Today we’d like to introduce you to Betsy Mitchell. They and their team shared their story with us below:
Betsy Mitchell is a former Olympic swimmer who serves as a service-oriented educational leader, speaker, and collegiate athletic director. A world record-holder, world champion and Olympic gold and silver medalist, Betsy has also served as a successful collegiate swimming coach as well as a high school athletic director and consultant.
While Olympic success would define many athletic careers, Betsy readily shares that her fondest memories of her swimming career were as an age-group swimmer and as a collegiate swimmer. Betsy began her competitive swimming journey at the age of five as a member of the Marietta, Ohio YMCA’s Marietta Marlins swim team before she attended Mercersburg Academy in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where she continued competitive swimming during her high school years. She graduated from Mercersburg in 1983 and remains passionately involved with the Academy, having served as a longtime member of its Board of Regents.
Following high school, Betsy attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she competed for the North Carolina Tar Heels swimming and diving team during her first year there, for the 1983–84 NCAA season.
At the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Betsy won a silver medal for her second-place performance in the women’s 100-meter backstroke, finishing with a time of 1:02.63. She also earned a gold medal by swimming the backstroke leg for the winning U.S. team in the preliminary heats of the women’s 4×100-meter medley relay.
After the 1984 Olympics, Mitchell transferred to the University of Texas at Austin and swam for the Texas Longhorns swimming and diving team from 1985 to 1988. She won nine NCAA individual titles in addition to leading the Longhorns to four straight NCAA national championship teams from 1985-88.
While a college student, Betsy competed at the 1986 World Championships, where she set the American and world record in the 200-meter backstroke (2:08.60); that world record stood for five years, while the American record stood for 19 years. Swimming World Magazine named her as its American Female Swimmer of the Year in 1986.
She received the Honda Sports Award for Swimming and Diving, recognizing her as the outstanding college female swimmer of the year in 1987–88. She was inducted into the Texas Longhorns Hall of Honor in 2000.
In 1988, Betsy competed at the Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, where she earned a silver medal for swimming the backstroke leg for the second-place U.S. team in the women’s 4×100-meter medley relay in the preliminary heats. Individually, she also swam in the final of the women’s 100-meter backstroke, finishing fourth in the final with a time of 1:02.71.
At the conclusion of her swimming career, Betsy served as the Women’s Swimming coach at Dartmouth College from 1990 to 1996, where she took up the sport of rowing for fun and to stay in shape — two years later, she represented the United States at the 1994 World Championships of Rowing in the women’s double scull.
In 1998, she was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame as an “Honor Swimmer.”
Since that time, Betsy has been a passionate advocate for the developmental benefit of youth and college sports women in leadership and is leading the conversation about the state of college sports in the United States, which, she advocates, is in desperate need of a rebranding and reframing of the role athletics play on college and university campuses. She has twice been a high school athletic director — Laurel School for Girls in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and Thomas Worthington High School in Worthington, Ohio — and is now on her second collegiate directorship after becoming the Athletic Director at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania from 2006 to 2011.
Betsy is called to serve and contribute to her community in many ways. Currently, she is a politically appointed member of the Pasadena Parks and Recreation Commissioner. She has also been a longstanding member of the Board of Trustees of her beloved prep school, Mercersburg Academy, serving since 1993. Additionally, she belongs to groups that support amateur sports and women’s leadership initiatives, such as Women Leaders in Sport, Women in Sports and Events, and SheAngels.
While not at work, you can find her walking her yellow lab, Bella, cultivating her garden, or adventuring around the world. These days, her athletic pursuits are confined to hiking, biking, gardening, pickleball, paddleboarding, and golf.
My first book, More Than Medals coming out on May 30, 2024! Available paperback, e-reader, audio book through Amazon.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Sports are great for kids, and games are for fun! But in the United States, over the last 30 years, we have severely damaged our youth and educational sport culture with the fantasy of monetizing and external reward for those who are good at sports. This creates a false dichotomy between playing for joy fueled by an educational intrinsic motivation and playing for infamy creating external pressures and often negative personal outcomes.
Youth sports are over everything! Specialized, monetized, pressurized, we must protect our children more from growing up too fast. Parents and coaches must do better.
College sports are on the very precipice of breaking, for no good reason! Greed and lack of integrity by a few have allowed this uniquely American awesome educational construct to spin out of control and launch an unsustainable top class while pushing the sane majority of small schools to the brink of extinction. College sports were created to enhance the educational mission, and now the tail is wagging the dog right into the doghouse!
The Olympic movement has intensified from its mythical and idealistic roots into a pseudo-geo-political cultural war. It has professionalized and over-commercialized the specialness away from its beautiful amateur roots. The human performance feats are incredible and pure, but the connection to commercialization has created conditions that tarnish the shine.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Betsy is currently the Director of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation – the first woman to hold that position – at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), in Pasadena, California. She has led a complete renovation of the intercollegiate athletic program at the world’s most rigorous STEM-focused university. The 16 teams at Caltech were best known for long losing streaks prior to Mitchell’s arrival. The overall department winning percentage was .001, and twelve years later has crested to .375. (a respectable batting average!) Several teams have reached .500, and the momentum is still growing. The Caltech athletic program is the best of educational sports and a shining example of the scholar-athlete model. The goal is competing hard and winning, but the reason for playing is to learn applicable life skills, providing fun and stress relief for the amazing amateur scholar-athletes. A complete facility renovation program, overhaul of the Physical Education graduation requirement and providing recreational opportunities for the entire academic community round out her duties.
What matters most to you? Why?
Kindness matters, Education matters. Personal striving to be the best version of oneself matters.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.betsymitchell.us
