The Athletic Departments That Win the Next Decade Will Be Speedboats, Not Cruise Ships

Chris King, college athletics veteran, talks leading with vision, innovation, team, and operational strategies that incorporate AI

College sports has changed more since 2020 and COVID than in the previous fifty years combined. NIL, direct athlete compensation, revenue-sharing, and conference re-alignment blew up the old structure. The student experience shifted significantly. And a wave of court decisions and legislation has left athletic directors and university presidents cautious about making a call, because the next lawsuit might make it for them.

Leadership has stalled at exactly the moment college athletics needs more of it. The old administrative playbook doesn't work in a landscape this complex, this data-driven, and this volatile. Running an athletic department now takes the financial discipline and commercial agility of a corporate enterprise, not a legacy athletics office.

Chris King has a name for what has to replace it: the Corporate Hybrid. Chris, most recently the Vice President and Director of Athletics at Robert Morris University, spent 30 years in Division I athletics, including 17 years as a Division I Director of Athletics. The secret to his success in his words: “I spend 95 % of my time on vision, strategy, the bottom line, and ROI. Then I hire experts for everything else from sports programs to compliance.”

Chris was named National Athletic Director of the Year by NACDA twice, led major conference realignments that expanded his institutions' media footprint, and set department-wide GPA and Graduation Success Rate records along the way. He's now Founder and CEO of CK1 LLC, an executive advisory and sports technology firm helping athletic departments, professional franchises, and sports business leaders do what he spent three decades doing:

·       set your vision

·       build a plan that gets results

·       leverage data, and

·       use technology to get your staff’s time back to focus on the most critical activities

His starting point isn't a tech stack. It's a question most athletic departments can't answer.

The Vision Vacuum

Chris's first question to any athletic director is basic: do you have a written strategic plan? Not a mission statement. An actual plan with clear priorities, organizational alignment, and precise resource allocation.

Many departments simply haven't had the bandwidth to create one, yet this is what provides a clear set of goals for staff to plan for and execute on now, not next season or the next. Athletic directors are drowning in day-to-day fires, and the strategic thinking that should drive every budget line, hire, and technology decision gets pushed down the priority list. It is a systemic challenge across the industry, not an oversight, and having a clear, actionable roadmap is what allows an entire department to execute in alignment without constant oversight. That prevents operational friction and strain on resources from getting in the way of the best plans

Vision isn't a report you write to look good for the board. It's the thing that lets 200 people row in the same direction without you standing over them.

Data Before AI

Every athletic department Chris talks to wants to talk about artificial intelligence. Almost none of them are ready for it. “AI, technology, and data go together,” Chris says. He has talked with leaders in sports technology, founders, and others who have helped him broaden his horizons and changed how he thinks.

“Everyone is using some form of sports technology and athletic departments can tap into these tools today to expand their operational vision then increase ticket sales, for example,” Chris energetically proposes. “If you have vision, there are people who can help you use your technology and AI to expand your operational vision…AI is already layered into the planning and profit model, but to optimize it, you have to clean and centralize your data. You must have a set roadmap, workflow, ethics, and training on AI as well as its use and parameters.

Step one requires organizations to look at and organize their data. Data in college athletics is fragmented – scattered across ticketing systems, compliance files, spreadsheets, and whatever tool a former staffer set up five years ago. Very few departments use that data to do real cost containment, measure return on investment, or make leadership decisions.

Chris's advice is clear: without clean, centralized data, layering automation on legacy systems simply accelerates inefficiency.

So, before the AI conversation, there's a data conversation. Build the strategic plan. Build the financial projections. Centralize the data. Make sure data readiness is addressed along with data architecture. Only then does an "AI operating system" – his vision for layering AI into planning and profit decisions – actually work. Skip the foundation and you're not innovating. You're guessing with better software.

Chris calls this data a "protected institutional asset," not an afterthought scattered across a dozen systems nobody owns. That's a principle we live by at HonorDRM, too. Data only creates value when someone is accountable for governing it.

From Sport Islands to a Single Business Engine

Chris has a name for what most athletic departments actually look like on the org chart: a loose federation of "sport islands." Football runs one set of unwritten rules. Basketball runs another. Olympic sports negotiate their own vendor deals, manage their own donor relationships, and build their own marketing collateral in isolation, with duplicated overhead nobody's tracking. Having multiple programs independently signing separate contracts with the same vendors isn't decentralization, it represents fragmented procurement and uncaptured scale.

Chris’ fix is the Corporate Hybrid: a department that stays rooted in the university's academic mission but runs its business functions – legal, finance, compliance, data, and revenue – through one centralized hub, that frees sport-specific staff to focus on performance and recruiting instead of reinventing the same administrative wheel twenty times over. Managing your team this way will centralize compliance so you can lift a legal and administrative burden off sport-level staff who were never equipped to carry it.

Centralize ticketing, media rights, licensing, and sponsorships and twenty fragmented revenue streams so they become one commercial engine, and one sophisticated enough to go find new revenue instead of just splitting the same donor dollars twenty ways.

It also changes who needs to be in the room. Chris is watching athletic departments build out real executive leadership teams with a Chief Revenue Officer and a Chief Strategy Officer, titles that would have sounded absurd in a college athletics department a decade ago. This means that running a modern department takes people experienced in business and who can speak the language of a university provost in the morning and a media-rights executive in the afternoon, in the same day.

The same shift applies to how departments treat their athletes. The old model was donor-centric: boosters gave, athletes received a scholarship, and everyone called it even. We all know that this model is over. Athletes are economic stakeholders now, not passive participants, and athletic departments must shift their perspective on athletes to be successful.

None of it works without governance that defines who owns which decision - coach hiring, facility investment, NIL strategy – before a crisis forces the answer. A board of trustees doesn't want to hunt through twenty spreadsheets to find a deficit. It wants one source of truth. Vision without a decision-rights structure underneath it is just a slogan.

The Speedboat Window

Here's what convinced Chris to move fast. The New York Jets' owner Woody Johnson mandated an AI-first operational strategy across the franchise, leading to 91% of the team's non-player staff adopting artificial intelligence tools that impact how the whole organization runs, from the top down. That's the model Chris thinks college athletics needs, and almost nobody has it yet.

His metaphor for it: "You can be a cruise ship with the biggest, baddest boat there is. But I'd rather be a speedboat that can grind and get into this next generation of sports technology."

A cruise ship is impressive and slow to turn. A speedboat adapts. For an athletic department, being the speedboat means automating the workflows that eat staff time like lead generation, CRM, and parts of social media, so the humans on staff can focus on what only humans can do: building relationships, developing culture, and creating an athlete experience worth having.

Chris has watched this play out directly. On one revenue generation project, his team built a centralized lead CRM, got the department's data into one place, then layered AI into the process on top of it. His rule for every addition: for everything you add, you delete something. Add what creates real value. Cut what doesn't.

He believes the window to move first is narrow – only 12 to 18 months before AI-driven vendors flood college athletics and the early advantage disappears. Departments are already tapped out, which is exactly why the ones willing to automate now will pull ahead of the ones waiting for permission.

This isn't only a resource-rich, Power Four problem, either. Chris says, “A D3 athletic director juggling six job titles at once has the most to gain: automate five manual workflows and you've bought back real hours, and time is money whether your budget is $2 million or $200 million.”

Hire Like the Program Depends On It, Because It Does

Ask Chris what actually built his track record and the answer isn't technology. It's hiring. He never fired a head coach that he hired in the last 12 years – not because he got lucky, but because every coach he hired operated inside a clear vision, structure, and set of expectations he held them to, and they held him to in return.

He sorts his department’s team roles into four categories: high growth contributors, supporter participants, fence sitters and observer critics. And his values include three non-negotiables, in order: integrity, character, and passion. “Passion doesn't require an extrovert,” Chris points out, just people with two feet in, not one foot in and one foot out, even if they're only there a year.”

He prefers to move fast on open roles, aiming to streamline search pipelines and eliminate administrative latency because he knows the vision and values he’s hiring against. And Chris leverages the leaders around him. He's brought coaching candidates to lunch with three current coaches on staff before making an offer, because, in his words, “Coaching is a fraternity, and that internal read matters more than a resume.”

Chris knows how critical it is to hire the right people because of his own lessons in leadership. One valuable experience he shared occurred early on in his career when he hired a coach who turned out to be the wrong fit for the role. He remembers standing in front of a team of young men and telling them: "I failed you. I'm going to hire you a rock star." He did. That's the standard he holds himself to, and the one he pushes every athletic director to hold themselves to.

The Bottom Line

Chris put it plainly in one of his recent posts: “hope is not a viable fiscal strategy…neither is nostalgia for how the department used to run.” Chris's advice to athletic directors isn't comfortable, and he knows it.

Don't be risk averse. It might maintain your department, but it won't elevate it. Set the vision. Write the plan. Get the data in one place before you buy the tool. Leverage AI strategically. Hire for integrity and character before you hire for resume.

And decide now whether you're building a cruise ship or a speedboat, because the departments that figure this out in the next 18 months are going to be very hard to catch.

Chris now works directly with athletic departments, pro franchises, and sports business leaders through CK1 LLC (ck1llc.com). You can contact him directly at king@ck1llc.com to get real results for your athletics program.