July 2, 1999

GREENSBORO, N.C. - The members of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA) have chosen Dave Hart, Jr., director of athletics at Florida State University, to serve as president for 1999-2000. Hart was elected at the 34th annual NACDA Convention and his term began on Thursday. Meanwhile, Deborah A. Yow, director of athletics at the University of Maryland, has been elected first vice president of NACDA. She is scheduled to assume the NACDA presidency in July 2000. Yow was the organization's second vice president during the 1998-99 school calendar.

Hart is in his fourth year as director of athletics at Florida State. He came to Florida State from East Carolina where he engineered many successful programs for the Pirates. At FSU, Hart has developed a Life Skills program for all student-athletes, restructured the administrative staff and negotiated contracts totaling more than $19 million for Seminole athletics. An active member of the NCAA, Hart has chaired committees on marketing and gender equity, served on the Special Events/Post Season Bowls Committee and is currently the chair of the Missions and Values Committee of the Division IA Athletics Directors Association.

A 1971 graduate of Alabama, Hart played basketball for the Crimson Tide and earned his master's degree in 1972 while serving as a graduate assistant basketball coach. Maryland's Yow is the second woman to serve as an officer of NACDA, following Washington's Barbara Hedges who served from 1994-97.

Under Yow's guidance, the Maryland athletics department has made remarkable progress over the past five years, including back-to-back performances in the top 25 of the Sears Directors' Cup, the all-sports collegiate rankings administered by NACDA.

Budgets within the Maryland athletics department are now balanced and her inherited operating debt of almost $7 million has been paid in full. With Yow's strategic goals, Maryland now ranks in the top 15 percent of all NCAA Division I programs competitively across all sports, is competing effectively in the Atlantic Coast Conference, and set a record of 154 All-ACC academic honor roll student-athletes. Corporate sponsorship revenues are up 270 percent and annual fund raising for scholarships has increased 60 percent.

A former basketball coach, Yow was the first male or female coach at the Division I level to lead three institutions (Kentucky, Oral Roberts and Florida) to their first-ever appearances in the national Top 25. Prior to her arrival at Maryland, Yow had been the athletics director at Saint Louis University from 1990 to 1994.

Yow also is a member of the NCAA Management Council and the NCAA Division I Budget Committee. She was recently identified by Street & Smith Business Journal as one of the leading athletic administrators in the U.S.

Also elected to serve NACDA for the 1999-2000 term were 2nd Vice President Bill Bradshaw, director of athletics at DePaul, 3rd Vice President Mark Dienhart, director of men's athletics at Minnesota, and Tim Gleason, commissioner of the Ohio Athletics Conference, to the first year of a five-year term as secretary. Now in its 34th year, NACDA serves as the professional and educational association for more than 5,100 college athletic directors, associates, assistants and conference commissioners at more than 1,600 institutions throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico.