On a day when a disgraced men’s basketball coach was reported to be on the interview list for the Celtics head coaching job, the University of Pennsylvania hired his former supervisor as its new athletic director.
Just three months shy of the announcement that Grace Calhoun would be leaving Penn for Brown, her alma mater, Dr. Alanna Shanahan, a 1996 Penn graduate, was named Calhoun’s replacement on June 2. Shanahan, a one-time captain and MVP of the lacrosse team, began a nineteen year association with the department as an assistant and interim head coach for her former program.
After moving up the ranks as an assistant, associate and senior associate athletic director, Shanahan was named executive director of the Penn Relays in 2011, as well as the deputy director of athletics and senior women’s administrator in 2012. She held those position until she left the Red & Blue in the summer of 2016 to become director of athletics and recreation at Johns Hopkins University.
In her deputy director role, according to university officials, she managed all aspects of Penn’s “33-sport intercollegiate athletics program–with direct oversight of the football, basketball, and lacrosse programs—including recruiting, budgeting, Title IX compliance, academic services, and alumni relations”. This oversight included supervision of Jerome Allen, the men’s basketball head coach and Penn Athletics Hall of Famer, who committed a federal crime by accepting $300,000 in bribes from Florida businessman Philip Esformes between 2013 and 2015 to place Esformes’s son, Morris, onto the recruited athlete list for the entering Class of 2015.
The news of Allen’s crime came to light in July 2018, and he was sentenced (and removed from the Penn Hall of Fame) a year later. In a late July 2019 Sports Illustrated article on the scandal, Ben Baskin documented many of Allen’s indiscretions, including an allegation of bringing four active Penn players to stay at the elder Esformes’s mansion to practice with his son. The author also went into details of the alleged involvement of then-assistant coach Ira Bowman, a former undergraduate classmate of Shanahan who was rumored to be a candidate for the Johns Hopkins head coaching job in the spring of 2017.
SI noted that Shanahan testified about the department’s lack of oversight of the coach’s recruitment list, telling the court, “I have to have basically total trust [in the coach].”
Weeks after Allen’s sentencing and the publishing of the SI report, Johns Hopkins administrators promoted Shanahan to the position of Vice Provost for Student Affairs. In that role, she managed critical academic services and residential, extracurricular, and other non-academic aspects of university life for more than 8,000 undergraduate and graduate students. In addition, she provided overall direction for strategic planning and leadership in housing and dining; student activities; athletics and recreation; student support, and Greek life.
The new head of Penn Athletics was introduced in a virtual press conference just a few hours after the school’s announcement. Shanahan spoke from her office in Baltimore, but there were no presentations by any of the university administrators who signed off on the hiring, President Amy Gutmann, Provost Wendell Pritchett or Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli.
Shanahan could not be reached for comment through Penn Athletics.
Penn Athletics did confirm to IHO that there is a conspicuous link to the public infractions decision located on the athletics department’s main landing page. The link, an NCAA logo with “2020 Negotiated Resolution” underneath, can be found at the bottom right hand side of the page.
Shanahan will start her new position on July 19. She is the sixth woman hired to run an Ivy League athletic department and the fifth actively in charge. After last week’s announcement, there are two permanent open spots remaining on the Ancient Eight AD carousel: Princeton, where Mollie Marcoux Samaan, will be leaving to become commissioner of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), and Dartmouth, where Peter Roby is the interim athletic director until June 2022.