i graduated and worked in their athletic department just on i was actually covering a maternity leave of sort of an assistant athletic director at the boarding school down the road and i was still trying to play a little ice hockey and i was interested in maybe coaching so i coach the girls i and the girl soccer team and i worked in the athletic department and i was only fourteen do it for a year and then i really liked it and really enjoyed my experience and so the school said well would love you to stay what would you like to do and i thought working in admissions would be  fun and so i did that for three years and i lived in a dorm actually lived in a boys dorm so i was right out of college and i would have been a tenth and eleventh grade boys and they called houses at lawrenceville and and did that for three more years of their four years but i kind of had the sense that i wanted to work in four sports marketing or sports management and get into the sort of corporate world and so from there i went to work for chelsea piers which is you know a big sports complex in manhattan at that time it was one thousand nine hundred five and we were just opening day and they had just a few employees and most of the buildings the facilities were not open yet the the corporate offices weren't even at the location of the facility so i threw a connection from lawrenceville i met one of the owners and and they were the owners were were yale guys so there's little you princeton yell thing going on there but you know and it worked out to be an unbelievable one thousand year career that i had with them working in all sorts of different areas of their business running the businesses doing marketing doing sponsorship starting a foundation and you and i were talking at the break about the foundation you would start you work for and we started a similar foundation where we provided kids under resourced kids with athletic opportunities both the chelsea piers and other places that was really fun and then so i worked there for a good i guess seventeen years sixteen years in new york and then we started at a facility in connecticut as well we opened up a four hundred thousand square foot second facility  stamford connecticut and i went up and helped start that and helped run that and i was doing that and having a great time and enjoying my my time of my life when when princeton called and said that they were engaged in the in a search for an athletic director and i said you know i haven't worked a day in my life in college sports and of the work in sports my whole career but then they said well just come to us because we're really interested in hiring a lot more really interested in someone who has broad based management experience and can order run a complex organization and you know might might just you know i said well how if princeton called you always answer right you know i love princeton i've always loved princeton so i came down and interviewed and sort of one thing led to the next than all of a sudden i was the new athletic director so again not something i was expecting not that most of the career path that i was on but it's been fantastic so how long it princeton university are you know this is my fourth year oh fantastic so let's get into what a lot of directed and what's what compass i'm still trying to figure that out a little bit but no it's great i mean i think again a lot of it is sort of just setting the tone for the department and setting the direction the strategic direction of the aesthetic department princeton have a very large department there are thirty seven varsity teams a lot of division one schools have you know fifteen to twenty teams and we have thirty seven so that part of the ivy league principals are sort of broad based participation so all the schools in the ivy league have a lot of teams so it's really you know how irene retaining working with all of those coaches really again setting the overall strategy of the department from marketing and fund raising and facility development and management you know and then being the liaison to the rest of the university which is vitally important obviously we are our mission is education threats lead except that we believe in so we very much believe that the athletic mission needs to complement and hance the academic mission and they all have to work hand in hand so i work very closely with the rest of the university and try to fulfill the university president's mission and make sure we're doing that throughout led ics on a day to day basis how many students from princeton university are part of the athletic program well we like to say almost all of our scenes participate in athletics and some way whether it's through the entire inner collegiate program or through our campus recreation program which we have another thirty seven or thirty eight through through the club programs so we like to say we get almost all of our kids doing something within the athletic department and again the same mission holds you know not just for intercollegiate athletics but for everything that we do we're trying to educate through the athletic experience now  the biggest question that a lot of families come to me about is academics some schools talk about it's just about the sports not about academics how does princeton university work that with the student school yeah i mean i think that's what's really unique i mean our students are truly student athletes and they have all the same exact requirements as all the other students at princeton and they have to be excellent students to be  admitted and so we look at it is there both sides of that hyphen you know you're a student and you're an athlete and you have to do both and i think that's what's really unique about the ivy league when you talk to our kids that's why they choose the ivy league in the most part and that's why i chose it because i wanted to be as good as i could be athletically and i wanted to get the best possible education and push myself academically and i think that's the uniqueness of the of the ivy league so the kids know that this is going to be a challenge they know that they're going to have to do both and they're going to have to put that extra time in to be a great athlete and they're gonna have to put the same amount of time or more time in to be a great student so is allocated amount of times for i guess study and things of that sort that each coach each one of the coaches give them well they you know i think again when you graduate from princeton as a student athlete you know you did it just like every other student there we don't have specific a lot of tutors are we don't have study halls for our athletes we you know we have schedules that we think allow our students to be students and to be athletes at the same time so some of the principles of the ivy league is that there are some playing in practice restrictions that are slightly different than the rest of the n c double a just to give kids to recognize that some of their academics are a bit more challenging but at the same time it's very doable you know i mean i think if you if you work hard in both you'll do just fine and so we try to reach i let the kids forge their own path but then given the support that they need sometimes they need a little extra support because their schedules are so demanding just in the sense of making sure there's some accommodation for the travel and but for the most part we you know we ask them to be excellent students and to demand that of themselves as well as excellent athletes so now out of the thirty seven sports you get the coaches coming to you for advice picking out different recruits that they're looking at yeah i mean i don't get involved in the recruiting i mean you know the coaches really are like c e o s of their own program and we in the athletic administration provide support for them  we have a pretty unusual organizational chart at princeton where all of the head coaches actually report to me so there are thirty four head coaches of the thirty seven sports and normally the head coaches report into various administrators  organizationally they all report to me which is great because there's equity across all the sports but it's not possible for me to be sort of you know manage them on a day they basis so i have a fantastic group of senior administrators who each you know help with various sports  each there's three of them that they each have thirteen or so sports that they work with and they they help with advice and again they're not getting too involved in the recruiting process but help with all aspects and provide extra support and help the coaches get the provide the basic necessities of what our teams need to compete and then for some extra things we're doing some fund raising for some of the extra amenities an extra resources that they need to sort of reach the next level but every school sort of handles it differently and manages  differently but again i fortunately the best one of the best parts of my job is that we get to focus on the core mission of the of the department which is really you know we say we have three goals to two main goals and one that we really believe in as well but the first is that education through athletics and we work very hard to provide a platform that kids can learn much more than just learning how to be great athletes great basketball players or football players but they're learning about life through that athletic platform and then to you know we want to be competitively excellent we w ant to win and we're sort of unapologetic about that and we think we can do both we think we can provide this great balance between the academics and the athletics and we can also use our platform to teach really important and valuable life lessons to our to our students or that co curricular experience and the third goal is you know in the ivy league princeton and the rest of the schools i mean i think we believe we're sort of a model and see double a program and we have that ability to to show the rest of the world that you can sort of do it all in a values for fund raising they do yeah we do we do for example we run we started something a couple years ago that we called tiger athletics give day and it's there are other schools that do sort of twenty four hour give challenge and give dates challenges and we created this really with the goal of bringing the athletic community together in one day to raise money for the friends groups we have seventeen different friends groups which support different teams and sport so a mentor women's soccer for example has one friends group so that's why they're not one for every team it's sort of by by program and so we created this day and twenty four hours of giving and the idea around it is just to participate it's not necessarily it's about me raising money and live here we raise to almost two and a half million dollars on the day which is fantastic  just that one twenty four hour period but we had eight thousand people give some type of a gift on that day which is phenomenal and some you know again twenty dollars is the minimum so it's big you have small gifts and the whole really goal of the day was to bring together the tiger athletic community in support of the work that our student athletes do and our coaches do and in support of mostly the school where they you know where they went and where they love and and so it's been really fun there's a great social media campaigns around it in our kids are engaged our student athletes are engaged in the day and so you know through a really big collaborative team effort with our development office in with our prison varsity club we have a board of directors that helps run the princeton varsity club alarms and they are very supportive they kind of got on board to it originally they help we have challenges on the day we get one group against another group and sort of competitive fund raising and you know our coaches are coaches and the methods are there all competitive and so by creating some type of a competition that's pretty unique move most places are doing quite what we're doing and we have a ton of fun with it we have a a web site dedicated to it and people are watching the leader boards and we put teams in different brackets based on the size of their organization so that's that's  example of something that we've done from a fundraising perspective a lot of fund raising for athletic happens at princeton within the central development office and we work very very collaboratively with them so the whole premise of the way princeton works in a very team oriented and collaborative place now academic wise what are some of the requirements that princeton looks for for students to come to school or why do you listen in order to be admitted to princeton is no secret you have to be a great student i mean yeah they have to have great grades you have to be a really hard worker you have to be committed and love learning and and you have to see the testing is important and so you know we're looking for kids that are really committed students obviously and that really take their academics commitments and priorities very very seriously so how about the school in general what what student athletes or just students in general when they come to princeton university what can they expect when they go there as a student yeah i mean i think the thing that's really amazing is that the opportunities are endless in terms of co curricular opportunities as well as academic opportunities and so whatever your passion is you can find it and you can find it at a really really high level i think the other thing that's even different from when i went to school here twenty seven years ago is that the support that's put in place for the students is amazing you know so academic support or any type of support that they're looking for there are so many committed professionals that work at the university that really have made their life's mission to help students and so i think hopefully when seems come they feel a real sense of community they feel that they're being pushed on all levels but at the same time they're being supported and that's a  balance that we try to to strike all the time in athletics as well obviously we want to achieve at the highest levels we wanted to win and be successful but the results not really what matters it's sort of the process of getting us been getting getting there and so we talk a lot about those values that we're trying to instill in our student athletes who've actually developed this or calling a b a tiger performance model and a stands for accountable the t stands for team oriented the i think and for integrity the g for growth minded the easy for engaged and the are for respectable respectful so we're asking our students to be tigers that to be a tiger and if they live their life that way and they they live with those values we think that they will not only be successful but they'll sort of have a  good balance sense of life and reduce stress and anxiety and recognize that it's really about the process rather than the result and we think the result will follow from that now do you find you find a lot of networking that goes on at princeton university with the students that are there with among the students yeah yeah i mean absolutely i think that one of the other big things about prince and that people talk about all the time is that you know it's a lifelong community and you know people stay connected to the university for their whole lives and at a very very high rate and people just love the school and love their experience and love what it the platform that it gave them and the opportunities that it gave them afterwards so i think the difference is they love being there and they love being from there and so that brings together a community of just really passionate people i'm not sure if you've ever been to the the p raid and some of the reunion events in egypt are amazed at how passionate people of people wearing a lot of orange and a lot of black and they just get so enthusiastic about the school so i think that that networking naturally occurs through the relationships that are developed that alumni reunion thing that happens each year what does the athletic department do with that it they do they do anything oh yeah we do i think in some reunion weekend i have like forty five events to go to so every friends group that i was talking about before generally will sponsor either an alumni game or they'll sponsor a barbecue or they'll sponsor some type of a meeting where the student athletes will talk about their experience i mean it's a it's an unbelievable week and it you know it starts thursday goes all the way through sunday morning and  it's fun but it's also really educational last year i helped moderate a panel with the various alarms that were in the source sports world on the business of sports and that was really fun and you get to see people from all different class years of recent graduates to graduate from you know in the forty's in the fifty's and all really enthusiastic about being back and having a great time so we try to do a lot around that event and you know we have a ton of fun so how many how many  things do you get involved with outside of princeton university is there is there are things that you go to conventions absolutely or yeah i mean i think the ivy league itself has a very sort of committed group of athletic directors and executive director and her staff is actually based in princeton which is nice and so we meet you know three or four times a year as a group and there's a lot of sharing of information there's a lot of collegiality and i think we we compete fiercely against each other every weekend and throughout the week and there's a lot of pride in the success that each school has or or doesn't have and but when we come together as a group again i think the model of the ivy league is so different in that we really truly are trying to use our athletic platform to educate in every way and so we share best practices we share ideas so we spend a decent amount of time during the year you know working with that group of people and then you know we there's  conventions i'm also involved in women leaders and college sports which is a really exciting organization that sort of provides opportunity for women in college athletics and they have a dynamic organization and i go to those conventions as so there are people there you work in all different facets of college athletics they come to various events that they that they sponsor so that's a great networking opportunity there's a bunch of other conventions throughout the course of the year but i try to make sure i get to as many of those department and we're going to do some events together and it's going to be a really great celebration of of college football and what college football has meant to society throughout the hundred fifty years of its existence and so i'm on a committee with a number of leaders and in college football as the representative of princeton since we played the first game in the records athletic directors also on the on the committee and that's been really fun to meet people from various conferences and to really talking at all levels of what football is meant and sort of you know we'll talk about some of the parents out there that their sons and daughters are interested in going to princeton university what advice would you like to give them well obviously i mean academics are the first and most important thing and working hard and putting in the effort and having the right sort of attitude about school is most important and working as hard as you can to be the best version of yourself academically obviously people have different levels of abilities and all of that and so not to put too much pressure on kids that they have to go to one specific place because there are a number of great institutions out there and so i have a high school i have three kids in my all this is a freshman in high school and i just i want her to love learning and to love the classes that she's in and push yourself as hard as possible and be committed to getting the work done and then the results will will follow i think the other thing that princeton particularly in princeton athletics and princeton university really look for sort of character and that's something we focus on all the time with an athletics is is you know characters the thing you can control your integrity and sort of who you are and how you live your life is the thing that you can control so control it and you know i was a control the controllable zz and so i try to tell my kids all the time like don't don't put too much pressure on yourself just be a great person and work as hard as you can possibly work and you'll find the place and the path that best suits you whether it's at princeton or someplace else i think that fit is really important and just kind of trying to be the best version of yourself is really my biggest advice because there's a lot of great places and there's a lot of