After two years on the job, Charlie Baker remains focused on his role as NCAA president — not on running for office

Boston Globe

4 days ago

Related
:
To be clear, that squelches remaining speculation over a potential run against Senator Ed Markey next fall.
'You can shut the door on that one,' said Baker.
Baker's
Asked to weigh in on the Trump administration
Advertisement
But he did reveal his concerns.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
'That issue is in court now, right? You might recall from my time as governor that I don't like talking about issues that are before courts that involve me or my administration,' said Baker. 'What I would say is that there were 1,400 current or former student-athletes who participated in the Olympics last summer. I think about half of them were from the US, and half of them were from other countries. One of the more interesting elements of college sports is the appeal it has to the international community. And part of that is because there really isn't anything that looks like this anywhere else in the world.'
Advertisement
Baker likes his job, and he wants to stay at it long enough to find solutions for an unusually long to-do list of complex issues hovering over the roiling college sports landscape.
As the front man for an organization of 1,100-plus schools, more than half a million student-athletes, and an operation that generated close to $1.4 billion in its last fiscal year, Baker's touch points far exceed those he had on Beacon Hill.
Charlie Baker has no immediate plans for a return to politics.
Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
Some small schools need guidance on NIL, some big schools are about to begin sharing revenues with student-athletes, and some really big schools with powerhouse football programs are beginning to wonder if they need the NCAA at all.
Factor in NCAA exposure to legal, legislative, and economic forces that place Baker in contact with media power brokers, a Congress and president who want a say in the future of college sports, and the scale and scope of Baker's job makes his old job and even the potential of some new political one sound almost quaint.
'I travel a lot more in this job,' said Baker. 'I used to leave the house at 6 o'clock in the morning and get home at 9 or 10 o'clock at night, and I'd probably hit 10 or 12 different places during the course of the day. But I got up out of the same bed I got into at night. I never, ever left Massachusetts, hardly.
'Whereas in this job, I have a lot of weeks where I'm in five states in five days. So that's probably in some respects one of the biggest differences, the travel schedule is just a lot geographically more complicated.'
Baker said he spends about two or three days a week at NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis.
Advertisement
'I have an apartment there, and I'm probably two or three days somewhere else, it depends on the week, but it's a lot of travel, which is fine,' he said. 'I get a lot of grief from a lot of people who work at the NCAA about the fact that I think Sweetgreen's is a pretty great place for a meal. I think they think I need to up my game a bit. And they're probably right.
'My Hoosier friends think there are a lot of great restaurants in Indianapolis, and that I'm missing out. They're also right about that, too.'
The skills Baker employed governing Massachusetts from 2015-23 don't seamlessly overlap with this job.
'It's hard to retail this job the way the lieutenant governor and I tried to retail our previous jobs — Karen Polito visited all 351 cities and towns, they all had her cellphone,' said Baker. 'I probably went to 220 cities and towns, and everybody, for the most part in local government, had my phone number, a lot of the folks in the legislature had our phone numbers. It's very hard to do that when you have 1,100 members in 50 states [in the NCAA].'
Baker said he's spoken with thousands of student-athletes since starting the job in March 2023, and speaking with international students at the Division 2 tennis championships last year in Orlando reinforced his beliefs on the value provided by college sports.
'Long story short, what they said was there just isn't anything quite like the combination of academic opportunity and athletic participation that exists here in the States in most other parts of the world, and the gratitude that a lot of these kids had for the chance to be part of a team here and to get a degree was pretty cool,' said Baker.
Advertisement
Conversations such as those are the favorite part of Baker's job.
The longer he stays at it, the more optimistic Baker sounds that all the noise surrounding college sports will not stand in the way of the athletes themselves.
'I keep saying to these kids, these are lessons you're going to get to use all the time,' said Baker. 'The more I talk to these kids, the better I feel about the future of our country, because they are such good kids, and they are going to be such positive forces for good and such great role models.'
Michael Silverman can be reached at