In February, sophomore Smeena Gill was calling races as a coxswain for the Ithaca College women’s rowing and sculling team. After walking on as a first-year student, Gill quickly rose through the team’s ranks. She went from being the novice eight’s coxswain to calling the shots for the second varsity eight boat during Fall 2025.
While rowing and pursuing a degree in sports management, Gill helped manage the Bombers men’s basketball team, maintained her responsibilities as an MLK Scholar, and acted as one of the social media managers for the School of Business. From the outside, everything seemed to be trending upward.
Which is why it came as a shock to the coaching staff when she decided to step away from the program.
“It took a lot of time and a lot of deliberation to think through it and make sure that’s what I wanted to do,” Gill said. “I thought about [leaving] my freshman year in the spring, but I stayed for my teammates and stayed for myself, just to test it out and persevere, but I decided in the end that I needed to think for myself and make the hard decision.”
Gill cited a few reasons for making the decision. Above all else, she said she found juggling her academic and athletic responsibilities left her unable to enjoy any aspect of her college experience. As conversations around student-athlete mental health continue to become more normalized, recognition of burnout and its sources also becomes more common. In 2023, the NCAA’s Student-Athlete Health and Wellness Study found that 47% of female Division III student-athletes surveyed felt overwhelmed by the amount of work they had to do “constantly” or “mostly every day,” while 36% reported they felt mentally exhausted.
Rowers and scullers also face a unique workload compared to most college athletes. Unlike almost every other collegiate sport, rowing has both a fall and spring season, requiring intense year-round training. Beth Greene ’00, current head coach of the women’s rowing and sculling team, said specifics make things difficult for walk-ons.
“There’s huge attrition in rowing,” Greene said. “We have a novice walk-on program … It’s college, it’s a new place. [Sometimes] they find other things, and now they have to prioritize their own time, and that’s hard.”
For some, the end of a playing career does not necessitate the end of involvement in the sports industry. Greene was a four-year rower and All-American for the Bombers and rowed for nearly a decade after graduation, including National Team Selection Regattas for both the 2003 Pan American Games and the 2004 Olympic Games. Eventually, she saw the writing on the wall for her time in the boat and joined the Bombers women’s sculling and rowing staff in 2009, working under long-time IC head coach Becky Robinson.
“I don’t feel like I ever really left the sport,” Greene said. “Because I did start coaching pretty soon after I stopped training, and it was because I knew I loved the sport.”
Greene said that Gill not only excelled in her leadership duties as a coxswain but also demonstrated emotional maturity when dealing with multiple people and situations at once, something she believed translated very well to Gill’s ambitions of becoming an athletic director. While Greene’s love of sport has grown into a fruitful coaching career, Gill’s has manifested in a different section of the industry.
“The athletic director at my high school was talking to me, said that she saw me taking her job one day, and that she was a sport management major in her undergrad and master’s program,” Gill said. “I wanted to be in sports somehow; I like sports, I like writing, I like the business side of the industry.”
Gill said that Ithaca College’s sports management program was what made her enroll in the first place, and the moment she arrived on campus, she made her presence felt. In addition to winning a Liberty League Championship on the staff of the 2024-25 Ithaca College men’s basketball team, Gill was also one of the presenters during the 2025 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Campus-Wide Celebration Week.
With her experience and traits, she landed a game operations internship at an Atlantic Coast Conference school.
Duke University has 27 varsity teams under the school’s athletic department, managed at the ground level by a staff of about 15 people. Several Ithaca College students have come through the program over the last few years, and Gill was chosen out of a competitive pool of candidates for the summer of 2025. Under the supervision of Antoine Brown, assistant director of Game Operations and Campus Events at Duke, Gill had to be responsible for helping out whichever team needed her, and he said that she excelled in her role.
“It’s rare,” Brown said. “Most of the time, we hire juniors and seniors, but she was so polished as a freshman that I was like, ‘OK, no, we give her an opportunity,’ and she proved me right with that. The sky’s the limit for her.”
Similar to Greene, Brown was a four-year Division II college basketball player for the New York Institute of Technology before an injury cut his playing days short. After a few years in the workforce, Brown decided to go back to school and earned his master’s degree in sports administration from St. Thomas University in Miami. Post-graduation, he worked in several different game and event management roles across universities and professional teams along the East Coast before eventually settling down at Duke.
“I tried a bunch of different things, but sports have always been my safe haven, and just loving being a part of a team,” Brown said. “There’s no specific path you have to take to become an athletic director like [Gill] wants to do. Everyone’s path is different.”
Gill had nothing but good things to say when reminiscing about her time working with the Duke Blue Devils. She said it made her discover her passion for what she wanted to do with her life and career.
“It made me realize that I want to work in facility and game [operations], which is a really cool place to be,” Gill said. “I’ve been able to use the lessons that I learned this past summer and bring them to managing the basketball team here.”
Few students who walk away from college sports ever rejoin as players. Greene recalled seeing people who had burned out to the point of permanently losing their joy for sports. Instead, Gill has turned her passion for sports into pursuing a professional career directing programs. It began with a collegiate career directing boats and a level of confidence she carried before even enrolling.
“My dad and I, when we toured, we had this mutual agreement of like, ‘I can run this school,’” Gill said. “If I’m confident enough, if I’m at the top of my game, and I make the most of every experience. People will know who I am, people will know my name, and so I believe that I’ve made the most of that experience. … [I’m] still growing while I’m here, but also making more opportunities for myself.”