What does it take to develop leaders inside a college athletics department — and what happens when the people doing that work need developing too?
In this episode of the Leading the Pack Speaker Series, BIOS Director Peter Miller sits down with Cassaundra Thorpe, Associate Director of Leadership and Inclusion at UW-Madison Athletics, for a grounded and candid conversation about student-athlete development.
Thorpe’s path into the field is worth knowing before you press play. A four-year basketball player at Saint Anselm College, she left as a senior determined not to let other athletes face the identity challenges she had navigated on her own. That conviction took her to Springfield College, then Xavier, Cincinnati, Kent State, and eventually Madison — where she has spent nearly a decade building programming at the intersection of leadership, inclusion, and student-athlete support.
“There’s a lot of staff that pour so much into our students that they need to be poured into,” Thorpe says. “How do you develop the staff so they can be better at their jobs — but also have the skills to move up in whatever way they want?”
About Cassaundra Thorpe
Cassaundra Thorpe is Associate Director of Leadership and Inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she first joined the staff as Career & Leadership Coordinator in 2017 and was promoted to Assistant Director for Career & Leadership in 2019. She serves as advisor to the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee (SAAC), leads the department’s Leadership Retreat and Leadership Institute, and oversees its mentorship program. She manages operations in the Student-Athlete Development Programs and Practices committee of the National Association of Academic and Student-Athlete Development Professionals (N4A) and is a member of the Minority Opportunities Athletic Association (MOAA). Prior to Wisconsin, she was an Athletic Academic Counselor at Kent State University and, before that, Director of Student-Athlete Development at the University of Cincinnati, following a post-graduate internship at Xavier University. She earned her degree in Athletic Counseling from Springfield College and her B.A. in Psychology from Saint Anselm College, where she played basketball for four years.
This conversation was recorded when Cassaundra served as Assistant Director for Career & Leadership.