They were coming from their home in Fostoria in northwest Ohio to Wright State University for the graduation ceremony of the fourth daughter, Joylynn.
She was the first person in the family to go to college and the first athlete — male or female — from little Hopewell-Loudon High to ever have received a Division I athletic scholarship.
She’d just finished a memorable volleyball career at WSU that had included All-North Star Conference honors and now was serving a final quarter as a student assistant coach with the team.
A few days before the commencement, Joylynn had gone with the Raiders team to the National Invitational Volleyball Championship in Kansas City. After four matches in two days, she was planning to fly back into Dayton just in time for the ceremony and a family celebration that was planned afterward.
“But I got fogged in and wasn’t going to make the connection and get back in time,” she said. “I knew my parents were looking forward to seeing me graduate.
“We’re a blue collar, working family — my dad was a pipe fitter at Columbus Gas and my mom worked in a factory and waitressed several years — and this was a big deal for them.”
Last Tuesday — 3 ½ decades later — Joylynn Brown more than made up for that disappointment when she was named the fourth athletics director in Wright State history and the first woman ever to hold the position.
Both of her parents — now in their early 80s — shared the historic moment.
“The first call I made was to my mom,” she said as she sat in her third-floor office that looks out over the Nutter Center court. “She was real proud.
“And my dad has called me twice in the last two days just to chat. He’s thrilled.”
Her parents should feel an emotional overload from all this because in the 3 ½ decades between the fogged-out graduation and this AD ascension, Joylynn has experienced great achievement, foundation-rattling disappointments and a remarkable ability to endure each.
That’s led to this glorious affirmation of who she is and just what she can do.
And she’s done a lot.
After being a college athlete, she was a college coach and for the past decade she’s been a college administrator.
Along with that, she’s also managed an Elder Beerman store, painted murals throughout the Miami Valley and been a realtor.
She initially married a fellow WSU athlete and then coach, Mike Tracy.
They later divorced, and for the past 10 years she’s been married to Mark Brown, now the Director of Security Services for the Greene County Juvenile Courts. She has two grown stepdaughters.
With Tracy, she co-parented their son, Mattaus, who was a soccer player of note at Carroll High, graduated from Ohio State, and now, at age 23, lives and works in Cincinnati.
All those life experiences have helped prepare her for her new job, though she’s quick to redirect the spotlight off any gender qualifier.
“I’m an athletics director … who just happens to be a woman,” she said.
And yet it’s worth noting there aren’t a lot of women who can say that.
There are 363 NCAA Division I schools, and just 15 percent of them have women athletics directors.
“I think there’s just over 50,” Brown said.
“But our conference (Horizon League) is a rarity. Five of our schools have ADs who are women, and our league commissioner is a woman, too.”
She said Wright State’s a rarity, too: “Our president’s a woman and our provost is too. There are a lot of people I can look to now and say, ‘OK, they’re doing it.’”
What adds real credence to her career rise is that she hasn’t traveled an easy path.
Although she was an all-conference player as a senior, she didn’t play as a WSU freshman and very little as a sophomore. “I wasn’t good enough,” she admitted.
As the Raiders head volleyball coach, she was named the Horizon League Coach of the Year in 2001. But just three years later — after her team went 4-26 — she said: “I resigned ahead of losing my job.
“I knew it was time. I knew I needed to get away from coaching, but in doing that, I lost some of my identity. It was a tough time.”
Regardless of the emotional and financial pressures she faced, she said she did everything she could so it would not impact her young son:
“I remember I was out to dinner with a friend during all this and she said, ‘I don’t understand it. How are you still so happy? Look at all you’ve gone through.’
“After she named all the negatives, I said, ‘Look, I don’t have a choice. I’m not pulling the covers over my head. I have a son who needs me. I need to move forward.’ “I’ve always tried to have a fighter’s instinct. I give myself one day to feel bad and then I need to get over it.
“When you press on, it’s amazing how far you can go.”
‘Showed leadership from the beginning’
Hopewell-Loudon is a small Seneca County school in Bascom — population 287 — that’s between Fostoria and Tiffin.
Brown said she had “around 75″ in her graduation class.
Most of the Mosier girls were noted athletes, but while the others got jobs after high school, Joylynn, who’d gotten all state volleyball honors, received some college offers.
“I visited Bowling Green and then Linda Schoenstedt, Wright State’s coach, came up and I was invited to visit Wright State,” she said.
“From the very first minute I walked into Joylynn’s home and met her family, it seemed very clear that she had a lot going for her,” Dr. Schoenstedt, now a professor of sports management, marketing and administration at Xavier University, said Friday.
“When I recruited her, I knew Joylynn was a great volleyball player and I figured she could help us continue with the success that Peg Wynkoop (WSU first volleyball coach and later a top administrator) had started.
“I was just trying to find the very best volleyball players, but with Joylynn I got a big bonus.
“She walked into the program and showed leadership from the beginning. She had something extra. She had personality and drive and energy.
“She’s a natural born leader.”
Just as Joylynn surprised Schoenstedt, Wright State surprised Joylynn:
“I liked Wright State because it was different. It had a modern feel, a newness to it. And I loved the city of Dayton. Coming from where I did, Dayton was a big city.”
Although she didn’t play as a freshman, she always put on a show in warmups.
“She was the hardest hitter on the team by far and we probably got three points without doing a thing because the other team was watching how hard she swung at the ball while warming up.” Schoenstedt said.
After coming into her own as a junior and senior and then serving as a student assistant, Joylynn left WSU and spent 18 months as an assistant manager of an Elder Beerman store in Defiance.
She was coaxed back to WSU by coach Steve Opperman, who had taken over the program after Schoenstedt had gone to Iowa, where she soon was named Big Ten Coach of the Year.
After serving as an assistant from 1996-1998, Joylynn became the Raiders head coach and went 92-115 in seven seasons, the last three after giving birth to Mattaus.
When she left coaching, she began to draw on the self-taught artistic talent she’d shown in high school and painted murals in businesses, people’s homes and around the WSU campus.
She especially did murals in kids’ rooms and at day care centers.
Often she painted scenes from story books, fairy tales and nursery rhymes.
She mentioned doing “Hey Diddle Diddle” images like the cow jumping over the moon and the dish running away with the spoon.
As for coaching, she ended up guiding her son’s seventh-grade volleyball team at Ascension.
“During one game, a woman official came past and said, ‘Wait, weren’t you coaching at Wright State?’” Brown said with a laugh. “I said, ‘Yeah, and clearly you can see my career is going in the right direction!’”
‘A special place for me’
In 2014, WSU athletics director Bob Grant asked her to return to the school in an administrative role.
Initially she thought, “There’s no way!”
But as she talked with Grant, she said she quickly learned “he wasn’t looking for someone who knew all the exact paperwork or the ins and outs of compliance.
“He wanted someone who cared about the student athletes, someone who cared about the school. And I did.
“Wright State has always been a special place for me. Going back to my days as an athlete here, it’s felt like I was part of something bigger.”
Grant’s motto was PSA.
“The person first; the student second; and the athlete third,” Brown explained.
As she moved into administration, she drew on the work ethic she learned from her parents and the examples she saw from Wynkoop and Schoenstedt.
“When I was a student athlete, Peg was here,” Brown said, “What a woman! She had such a calming effect.
“When things weren’t going well, I could walk in to see her and immediately I felt calm and safe. I remember thinking, ‘If I’m ever in some leadership role, that’s the kind of leader I want to be.’
“And Linda fought for us and because of it, we were treated very, very well.
“She treated us like adults and didn’t babysit us. We worked real hard and went to school, but she let us grow up on our own and figure out life and I appreciated that.”
Grant was a mentor, as well, and over the years she gained more and more responsibility at WSU.
She’s had direct oversight of almost every men’s and women’s team at WSU and has been on various search committees for coaches. She led the one that recently tapped WSU basketball assistant Clint Sargent to replace Scott Nagy.
She was the deputy director of athletics and the Senior Women’s Administrator at WSU until taking over the interim AD job in April when Grant retired.
She talked about some of the issues facing college athletics these days, including the transfer portal, NIL, and gender equality.
Although she said it sometimes seems a school like WSU “is a training ground for bigger schools,” she noted this year the Raiders retained 88 percent of their athletes from the lure of the portal:
“That’s a high number, but we’ve tried to make this a positive experience for all our athletes. Hopefully that makes it a difficult decision for them to want to leave.”
Although three years ago Wright State lost two of its highest profile athletes when basketball players Tanner Holden and Grant Basile opted for Power 5 schools, she said both still consider themselves Raiders.
Holden returned to WSU after one disappointing season at Ohio State and though Basile starred at Virginia Tech, he got his undergrad degree at Wright State and returns to the school often.
When Brown was named the new AD, one of the first congratulatory texts came from Basile.
As for ensuring gender equality, Brown witnessed firsthand the difference in treatment of women and men at the NCAA Tournament a few years ago.
The WSU women played in Texas and everything from the support facilities they got to use to the swag bags they were given didn’t match what the Raiders men got when they played in Indianapolis.
The women’s goodie bags contained hair ties while the men got things like video games. She said the men got several meals and at night could order Wendy’s bags of food that were delivered to their door. The women got one meal.
That year the women, unlike the men, couldn’t even use term “March Madness” to promote their tournament.
Brown has worked to make experiences better for all athletes and noted how various Raiders teams have excelled recently.
Volleyball and baseball are now regular NCAA Tournament teams. Golf won the Horizon League crown. Women’s basketball has solidified. Soccer’s getting a new turf field, as is the WSU football field, which is used by the general student population.
Recently, club sports were added under the athletic department umbrella.
The last time Schoenstedt saw Brown was at a Xavier-Wright State volleyball match at the Cintas Center.
“That must have been some kind of foretelling.” she laughed. “I had a vintage Wright State lapel pin from the late 1980s and it had been in my jewelry box all this time. I gave it to her that day and now I feel like it was a symbolic passing of the torch.”
While Brown feels the same, she admits some people who remember her as a wide-eyed freshman out of Hopewell-Loudon are surprised:
“One of my college friends sent me a message and said, ‘If you would have told me freshman year that you would be the AD…!’”
She finished his thought: “And I said, ‘Yeah, we would have laughed and laughed.’
“But while it’s a little mind blowing to me, I’m thankful I’m here. And I know I’m prepared to lead this department. I’m ready.”
Well, almost ready.
She still plans to paint a mural on a wall in her office.
“I think it’ll be a landscape,” she said. “Maybe a mountain lake.”
While that seems fine, a story book theme or a scene from a nursey rhyme seems more apropos.
After all, Joylynn Brown’s story book ascension truly has been over the moon.
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