'I like sneaking up on people': Doubt, authenticity fuel Washington AD Cohen

In her Salt Lake City hotel room, Washington athletic director Jen Cohen considered her options. One outfit was fairly traditional: nice pants, purple shirt, dressy shoes. The other outfit, not so much.

How many Division I athletic directors wear a baseball hat and white jean shorts to a football game?

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Then again, how many Division I athletic directors are women? (In the Power 5 conferences, the answer is five). Or cuss out a loudmouth at a game, fly up the sidelines after a missed call and constantly get mistaken for the coach’s wife or a player’s mom?

“I can handle the coach’s wife more than the player’s mom, even though I’m old enough to have a kid that age,” Cohen, 49, said. “I’m like, ‘WHAT?!? ME!?!’ I’m all pissed. Happens all the time.” One guy walked into a suite and asked if she could point out Washington’s athletic director. Another asked her to get him ice cream. When she traveled with the baseball team to Ole Miss, the NCAA rep called her the coach’s secretary.

“It’s alright,” she said. “I like sneaking up on people.”

Cohen was in Salt Lake City for the Utah game, and she knew she would schmooze with donors, wander the sidelines and, at some point, cross paths with her counterpart at Utah, all visible elements of the job. But Salt Lake City was hot, and she wanted to be comfortable, so in her hotel room she weighed her options.  

Did she want to blend in, or did she want to do things her way?

Several conflicting thoughts crossed her mind, a seemingly benign decision made more complicated by her gender and personality. “I knew somebody was going to perceive it like that wasn’t professional enough,” she said, “or that I’m not dressed like an athletic director is supposed to be dressed.” Then she thought, “Well, wait a second, who decides what the standard is? I get to be somebody now that gets to set the tone, so why do I have to limit it anymore?” The more she thought about it, the more she saw symbolism in her choice of clothes: Be who you are and success will follow. Still, she wondered what Utah athletic director Mark Harlan would think.

Finally she decided, “Oh well, he’ll get over it.”

The next morning, Cohen sat at a Capitol Hill brunch spot. The woman behind the bar walked over and smiled.

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“You want a Tito’s?” she said.

Cohen looked and sounded disappointed, both with herself and with responsibility in general. “I think I’m just going to have a coffee,” she said. “I want one, but I’ve got a busy day today.”

She turned to me. “See, she knows my drink order.”

We just got out of an hour-long hot Pilates class, and let me tell you right now, if Jen Cohen ever invites you to hot Pilates, immediately call in sick for the next four days because you won’t be able to get out of bed without groan-inducing soreness. Trust me. (“I’ve thrown up just outside that room,” one of her friends later told me. “I know exactly where you’ve been, brother”).

Cohen got back from Utah around 3 a.m. And yet when she walked into the 104-degree room at 10:15 that morning, she was grinning because she knew the hell she was about to put me through. Feeling good about surviving the class, I told her I’d do a mimosa if she did a Tito’s. Hadn’t we earned it? She hardly blinked.

“Ok, I’ll have one. Just a splash of grapefruit,” she said, turning to the bartender and then back to me. “That was easy, wasn’t it?”

She made fun of me for not sweating enough during the class (“I’m not a big sweater!” I told her) and for immediately getting carded at the bar (“This is best day ever,” she told me). She has a crazy, innate ability to connect with people, and after 20 minutes, I was telling her things I barely talk about with my own family. It was like she cast a charm on me.

She was hired in May 2016 after spending 15 years at various jobs in the athletic department, including as a fundraiser and overseeing football. In less than three years, she has hired basketball coach Mike Hopkins, signed a huge deal with Adidas and would have won a National Athletic Director of the Year award, if such an award existed. But in the corporate world of college sports, she stands out for being so human: flawed, vulnerable and — this is the word people use over and over — authentic.

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That’s the interesting thing about her and for years the source of her inner conflict: Nothing in her background made her feel like she could do the job her way. Over the years, male leaders told her she was too passionate. She was too emotional and therefore too weak; or she was a bulldog and therefore too aggressive. When she was young and eager, she visited her dad in Bozeman and set up an informal interview with Montana State’s athletic director. She told him her dreams of becoming an athletic director, and he told her something to the effect of, “There’s no way you’re ever going to be able to do this.”

Although strong-willed and ambitious, she eventually started believing it.

On top of that, she always felt average, a symptom of her own inner doubt. She remembers losing the senior class presidency at Curtis High School outside of Tacoma — as well as the name of the guy who won. She was wait-listed at Washington, the school she loved growing up, so she went elsewhere, and then it took years before she got her shot in Division I.

When the athletic director job at Washington opened up, she knew she could do the work. “I was so prepared for that job,” she said. “I mean, are you kidding me?” But she didn’t know if she could do it her way, with her leadership style (“I believe love is a great, great secret ingredient to leadership”) and her personality (“I am passionate, I am emotional, I probably swear too much; I don’t probably, I do swear too much, I’m unfiltered”).

She worried about the visibility and the pressure and the toll it would take on her husband and two boys. Nothing about her was cookie-cutter, and she worried about that, too.

The night before her first press conference, she holed away in her bedroom. Her husband, Bill, was in the living room and tracked her path across the creaking hardwood floor: from the bedroom to the bathroom and back again.

“Legitimately throwing up,” she said.

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She hates public speaking, even though friends and donors say she’s great at it. But that wasn’t her only barf-inducing fear. “She was very aware of that threshold she was crossing over,” said Robin Hamilton, her friend, mentor and the godmother of her youngest son. It was the moment of true vulnerability.

So at that first press conference in May 2016, she collected herself and took a drink of water — “a make-sure-you-don’t-throw-up-on-the-table drink of water,” her husband said. And then she spoke from the heart, without notes, like always.

“I was there that day,” Hamilton said. “One of the proudest moments of my life. I was so proud of her arriving at that level by doing it her way, by being her authentic self, by being Jen Cohen.”

But what happened next startled Cohen. One moment, she was a fairly anonymous senior associate athletic director in charge of football, and the next she was a symbol. “I got the job, I went to bed and then the next morning I was expected to be the expert on women in college sports,” she said. “And I had no idea how to manage that responsibility.”

So at first she resisted. Patti Phillips, the CEO of Women Leaders in College Sports, reached out and lobbied her to change her mind. Cohen hates talking about herself or highlighting her success (Her bios rarely mention her awards). Sharing her story on a big platform was something she hadn’t done, and it still makes her uncomfortable. She took on this new responsibility “kicking and screaming.”

Phillips told her, “Jen, there’s a whole country of women out there who has never seen someone like you leading. Ever.”

Her way is often unconventional. For one thing, she knows she’s probably going to get busted at a game. Someone is going to film her yelling at an official or some “jackass” in the crowd, and it’s going to get passed around.

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“Our poor PR guy just shakes his head all the time,” she said. “I’m like, ‘You know, I’m working on it.’”

At the bar, I asked for her funniest story, and she smiled conspiratorially, like what on earth could you POSSIBLY be talking about?

“I mean, my stories are not funny when I’m losing my mind,” she said, grinning.

Disagree. They are not only funny, they are the essence of her passion. Sometimes she’ll walk into a game and forget she’s the athletic director: “Oh, yeah, I guess I’m supposed to be, like, in charge or something.” But occasionally, maybe her passion gets the best of her. She wants to be true to herself, but she also doesn’t want to end up on Deadspin. It’s a constant fight.

“I think it’s funny that there’s some guy on the field that’s assigned to me for Husky games,” she said. “I didn’t even know that.”

This reminded her of last year’s game against Utah. She was down on the sideline with her oldest boy, and apparently the security guy warned her son, “Hey, keep an eye on your mom.” Her son kind of shrugged, and the guy said, “No, really, keep an eye on your mom.” And then the refs missed a pass interference call on a throw to Dante Pettis, and, well, sometimes the little girl who yelled with her dad comes roaring out. Former UW running back Lavon Coleman remembered only a “glimpse of red.”

“I lost my mind,” Cohen said. “I was flying up the sidelines, the hair is flying, the whole thing. Just ridiculous behavior.”

She shook her head and half rolled her eyes.

“That’s the thing that everybody worries about, right?”

After the game, she asked if anybody could delete the game film because coach Chris Petersen is someone who, in the past, has kindly offered feedback on her…passion. She didn’t hear anything for months.

And then one night they were in Arizona, sitting around a fire pit, drinking a little wine, watching the men’s basketball NIT game on a laptop.

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“He just said something to the effect of, ‘Oh, by the way, I saw you.’ And I knew exactly what he was talking about,” she said. “He goes, ‘We were watching game film, and I was like, wait a second. Play that back. I circled you and told everyone, Look at Jen.’”

There was also the Stanford game last year. She was on the sideline when quarterback Jake Browning came off the field after a three-and-out. Some guy in the second row started shouting profanities. Cohen looked at him and thought, There is no way this guy knows what competing in life is all about.

She knows her passion can be a weakness. And her hot button is when grown men rip her athletes. “I just cannot tolerate,” she said. It sets her off.

So she verbally pounced on the guy, and in the retelling she contorted her face and pumped her arms in slow motion for full effect. When she told me earlier, “I would get in a bar room fight” for Jake Browning, she wasn’t totally kidding.

“I was like, (mouths cuss words), and everybody was like, ‘Whoa,’” she said. “I don’t think he knew who I was, thank God. And then everybody is like, ‘I think we should get you off the field,’ and we got me off the field and we survived!”

The flip side of her outward confidence and decisiveness is her inner doubt. For a year after she took the job, she believed she was going to get fired. It was an irrational thought, but she’d also never been under so much pressure.

She is on a board with Sandy Barbour, the athletic director at Penn State, and made the half-joke like seven times in three months.

“Stop saying that,” Barbour told her. “You’re not getting fired. You’re really good at what you’re doing. Don’t do that. It’s not productive.”

And yet with her staff, the people Cohen leans on most, she wanted to share that fear. Last year, she had her team give each other feedback: one positive behavior, one negative. She put herself under the microscope first (“I had to literally bring in mimosas for us to do this, everybody was so stressed out,” she said, laughing. “Seattle, passive aggressive. Everybody has no problem talking about everybody behind their back”). Her team told her she’s decisive, she trusts her gut, but sometimes she gives up on people too quickly. As a leader, it was like the worst thing she could hear. She didn’t develop people?

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It was important she explained why she did that, so she talked about her fears, her anxiety and how every day feels like managing a big risk. “Like, I’m completely convinced everybody is trying to take us down,” she said. “It’s a paranoia I’ve never experienced before in my life, and that feeling is changing the way I can interact with people now.” When a couple of her staff recently lost family members, she started a meeting with tears because vulnerability is not just a leadership philosophy but part of who she is.

Every day she beats herself up. She never leaves a meeting without criticizing something she said. She has an endless amount of energy, but she is an optimist only through hard work and intense training, not by nature.

She worries about the budget in five years and what will happen if she has to hire a revenue coach (Never mind the fact she already has in Hopkins). Can she sustain it? Are the wheels going to fall off? Maybe this is all luck. Her doubt is an elite source of inspiration, but it comes with a cost.

“I will never, probably ever think that I’m good enough,” she said.

The bartender set down our drinks, and Cohen clinked her glass against mine. She ordered avocado toast and two eggs over easy, then asked if I liked eggs because the benedict is really good, or if I preferred breakfast bowls, those are really good, too, and so is the avocado toast. She describes herself as a Mama Bear, and it makes total sense.

“I’m in Salt Lake, and the drinks were so watered down, it was great,” she told the bartender. “I came back and it felt like I didn’t even have any alcohol the whole weekend. But trying to go to that intense of a football game without something in my system, no thanks.”

She literally couldn’t watch the end, despite the Huskies’ big lead. She stood in the back of a suite, following the game through the crowd’s reaction. Even in the final 40 seconds she didn’t relax. Part of that is the fan in her, and part of it is her love for the kids and coaches, but part of it is also the reality of her job: Football’s success plays a huge factor in the success of the department. A loss at Utah that night would have been bad for business.

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One person commented on her casual outfit that night. Just trying to blend in, she said, but that wasn’t the only reason. In her own little way, she loved the symbolism and subtle message it sent: That you can down a Tito’s and grapefruit with breakfast and yell like a fan, kick ass at hot Pilates, share your insecurities and raise two boys — and still be the strong, decisive leader of a multi-million dollar athletic department.

She wants people to know they can do it their way.

(Top photo by Elaine Thompson/Associated Press)

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