Ann Walker’s career in athletics has taken her from Minnesota to Florida to Clark County.
She has been a NCAA Division I basketball coach, worked in college administration and chaired national committees.
No matter the location, level of competition or occupation, her goal is the same.
“My top priority is ensuring a good experience for the student athlete,” she said during a recent conversation at a downtown Vancouver coffeehouse.
That goal brought Walker out of retirement to become the new athletic director at Clark College.
After a 23-year career in athletics administration and coaching, Walker had spent the past year settling in to retired life in Portland. But something was missing.
The athletic director position opened at Clark last summer when Charles Guthrie took the AD job at San Francisco State. Walker decided to jump back into the game.
Since starting work on campus Sept. 2, Walker has spent long hours getting her bearings, crafting department policies and pursuing her priorities. She hopes to make Clark’s coaches full-time and one day have a full-time athletic trainer on campus.
It’s busy. It’s hectic. But Walker’s background shows that she thrives in that environment.
• • •
Walker is just as comfortable on the hardwood of a basketball court as behind a hardwood desk in an athletics department.
After playing four years at Northwestern College in Iowa, she went into coaching. In 1991, she began a four-year stint as head basketball coach at Teikyo Marycrest University in Davenport, Iowa. She parlayed that into an assistant coaching job at Division I Creighton University in Nebraska.
After three years in Omaha, she served as head coach at Minnesota State-Mankato from 1998 to 2005.
From there, she entered administration full-time. She was an associate commissioner for the Sunshine State Conference, led the NCAA Division II Women’s Basketball Committee for two years and joined Nova Southeastern University in Florida as the associate athletic director for compliance and internal operations.
Between her committee duties and AD job, Walker was used to working long hours and balancing multiple tasks. Things got busier in 2010 when the Nova Southeastern basketball coaching staff was relieved of its duties 15 days before the start of fall practice.
Walker added the role of interim coach to her already full schedule.
“She told me she had to do that job for the kids,” women’s basketball championship director Roberta Page said in a story published by the NCAA in 2011. “That’s what gives me goosebumps about the people in Division II. There are so many people who take on additional jobs to make it a positive experience for the student athletes.”
The same week Walker became interim head coach, she learned her mother had terminal cancer. That year when she balanced coaching, administration and caring for a sick parent caught attention beyond Nova Southeastern’s Fort Lauderdale campus.
In 2012, she was named NCAA Division II Administrator of the Year by the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators.
• • •
Of anything on Walker’s resume, her role as compliance director caught eyes at Clark, which faced a Title IX noncompliance lawsuit in 2011. The college has spent the last three years trying to make female athletic participation mirror the male-female ratio of the student body, which is 54 percent female.
“I don’t think Clark has anything to worry about,” Walker said. “I’ve never been at a place that was more sensitive about Title IX compliance.”
Amid those Title IX worries and decreased state funding, rumors swirled that Clark was considered dropping its track and field program, which has traditionally had more men than women.
Walker says she has no appetite to drop any sports at Clark.
“I would never want to come into compliance by taking away opportunities for male athletes,” she said.
