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She didn’t know it at the time, but Keli Zinn’s persistence on a youth baseball team foreshadowed her future as one of the nation’s top executives in college athletics.
An exceptional youth athlete, Zinn was the first girl in rural Grant County, West Virginia, to compete on a boys’ baseball team when there were no options for girls. She went on to letter in three varsity sports and earned the sole Athlete of the Year award at her high school—the first female to do so.
Zinn would make a career out of athletics, but not before serious soul searching. After high school, she left her small hometown of Petersburg and enrolled at West Virginia University.
Read “Voices of Influence: Keli Zinn”
for more of her personal and professional insights.
It was a tough transition. While a lauded tennis player, she lacked the talent to play in Division 1 competition. With her identity as an athlete jettisoned, she felt adrift. Her grades suffered and she struggled to find a suitable major.
An insightful academic adviser finally tapped into her personal passions and recommended Zinn try WVU’s sports management curriculum.
“I didn’t even know that option existed at the time,” Zinn says. “But just being in any way associated with the world of sports sounded good.”
It was a game changer. She loved her courses.
Accustomed to juggling part-time jobs to pay expenses, Zinn sought work in WVU’s athletic department. No paid positions were available but she volunteered for more than a year, taking on any task. Eventually, the associate athletic director for governance and compliance recognized Zinn’s commitment and offered her a job. The hook was set. Zinn found her calling.
Passion bred momentum, and new opportunities presented themselves. Upon graduation, the WVU athletic department offered Zinn a graduate assistantship with free tuition toward a master’s degree. The financial stability was appealing, but she turned it down to accept a paid internship with the Big East Conference. Success there led to full-time opportunities with the University of Maryland athletic department.
Within six months, she was offered the number three job in the department and worked as an assistant athletic director for the next five years.
With her stock on the rise, West Virginia recruited her back. Zinn rose through the ranks at WVU, becoming a deputy athletic director and continuing to develop a name for herself among the community of athletic department executives across college sports. LSU Athletic Director Scott Woodward got wind of her accomplishments and extended her an offer in 2022 to be his COO.
“I’m grateful to Scott for taking a chance on a young lady from West Virginia,” Zinn says. “The job is everything I’d hoped it would be and more because the people are just tremendous.”
Zinn works on both external and internal operations at LSU, an appealing split lens for someone with sights set on ultimately becoming an athletic director. No, it doesn’t bother her in the least that she’s one of the few women in the field.
In her three years at LSU, Zinn has tackled some of the most dynamic issues affecting college athletics today, including an ever-shifting NIL landscape as well as a new revenue-sharing mandate that has schools like LSU paying out $20.5 million to athletes this year. Zinn’s ongoing focus has been to find new ways to maximize revenue through renegotiating contracts, new sponsorships and stronger fan engagement.
No question, sports is a business. But it’s something else besides, Zinn says.
“It’s one of the significant unifiers across all walks of life—young, old, Black, white, male, female,” she says. “There’s not a lot in our world that can bring people together in a place of joy, excitement and passion like that.”
