A few weeks into her tenure at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, Becky Carlson found herself running lines at a soccer game. One of the local schoolchildren that usually retrieve out-of-bound balls got sick, so the school’s new athletic director stepped in until a replacement could arrive.
The act was small, taking maybe 10 minutes of her time, but illustrates how Carlson, a longtime Division 1 coach, wants to lead as she begins her next chapter at Maine’s northernmost university.
“It’s not like I’m checking a box showing my face. I’m a part of this,” Carlson said in an interview with the Bangor Daily News, her first since beginning the job in mid-August. “I love being in that environment and being present and being available.”
A first-time athletic director, Carlson spent the last 15 years as head coach of the women’s rugby team at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where she won three national championships and coached 32 All-Americans, including Olympian Ilona Maher.
When Quinnipiac eliminated its varsity rugby program this spring, Carlson was left searching for a job. It led her to Fort Kent. The university was looking for its second athletic director in two years. She applied on a whim.
Carlson and her family had visited Maine, where she said “everything is gorgeous.” But something else drew her to the position.
“It had nothing to do with the location or anything. It had to do with the people,” Carlson said. “I went through three different interviews, and the more the people I met, you could see that they were heavily invested in who the next hire was going to be.”
UMFK, the smallest standalone university in the UMaine system, is in a period of athletic transition. The school is in the process of almost doubling the number of varsity sports it offers, adding softball, golf, esports and men’s and women’s cross country. It launched a baseball program last year.
The university itself is also growing, seeing a 29% increase in enrollment since 2022, thanks in part to expanded online degree programs.
“When I looked at it, I was like, ‘This is a place that I could expand,’” Carlson said. “We were going over the numbers and with the additions in enrollment, I think we’re only going to go up and I want to be part of that. Certainly athletics is a big anchor at this university for enrollment. And I just see so much potential.”
In her short tenure, Carlson says she’s put a focus on streamlining marketing and recruiting efforts to strengthen the Bengals’ brand. Her No. 1 priority, though, is the athletes.
“I always said when I was a coach … if I ever had a chance to sit in the chair, I would do it differently and I’m getting to do all of that right now,” Carlson said. “Just being wholly focused on if we are going to do this, it has to be good for the athletes. And if it’s not, why are we talking about it?”
She’s revamped the athletic department’s work study program for students — many of whom are athletes — and said she’s tried to make herself widely available to anyone at the school who wants to speak.
The Bengals compete under the USCAA, a non-NCAA governing body for small colleges, where they have won more than a dozen national championships between soccer and track and field.
The university has barely one-seventh the undergraduate population of Quinnipiac, where Carlson comes from, and is distinctly more remote. It’s “peaceful,” she said. Her more-than-an-hour-long commute is now a short walk to campus.
“I’m just here. I’m immersed in it,” Carlson said. “I think there’s like this level of expectation of like, ‘Well, when is she going to pull back on this? When is she going to get tired?’ And it’s just like, ‘This kind of stuff is like the Olympics to me.’”
Still, it’s hard to completely remove herself from the past. Nearly two dozen of her former athletes are suing Quinnipiac in an attempt to resurrect the school’s rugby team. Carlson testified in federal court in the case.
That team will always be important to her, she said, but so too is the present.
“I want people to know how intent I am on looking through the windshield and not in the rearview mirror,” she said. “I’m looking forward to all of these opportunities. Certainly there’s a lot of heartache that is attached to all of that, for my players, for my family, for my alums, for all of those people … by no means do you get to just erase that part. It was 15 years of a lot of success … but I’m really pumped about the windshield.”