Celine Cunningham is Dickinson College’s new Director of Athletics (AD). Cunningham has a storied career in sports, including playing lacrosse at University of Maryland and winning a national championship there. The new AD has a lot of coaching experience and she brings a competitive nature to the position that comes from a life in sports.
Cunningham had Dickinson on her radar before her employment due to working for other Division Three athletic departments. Cunningham remarked, “I was always very familiar with really competitive academic and athletics programs in D3 and I had recognized Dickinson as being one of them.”
Cunningham made her priorities clear from the start of the interview: “I’m uber-competitive, love to win, I understand that there’s, you know, a process, not necessarily the outcome, but there is a reason we keep score. There’s a reason athletes get up early and train and recruit as hard as they do, because they want to have success.”
Cunningham wants to win and wants to provide student-athletes with opportunities to succeed. She has ideas on how to make her lofty goals come true.
Cunningham’s coaching experience and familiarity with the difficulties coaches face should make her a great resource for Dickinson coaches. “I want to make sure our coaches are in a place to be successful and they have the support they need…I’m the coach of the coaches. I understand the challenges they have, I understand what they are trying to do,” she said.
“I want to support our coaches. I want to be in a place where every team has an Assistant Coach as a full time position. I think that is so important for the student athlete experience and in supporting our coaches,” she explained. Cunningham knows that goal is will be tough to achieve, but somewhere down the line the hope is too expand each coaching department.
Cunningham has other, more aspirational plans to improve the Athletics Department. Her long term vision is to ideally have “a peak performance program… nutritionist, strength and conditioning coach, sports psychologist all work together working with sleep, nutrition, how you fuel yourself, how we make sure that we are taking care of our injuries. That would all be under the umbrella of the sports medicine staff of building this peak performance.”
Dickinson teams have had success with sports psychologists in the past. This would be expensive, but Cunningham hopes that, in the future, the Athletic Department will make big strides.
The Instagram accounts for Dickinson athletic programs have clearly taken a real step forward in the first few months of Cunningham’s tenure. Cunningham is all about modernizing the Dickinson sports brand. About social media she said, “I think we have to talk about our brand and that is part of our brand. You know I talk to the athletes about how important it is in how we represent ourselves…That is another place where I would love to build a staff.”
It is clear that the improvement in social media is not just for the sake of looking better.
“That’s how you communicate right now and that’s how you can get recruits to come and understand the value of a Dickinson education and the excitement around Dickinson athletics,” she said. Dickinson Athletics has upped the quality of their social media, and it does paint a picture of Dickinson as a serious sports institution.
Dickinson sports has been open to the community for a while, but Cunningham wants Dickinson to have a more clear plan of how to work with the Carlisle local community. Cunningham and others in the Athletics department hope for more engagement between Dickinson and the community; in turn, they hope to create a Carlisle community that cares about Dickinson Atheltics. Just in the past week, The Football team, Men’s Lacrosse and Men’s Soccer teams all have hosted community events.
Cunningham has already begun implementing some of her plans, and the big goals for Dickinson Athletics will hopefully improve the program in years to come.