Keli Zinn zipped through the parking lots around SHI Stadium on Aug. 28, moving from one tailgate to another with a warm smile, an outstretched hand and a quick quip in her subtle southern twang.
On her first gameday as Rutgers’ new athletic director, she was ready to immerse herself in the Scarlet Knight experience.
Zinn posed for photos with fans and their metal mascots, then encouraged them to post on X while tagging Jon Newman, a decades-long booster who was running a fundraising campaign in her honor.
She tried on medieval helmets, climbed into customized RVs decked out in Rutgers memorabilia and got her first taste of New Jersey by trying the state’s breakfast sandwich. Zinn was convinced to call it pork roll by staff members from South Jersey, but Taylor Ham could change her mind by sponsoring her department with name, image and likeness (NIL) opportunities for her athletes.
“We love competition here in New Jersey,” she said.
Zinn heard about the glory days in Piscataway’s past, of the football team’s iconic win over Louisville and men’s basketball’s unforgettable upset of No. 1 Purdue. She listened to the hopes and dreams of the long-suffering fanbase of a school that Joe Verderami, a 78-year-old alum and 30-year season ticket holder, described to her as a “sleeping giant.”
Now in charge of awakening it, her audience was appreciative.
“It’s huge because she’s really making connections with us,” Verderami said. “No one else has.”
Fans like Dave Lepping believe Zinn can do something else no other athletic director has: turn Rutgers into a winner. A Rutgers football devotee since its heyday in the 1970s, Lepping knows it won’t be easy, so as Zinn walked away from his tailgate, he handed her one of the dozens of laminated four-leaf clovers he carries around.
“If anybody needs hope,” he said, “it is Rutgers sports.”
Zinn brings hope in droves as the school’s first athletic director with big-time college athletics experience, a stark contrast from her predecessors who stumbled into scandal and controversy. From the mountains of Morgantown, West Virginia, to the bayou of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she’s traveled 3,559 miles across four states over the past two decades, rising from a compliance assistant in the Big East to a chief operating officer in the SEC.
She took many notes in what her husband Nathaniel called “25 years as an assistant coach,” and now that she has her dream job at the top of an athletic department, the 46-year-old is hitting the ground running to try and bring the excellence she witnessed elsewhere to Rutgers.
Focused on building NIL infrastructure at a school that’s long lagged behind, she has “significant” goals and detailed plans to get there. In her first two months, Zinn held 337 meetings — in person, over the phone and virtually — with coaches and players from the school’s 22 programs, as well as administrators and donors of all levels. Her door is always open to anyone willing to help her achieve the goal that President William Tate brought her from LSU to Piscataway to do: “winning.”
Zinn is “built for 220 volts,” her mentor Debbie Yow says, and she is not stopping now, putting in 80-hour weeks at a time where a patient approach is not an option.
“We don’t have time to waste time,” Zinn said.
Rags to Riches
As 19-year-old Keli Zinn walked the halls of the White House alongside her father, she witnessed the power of hard work.
The son of a coal miner with a ninth-grade education, Joe Cunningham and his nine older siblings grew up on a small farm in the tiny West Virginia town of Tioga. For the first 10 years of his life, they got by without running water, indoor plumbing or a telephone.
Cunningham enlisted in the Air Force during the Vietnam War after graduating from high school in Baltimore. Through the GI Bill, he earned two degrees from West Virginia University before building a life in Petersburg, a city sitting on the bed of the Potomac River with just two main roads and a population that has hovered around 2,000 people for the past half-century.
He moved up the ranks as an educator in the tight-knit community tucked into the winding roads of the Allegheny Mountains. His biggest accomplishment came in 1998, when he was named West Virginia’s Distinguished Principal of the Year and received an invitation to the White House. Cunningham brought his daughters Keri and Keli as his guests.
“Back in little Petersburg, that was seen as a big thing,” he said. “My daughters have used that as a linchpin to what they have accomplished. They have left me in the dust with what they’re doing with their lives.”
Keli Zinn (née Cunningham) lived up to the high bar her father set in the classroom, earning multiple scholarships to his alma mater as a model student at Petersburg High School. She filled her calendar with extracurriculars, from French club to student council, from the yearbook staff to the National Honor Society. In the summer, she picked up shifts at a Ponderosa Steakhouse in Moorefield, the neighboring town known as the “Poultry Capital of West Virginia.”
But it was on the fields and courts of Petersburg where Zinn built her local legacy. The first female to play baseball in Grant County’s Little League, she starred at third base and as a power hitter, batting fifth in the lineup. On one occasion, according to her father, an opposing coach named Doug Lambert — who went on to become a local superintendent for two decades — rose from the dugout and screamed at his team: “Someone get this girl out. She’s killing us!”
Zinn dropped baseball and basketball in high school, the latter out of principle. When she missed a practice to attend a tennis camp, her coach demanded she run sprints as a punishment. Not only did she refuse, but she voiced her displeasure on the matter to the Board of Education, her father said.
“She will stand up for the right things at the right time,” Joe Cunningham said.
Zinn starred in tennis and volleyball, winning sectional titles in both sports as a senior before becoming the school’s first female Athlete of the Year. Decades after she graduated high school, locals still remember what she did and take great pride in what she is accomplishing.
“She was a very, very hard worker,” her tennis coach Greg Foley said. “Looking back, I’m not surprised at where she’s at. I knew she was always going to be a success. But the amount of success and notoriety that she’s got is just beyond belief. Everybody in town here is just so happy for her.”
Zinn made her mark in the kind of place where everyone “knows a little bit about everybody,” longtime mayor Gary Michael said. But like many West Virginians, Zinn soon outgrew her small surroundings.
Sitting at a desk in his office on Main Street, where statues of The Blues Brothers and Jack Daniel stand at the entrance, Michael beamed with pride about what Zinn has achieved while lamenting the lack of opportunities in the town that made her.
“I wish for our community that we had prominent job opportunities here,” Michael said. “But we don’t.”
When Zinn moved to Morgantown in 1997 to enroll at West Virginia, many had high hopes for what she could achieve. But in the quarter century since she left Petersburg, she followed in her father’s footsteps by exceeding all expectations.
“I felt like I raised the bar just a little bit for my family, and I hoped that my daughters will be able to lift that bar just a little bit higher,” Joe Cunningham said. “My gosh, they have bench pressed the bar. They have taken it beyond all my expectations.
“When I started teaching in 1974, my first-year salary was $6,500, and I thought I was doing well. I don’t even know if I ever met a millionaire. Now that my daughter is making ($1.35 million) a year, I have difficulty handling that in a way because that’s just beyond my mindset.
“It is a rags-to-riches story.”
Climbing the Ladder
When Oliver Luck took over as the athletic director at West Virginia in 2010, he had a major mess to clean up. The department was facing multiple allegations from the NCAA of violations centered on graduate assistants and support staff inappropriately coaching players, and he needed a “strong leader in compliance” who would help pull the Mountaineers out of it.
As he asked around, the same advice kept being repeated: “You have to call Keli.”
Luck followed through by making Zinn his first “significant” hire and giving her a full-circle moment.
It was in Morgantown where she discovered her limits as an athlete — she left the Mountaineers tennis team within a week of walking on — and found her calling as an administrator. While her father hoped she’d be a pharmacist or attorney, Zinn had found her passion in athletics, so she changed her major to sports management and chased her dream.
The first steps came when she knocked on Brad Cox’s door. The compliance director had already filled the two graduate assistant spots on his staff, but when Zinn asked to volunteer, he could not turn her down.
In between classes and shifts at a local diner named Eat N’Park and the call center of a JCPenney, Zinn did “a little bit of everything.” But it was never enough: She was “always wanting to do extra,” Cox said, using every second of free time to help and learn.
“She asked a lot of questions and was a real go-getter,” Cox said. “Even then, I could see leadership traits. I’ve had a lot of good grad assistants, a lot of good students come through, and she’s top of the class.”
Zinn worked as a compliance assistant while getting a master’s degree, and after graduation, she landed a similar job in the Big East office under future NCAA Executive Vice President Stan Wilcox. She spent a year in Rhode Island before moving down to Maryland to work under Yow, a female pioneer as a coach and administrator.
Yow saw some of herself in Zinn, who was promoted to assistant athletic director within a year in College Park. When Zinn sent Yow a congratulatory note for becoming the first female president of the Division 1A Athletic Directors Association in 2008, Yow replied that “some day, my dear, it will be you.”
Zinn kept that note when she was hired by Luck at her alma mater in 2010, taping it to the inside of her desk and looking at it frequently as she climbed the ladder during an 11-year stint in Morgantown. Within five years, she went from an associate AD in charge of compliance to the chief operating officer in charge of just about everything.
“She had a very good way of managing people,” Luck said. “When you realize folks have a good capacity for projects, you put more responsibilities on their plate. I don’t recall ever being let down by Keli. She had a great work ethic, she was tireless, and perhaps most importantly, she had a very pleasant but firm way of dealing with folks. That really resonated with me.”
Zinn quickly earned the trust of then-West Virginia President Gordon Gee, who named her the interim athletic director when Luck left the school in 2014, making her the first woman to lead the school’s athletic department.
“I’ve been president of five different institutions over four decades, all of them having significant football programs, so I really have enjoyed being around really great people who have the ability to be able to make a difference,” Gee said. “I identified her early on as one of those particularly important voices: a young, dynamic woman with vision. She never disappointed.”
Zinn’s reputation made its way down to Baton Rouge, where football coach Brian Kelly and athletic director Scott Woodward kept hearing about this “rising star” out of Morgantown. While searching for a chief operating officer in 2022 amid the ever-changing landscape of the NIL era, they believed she could lead their successful department to new heights.
Woodward “threw her the keys” and told her to “run the department,” so Zinn did everything from managing a robust NIL apparatus to being the “driving force” on the planning of a potential new basketball arena on campus. During three years in which the Tigers won four national championships across three sports, she “exceeded” all expectations, Woodward said.
“She was just fabulous,” he said. “She succeeded in everything she did and every measurement you could have in helping build and continue to maintain excellence in our department.”
After three years in Baton Rouge, and a decade after her brief first experience as an athletic director, Zinn felt she was ready to lead her own department. She was a finalist for Georgia Tech’s open position, but her breakthrough came when her former boss gauged her interest in joining him at Rutgers.
Tate and Zinn will lean on the alignment they bring from Baton Rouge, something she enjoyed when working closely with Gee at West Virginia. Having been in Tate’s position in the past, he sees the hire as a good gamble.
“She has a spine of steel and a great sense of humor. That is a great combination for an athletic director,” Gee said. “I think she is ready for the Big Ten, and I hope the Big Ten is ready for her, because she is a dynamo.”
Winning Goals
As Greg Schiano drove up Scarlet Knight Way and headed home in the late-night hours of another long day in training camp this August, he noticed something he had rarely seen before: On the top floor of the Rodkin Academic Success Center, the lights of the athletic director’s office were on.
It was a welcome sign for the longtime football coach, who spent the first five years of his second stint at Rutgers “doing a lot on his own,” according to Zinn. Schiano left his first meeting with Zinn feeling “really excited that we’re on the same page” and “very confident” that she would be a “huge help” to his program.
The duo got off to a good start, with the Scarlet Knights pulling out a 34-31 victory over Ohio to open the 2025 season. After giving Zinn a big hug on the field, Schiano gifted her a game ball in the first of what they hope to be many winning postgame locker rooms in Piscataway.
“Coach Schiano now has a real boss,” Gee said. “That’s all I need to say.”
Zinn has only added to the coach’s confidence by putting in long weeks that initially worried her father.
“I asked her if it was worth it and she said, ‘Dad, you wouldn’t believe how exciting it is to be here doing what I’m doing,’” Cunningham said. “She has always had the goal of being the athletic director at a power conference, making the decisions. She is in her seventh heaven.”
The athletic department as a whole has received a heavy dose of Zinn in her two months in charge. She attended multiple games for fall sports, from women’s soccer’s season opener against NJIT to volleyball’s meeting with No. 1 Nebraska, stopped by men’s and women’s basketball and visited preseason meetings for baseball, field hockey and others.
“For a coach, it’s incredible, because it shows that she’s committed and she cares,” field hockey coach Meredith Civico said. “We want to do big things in football and basketball and we’ve got amazing coaches, but I think she’s also coming in and looking at the programs that don’t always get everything they need to be competitive at the highest level, and she’s all in when it comes to those sports as well.”
Zinn has put actions behind her words. Before an Olympic sport program welcomed a top recruit on a visit, she called the head coach and asked what the program needed to offer beyond a scholarship to compete in the recruitment. When the coach replied with a number, Zinn gave her the green light immediately.
“If I can’t come up with that money,” she said, “President Tate needs to send me back to the Bayou tomorrow.”
Zinn has not been shy in sharing the importance of money in modern-day college sports to those who can help her stuff the coffers.
In the first road trip of the football season at Minnesota, Zinn met with donors for dinner at 801 Chophouse in downtown Minneapolis and visited a big tailgate outside of Huntington Bank Stadium. Three days after the close loss to the Golden Gophers, she spoke at a meeting for the program’s booster club.
According to multiple people who attended the latter event, Zinn revealed plans to make “several” NIL-centered hires in addition to Chief Revenue and Operating Officer Todd Knisley, as well as “significant” NIL-based announcements coming later this month. She has set ambitious fundraising goals and is determined to meet them — at a minimum.
Zinn is not going to let the school’s lackluster history be “a determining factor of our future,” she said, and that includes the reactive nature of her predecessors. Recognizing Rutgers’ longtime struggles for success, she brings the vision and relentlessness that took her from Petersburg to Piscataway and hopes it will lead the Scarlet Knights to unprecedented success.
Zinn will leave no stone unturned in her pursuit of turning Rutgers into a winner. And as she chases those lofty goals, she has a laminated four-leaf clover and a strong support system to constantly remind her why the hard work is worth it.
“It’s about the people who show up at the tailgates, who get on the planes to come support us, who show up at an event — and what it means for them,” Zinn said. “Their passion and energy for Rutgers are the type of things that make life grand. It is incredibly motivating to see how much they care and the impact that it’s had on their lives and what they’re seeking through it. For me to be able to give to them what they’re looking for in Rutgers — competing at the highest level and winning — that’s really important to me.”