Betsy Mitchell: From the Olympics to Caltech
by Andrew Moseman
Last year, Caltech athletics director Betsy Mitchell was inducted into the Southwest Conference Hall of Fame for her accomplishments as a swimmer at the University of Texas. (The conference ceased competition in 1996 when its members joined other conferences, such as the Big XII). In the 1980s, Mitchell was a seven-time individual NCAA champion, two-time NCAA relay champion, and a 20-time all-American who led Texas to NCAA team titles in 1986, 1987, and 1988. She is also a three-time Olympic medalist who represented the United States in 1984 and 1988. At Caltech, Mitchell has overseen a transformation of Beaver athletics, which Caltech magazine has covered in our series of coaching profiles.
Q: Tell us about your journey. What took you from college swimmer and Olympian to Caltech athletics director?
A: I always knew I wanted to do this work. The impact that coaches and administrators had on me all the way through high school, through all of my sports background—they were just the greatest people. When I got to Texas, the athletic director there was Donna Lopiano, who was the major force along with Senator [Birch] Bayh of Indiana to get Title IX passed in our country in 1972. She is just a force of nature. She was providing a great opportunity for young women and for me and my teammates. I thought, boy, I’d like to do that.
And so I set out to be an athletic director. I took sports administration in college. I was a coach for a short period of time after because, in those days, you were going to be on one of two tracks: you were going to be coaching, and then, when you just couldn’t do it anymore, you’d become an athletic director, or you’d come up through an MBA and be on the business side of big-time sports. I didn’t want to do the latter. I wanted to have an impact on young people, so I coached and then became an administrator. But it was because of the people who impacted me.
Q: What does it mean to be an athletic director? What is it like to oversee the athletic department, especially at a place like Caltech?
A: To me, it means being the symbolic reminder that you have to get up and you have to move. It’s good for your body, and what’s good for your body helps your mind be better. I’m the symbolic reminder that play is important to stress relief and health.
One of the reasons I’m here is that I really appreciate that my role takes on three things: intercollegiate athletics, physical education, and then recreation for the whole community. That’s why I was brought here—because this community spoke loud and clearly in a couple of different ways to say that the disrepair the athletic facilities had fallen into was not good enough. Our community needed to improve our facilities and take care of our facilities because the community values recreation. Also, the students had gone to the former president to say we want this to be more valued, specifically the intercollegiate part. We are athletes, and it doesn’t matter how good we are, we want it to be valued, and we wanted to do it in a first-class manner. I was fortunate to be asked to come and help with that.
Everybody is a body, right? We are all a physical manifestation. A lot of our culture and society gets focused on achievement, acquisition, competition in the negative senses of those words—my way, excluding all others—so that if you’re not an NFL quarterback making a hundred million dollars, you’re nothing. And that is just not true.
I just really value the role of health and physical wellness as it relates to all the other parts of one’s life. Again, everybody is a body. We need exercise. We need to push ourselves cardiovascularly. I care more about that than which form it takes. If it’s yoga, great. If it’s martial arts, great. If it’s table tennis, awesome. If it’s intercollegiate athletics, great.
Q: Are people more aware now of the interplay between physical and mental health, and less likely to think that smart people aren’t athletic (or vice versa)?
A: Yes. I was born in the 1960s, and I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, and there was absolutely a cultural revolution around exercise in the ’70s and ’80s. Now, it has shifted to the language around whole-person wellness: this concept of mental, emotional, intellectual, and physical health. The science in the last 30 years proves the theory, from hormones to hormone secretions to cortisol and stress—all of it. What was sort of guessed at in the 1950s and ’60s has been filled in by science.
Caltech is a place of rigor, and with rigor comes stress. And stress is not a dirty word—it’s only bad if it’s bad stress or if you never allow yourself to recover from the stress cycle, and exercise and rest are a part of the stress and recovery cycle.
Q: In our series profiling Caltech coaches, we highlighted several examples of a culture shift in Caltech Athletics in which teams that were essentially noncompetitive became competitive, and players started going into games expecting to do well. What was behind that shift?
A: Valuing it. Standing up and saying, yes, it’s important to you; it’s important to us. And it took motivating, inspiring, supportive staff members who are resilient and gritty themselves who are balanced educators who believe that process is more important than outcome—but that you can’t have outcome without process. It’s the iterative cycle of experimentation, trial and error, success and failure. And that is what the learning curve is.
Q: How do you find that? What do you look for in coaches?
A: Excellent communicators and people who themselves were positively impacted through their athletic experience. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were great athletes, but someone who, like me, had a really positive growth experience with a coach or a teacher, and they want to give that back. That passion, that philosophy has to be there. And people who set and accomplish small goals no matter how small, because that is what moves toward progress, change, maximizing potential.
You look for somebody who can understand, who can deal with defeat, who has self-confidence, and knows that losing doesn’t mean you're a loser and winning doesn’t mean you’re a winner, but that the endeavor, the iteration, the process is where you really become a great person.
Q: How do you recruit players to a place like Caltech?
A: I talk about it with the coaches all the time. The first criterion is to go find Caltech students. We’re the only place in the world that starts with that. Of course, that’s challenging, but it’s part of the secret sauce. But here’s the thing: there are lots and lots and lots of them. No matter what, there are more people that could come to Caltech than we have space for. I’m not just talking about the athletes. This place chooses to keep a small undergraduate population to focus in on a very, very high level of young person. So, always, my first and last advice to the coaches is to go find Caltech students.
Now, the reality is that about half the kids that play on our teams find us. They have Caltech in their sights already, and they’re a baseball player, or they’re a soccer player, or they’re a swimmer. Then we are able to talk with them about Caltech. We know we’re able to describe how our program can assist them as a student here.
Q: Do you still swim?
A: No.
Q: Not at all?
A: I have swum in the last two years, but probably twice. There are so many other things to do now: walk, garden, golf, paddleboard, pickleball. I ride my bike, I travel. I also think that in another 20 years, I’ll probably be back in the pool because that may be all I can do! So, I better do other stuff while I can.
Q: What is different and what is the same about the student–athlete experience compared to when you were competing?
A: I was a student-athlete on a scholarship at Texas. I coached two sports at two Ivy League schools. I was a high school athletic director, and now I’ve been a college NCAA Division III athletic director at two different places. You know, the vast majority of college student-athletes compete in Division III. And I’m here to tell you that done well, it’s the same endeavor. It’s for young people who are in college, who play sports for stress relief, who have real athletic and competitive goals, who have a self-identity as an athlete to do it as well as you can do it while you’re going to school. That’s exactly what I did.