Wendell Jack, Caltech’s new athletic director, joins other early risers at 6:30 a.m. during his daily workout in the Braun weight room.

Jack is back in action at Braun

“Hey, Wendell, welcome back!” shouts a gym rat in workout clothes one recent April morning in Braun Athletic Center. It may have been Wendell Jack’s first week on the job as Caltech athletic director, but it was obvious that his face is a familiar one around campus.

One of Caltech’s football coaches before the Institute dropped the sport for good in 1993, Jack also variously served between the years 1989 and 2000 as associate director, assistant director, and acting director of Intercollegiate Athletics, PE, and Recreation. He also taught PE classes.

Then in 2000 he was recruited by Hiram College in rural northeastern Ohio to become director of Athletics and Exercise/Sport Science. “My goal was to get entrenched in NCAA Division III Athletics,” explains Jack, adding that Ohio and bordering states represent “one of the hotbeds,” with 115 Division III schools.

“Hiram is a small liberal arts college, and very pretty. It’s a very nice place to live, until you’re in a hurry to get somewhere.” He’s not talking about traffic congestion. Some mornings, Jack opened his garage door to the sight of three-foot snowdrifts that needed to be shoveled before he could drive to work. Despite being charmed by the Amish countryside dotted with horse-drawn buggies, Jack says he and his wife, Sarah, felt a bit like California fish out of water.

After earning his EdD in higher education leadership and administration from Concordia University in River Forest, Illinois, the native Californian returned to the West Coast in 2002. Southern California’s Whittier College recruited him as director of athletics. “It seemed like a great opportunity to get back to California. We were willing to trade the snow for the traffic jams.” At Whittier, Jack oversaw intercollegiate sports, recreational services, and intramural and club sports.

When he learned that Caltech was looking for an athletic director, he decided to apply. Says Margo Marshak, vice president for student affairs, “Wendell Jack knows Caltech well, and he understands our athletic and recreational programs and their fit within our academic community.” Marshak also thanked Mark Harriman for a job well down as interim director.

Caltech is in the Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SCIAC), along with Cal Lutheran, Claremont-Mudd-Scripps, LaVerne, Occidental, Pomona-Pitzer, Redlands, and Whittier, all NCAA Division III schools.

Division III institutions, including Caltech, tend to be smaller than high-profile Division I and Division II colleges, and they don’t offer sports scholarships. Nevertheless, Caltech fields varsity teams in baseball, basketball, cross-country, fencing, golf, soccer, swimming and diving, tennis, track and field, volleyball, and water polo. A few of the sports are represented by both men and women’s teams, and no student who wishes to participate is turned away, Jack says. “We are offering a lot of choices to 900 undergraduates.”

Caltech students may be famous for their brains, not brawn, but this is not to say they don’t take their sports seriously, says Jack. Many of these students bring the same tenacity to their sports that they apply to their studies. And he notes that Caltech is steadily improving, particularly in tennis, track, and cross-country. “Are we winning conference championships? No. Are we getting more competitive? Yes.”

“I’m committed to offering our students the opportunity to compete. I’m very competitive myself, but in the big picture, the experience of competing in sports teaches lessons in character-building, fighting against adversity, and the values of teamwork.”

Jack’s department also runs the PE program, in which undergrads are required to complete three, 3-unit classes. Equally important, Jack says, is the value placed on fun, and helping students become well-rounded people, as expressed by the department’s “sound-body, sound-mind” mission statement.

Students are only part of the picture. Anyone who spends more than a milli-second at Braun sees a mix of faculty, staff, and students in many classes and activities. They are seen shoulder to shoulder, practicing their downward dogs in yoga or burning calories on the elliptical training machines. They also mix it up in intramural sports, cosponsored by Athletics, the Graduate Student Council, and the interhouse committee.

As for major changes, Jack doesn’t anticipate making many, except maybe continuing to draw more diverse users to campus sports and fitness opportunities, “from, literally, the rocket scientist from JPL to the campus custodian.”

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