Lee High’s Derrick Gragg Answers Second Call to be AD at Northwestern

Huntsville’s Derrick Gragg has returned to his professional roots as a collegiate administrator, leaving a senior position at the NCAA offices in Indianapolis to become the athletic director at Northwestern University.

The two-sport Lee High School star and Vanderbilt University wide receiver has spent more than a quarter-century in athletic administration. Except for the most recent nine months with the NCAA, Gragg has made his living on college campuses.

But he’s been an accidental AD.

“I had no intentions of getting involved with college athletics and really backed in,’’ he said between his current and future job. “I didn’t even know there was a path to it other than coaching, which I thought I may want to do. After Vanderbilt, I went to law school at the University of Tennessee for one year and intended to become, of all things, a lawyer in the Marine Corps.

“And then the funny story about that is I heard, and it may have been a rumor, that if you didn’t pass the Bar within your first two times you couldn’t be a lawyer in the Marine Corps, that you’d have to go active duty. That was just something that almost frightened me to death.’’

Gragg returned to Nashville, where his future began to take shape. He talked to Vanderbilt’s athletic academic advisors, and despite hesitation on the administration’s end since Gragg was only 22 or 23 years old, he was given the position of director of student life.

Gragg, who has earned a master’s and a doctorate, the latter from Arkansas, has climbed upward since.

After Vanderbilt, he held an assistant post as director of compliance at Missouri, associate administrative roles at Michigan and Arkansas, and was AD at Eastern Michigan from 2006-13 before taking the same job at Tulsa prior to his move to Indianapolis.

He said the decision to leave the NCAA for Northwestern was difficult. 

Gragg turned down the Wildcats’ first offer.

The school then promoted its deputy athletic director, but he resigned after being named in a sexual assault cover-up. The backlash from that coupled with racism charges in the program led him to resign.

The Big 10 private school came back to Gragg. His wife Sonya urged him to listen, again, and he accepted the offer the second time.

“I’m so passionate about diversity and inclusion first and foremost and I’ve always been involved in that area even during my 26-plus years on campus as an athletic administrator.’’ he said. “It gave me some pause about going back onto campus because I am so passionate about the (inclusive) work.

“But at the end of the day with Northwestern it’s an opportunity that few of us in the profession get, an opportunity to even talk to people much less getting offered. The opportunity is one of the premier institutions in the world. It’s in the top 10 in the United States. And this will probably get me in trouble with the SEC folks, but it’s probably the best conference in the nation top to bottom when you talk about the mix of academics and athletics.’’

Gragg said late Lee High basketball coach Jerry Dugan always supported him as did former Vanderbilt football coach Gerry DiNardo. Gragg said DiNardo “pulled hard’’ for him the year he returned to Vanderbilt from the failed law school attempt and gave him a boost of confidence.

“He thought that I could become an athletic director,” Gragg said. “So before him I had no inclinations. There were not a lot of African Americans who were athletic directors at the time. There are more now. But certainly not many back then.’’

Gragg is Northwestern’s first black AD. Coincidentally another Vanderbilt graduate, Bob Jones alum Candice Story Lee, a year ago became the first black woman to be named AD in the SEC.

Gragg has said it seems like he’s been the “first or only’’ at his career stops. 

But, along with Lee, they’re helping change the landscape.-