Danielle Bartelstein keeps Virginia Tech football running
BLACKSBURG, Va. — If Danielle Bartelstein does her job well on Saturday — the way she fully intends to — no one watching Virginia Tech take on No. 14 Tennessee at Bristol Motor Speedway will have any idea who she is.
Bartelstein, the Hokies’ director of football operations, hopes that all of the logistical questions tied to an unfamiliar football venue will be asked and answered by the time game day rolls around. She and her counterpart at Tennessee have had a handful of operational meetings and tours of the racetrack, preparing themselves for this moment.
For example, coaches’ boxes have been constructed but are significantly farther from the field than usual. Fences of the speedway have had to be cut down in order for teams to walk to their locker rooms. The design and locations of each team’s locker room has been organized for some time.
“But you have to take into account that, really for the most part, we’re in a tire shop,” Bartelstein said. “We have to transform that into a locker room, a training room, showers, bathrooms that are actually usable for a football game.”
“We definitely have a setup that will be unique, but it will be operational and functional.”
Saturday’s game is Bartelstein’s second at Virginia Tech; first-year head coach Justin Fuente hired her in December, making her the only female director of football operations at a Power Five program at the time. This summer, Washington head coach Chris Petersen promoted Deborah Goldstein to the same role with the Huskies, making her the second.
Both women acknowledge how rare they are in their field, and they also understand that the evolution of the position itself might allow for more women in the future. Or, at the very least, gender being a nonfactor in making hiring decisions.
For now, though, there are plans to touch up, problems to be troubleshooted and a game to play.
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“Millions of people are going to turn on television set and watch it and think how cool that is, but Danielle's dealing with things that nobody else is thinking about,” said Mike Sinquefeld, TCU's senior associate athletic director for internal affairs and Bartelstein’s former boss and mentor. “What are the logistics into the stadium? And police escorts? And where are the locker rooms? The distance from locker room to field … and all the things that nobody else is thinking about. How do you get a postgame meal in to the kids after the game?
“The average Joe watching TV has zero clue what an operations person does — and that's good. We don't want them to know because if they know then something went wrong.”
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Bartelstein’s first foray into college football came as a student at Illinois, where she worked in the recruiting office first under Ron Turner and then Ron Zook. She eventually expanded her role and helped with summer camps, too.
“It doesn't surprise me that she's where she is,” Zook said. “She’s relentlessly positive. She's got great work ethic, and she's a team player. Whether it be recruiting or camps or whatever mailings that had to go out, she was going to be involved and she wanted to know everything about the process — which was kind of neat.
“She's not the type of person who's going to say, ‘That's not my job, it doesn't matter.’ If it needs to be done, she's going to do it. If she doesn't know how to do it she's going to find out how to do it and get it done. Those are the kind of people that you want around you.”
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After graduation, Bartelstein took a teaching job in the Bay Area, preparing herself to teach elementary school and simply enjoy college football as a fan.
But something was missing.
“I didn't realize how much it was ingrained in my life,” Bartelstein said. “I feel like athletics filled a void in my life where it was the atmosphere and the energy and excitement that surrounded college football, but then beyond that. ... There's so much not only discipline, but team work that goes along with it, and unity.
“You're a part of something bigger than yourself.”
Bartelstein applied for a job at Stanford and eventually started running camps for summer camp enthusiast Jim Harbaugh. Her role there evolved, and a turning point in her career came as she traveled with the operations staff to the Sun Bowl.
Soon, she moved to TCU as the assistant director of football operations, working for Sinquefield and closely with head coach Gary Patterson. She also overlapped with Fuente, then TCU’s co-offensive coordinator, who would eventually call her to join him in Blacksburg.
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“At that time, there wasn't a female in the room when we sat down in a staff meeting which we'd do daily,” Sinquefield said of hiring Bartelstein. “How would that affect dynamics? Would it be a positive? Would it be a negative? Would it be a nonfactor? … I liked her. I liked what people said about her. I thought it was the right fit. We made the commitment and brought her here and the only thing I asked her to do was prove me right. It's easy for me now to look back year and year and she did all that and more.
“She was always hungry for more and more responsibility, and every time I gave her an inch, she took a yard and did great job with it. It was a natural progression.”
After TCU, Bartelstein worked at Texas Tech under coach Kliff Kingsbury. Then, she left athletics to take a job as a senior adviser for the Austin-based law firm of former U.S. Congressman and former Texas Tech chancellor Kent Hance.
Until Fuente called — not for an interview, but with an offer.
“He asked me, ‘How's the job going?’ and I was like, ‘It's good,’ Bartelstein said, laughing. “He's like, ‘Tell me you hate it.’ ”
She didn’t, but she was ready to come back to college athletics after her brief hiatus. She did not hesitate.
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Bartelstein describes her job at Virginia Tech as a dream come true.
This is not a stepping stone; she does not want to become a position coach next. This is not an end-of-career job, the way some older coaches have used the role in the past at various programs. This is part of the evolution of the director of football operations position — a job that values, above all else, administrative organization and hard work.
And for women who want to merge their love for college football with a career in athletics, there were previously few options beyond secretarial positions. Women who work in operations can add a different dimension to a staff, too, Sinquefield said. He described how TCU learned how beneficial it was for recruits and their mothers to see Bartelstein’s involvement in staff meetings, and what it meant for a woman to have a seat at those tables and involvement in those conversations.
Bartelstein and Goldstein, at Washington, have experienced that, and they’ve also given examples of players feeling comfortable coming to talk to them instead of position coaches about personal problems they were facing. That’s in addition to the myriad administrative and operational tasks built in to the role itself.
“Danielle does everything,” Fuente said. “She touches every aspect of the program. Basically, when our kids get here and get enrolled, and then dorm issues, or academics … all that sort of stuff, she becomes the kind of primary contact for all of that. Everything that involves not playing the game. Whether that's travel situation, or functions that we have that aren't related, that aren't recruiting functions, but maybe are community service functions. She's the No. 1 point person for almost everybody across campus in terms of dealing with our kids. It’s pretty valuable. It's hard to do much without a really, really competent person in that spot.”
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As college football staff sizes balloon — Alabama’s announcement this week of former USC coach Steve Sarkisian gives Nick Saban at least 21 staff members that are tied to operations, recruiting or analyst positions — the operations position has shifted.
“It’s changed now with all the different positions,” TCU head coach Gary Patterson said. “It used to be when we had smaller numbers, that person had to do everything that football operation person needs help with, plus recruiting. Now, you have high school relations people. You have quality control people.
“It used to be maybe you'd put a guy that wanted to coach some day (in an ops role), but that's not what that position is anymore.”
Sinquefield, who began at TCU as an equipment manager and held the director of ops role under Patterson for more than a decade, believes it’s helped him that he has had no interest in coaching.
“I wanted to do what I can to allow coaches to do what they do best and that's coach and recruit,” Sinquefield. “My role let me handle the logistics stuff and the things that those guys didn't need to worry about so they can concentrate your time and efforts on doing those things.”
“You’re starting to see some of that shift a little bit — there are more people now in operations that that's their goal and aspiration. Their goal isn't that, ‘Now I'm coming out of coaching for many years and I'm looking for a retirement path,’ or B, ‘I want to be a coach and that's my first opportunity in.’ ”
The key for success in a supporting role, Sinquefield said, is to be the kind of person who takes satisfaction in knowing he or she contributed a small part to the success on the field.
For Bartelstein, that’s also the same way she approaches her role as a woman in an industry dominated by men.
“A lot of people want to make something out of the fact that I'm a woman in this role, and I understand,” she said. “If me being in this role creates other women in this role, that would be fantastic. If people see me in this role and think, ‘OK, that's something that I'm interested in and that's a path I want to take,’ that's wonderful. But I don't necessarily think about it on a daily basis.”
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