Game changer

As a teenager growing up in New Jersey, Patty Raube Keller always had a part-time job, but instead of spending her hard-earned cash on clothing or CDs, she bought softball cleats, goalie gloves, and downhill skis. While her parents were at work, she got herself to swim competitions, soccer and softball games, becoming an accomplished athlete in multiple sports. Looking back, the ski slopes and the pitcher’s mound were where she felt most at home. 

“I had a very emotionally abusive family so sports is where I was raised,” she recalled. “I had friends, my coaches believed in me. I’m also six feet tall and built like my father, who was a football linebacker, and sports was my way to be a big girl and be okay with that.” 

Raube Keller’s love for sports, and her belief in their importance in the lives of young people, has shaped much of her personal and professional life. Today, as director of Boston College’s M.S. in Sports Administration program, offered through the Woods College of Advancing Studies, Raube Keller is educating leaders to create more ethical and effective athletics programs at every level, from high school to the pros. The program is currently ranked #21 in the world, and #14 among postgraduate sports management programs nationwide.  

“Sports for kids are game-changers. For a lot of them, it’s how they get out of poverty,” explained Raube Keller. “For me personally, if it wasn’t for sports, I wouldn’t have gone to college. Who knows where I would be now?”  

Learning the ropes

There was no such thing as a sports management degree when Raube Keller attended college in the 1990s, so she majored in athletic training while playing Division III lacrosse and soccer at Greensboro College in North Carolina (a broken hand her senior year had dashed her Division I softball dreams). After graduating, she entered the male-dominated world of college athletics, often working long hours for little pay and no benefits. Some of her bosses, she said, were volatile and unethical—but she forged ahead, building a professional network and occasionally waitressing to pay the bills.    

In the early 2000s, while working as an assistant athletics director at Rowan University in New Jersey, Raube Keller entered a doctoral program and wrote her dissertation on a subject close to her heart: the marginalization of women working in college athletics. She had just met her husband, a strength and conditioning coach at the University of Pennsylvania, and been told by her boss that she could only get married during the offseason. In search of a more supportive work environment, she accepted a one-year contract at the University of Mary, a Benedictine school in North Dakota with a Division II athletics program. Her husband stayed behind in Pennsylvania.

“The oil boom was going and rents were $3,000 a month for a two-bedroom, so I moved into subsidized housing that the University helped me secure,” Raube Keller recalled. “It was crazy but I loved working there.”

As the school’s assistant athletic director for compliance, Raube Keller helped out wherever she was needed, traveling with younger coaches on road trips and providing support to student-athletes who were struggling. She brought in food for younger staff members and took in a graduate assistant who had become homeless. When her husband suffered a heart attack at 42, Raube Keller’s job was made permanent, allowing her and her husband to begin putting down roots in a townhouse in Bismarck. They knew biological children were impossible, so at the suggestion of a colleague, they applied to become foster parents instead.  

A new journey

Four-year-old Dana arrived at the Kellers’ house two days before Christmas in 2013, wearing a two-day old pull-up, a SpongeBob t-shirt, and one sock. Her backstory was heartbreaking: born on a nearby Indian reservation, her parents had abandoned her at a gas station along with her half brother. She had endured five foster care placements already, wasn’t potty trained, and was nonverbal.

“Her teeth were rotten,” Raube Keller recalled. “Cheetos probably were her main source of sustenance. I remember giving her watermelon and she wasn’t quite sure what it was.”