Above and beyond

At Auburn University, Joan Alexander forges much of her own job description as she goes. Nearly eight years in, the intricacies exist largely in her head. Alexander, the director of operations for men’s and women’s golf, can make all the notes she wants, but there’s very little that’s formulaic or even repeatable about the magic she pulls off for the Tigers.
“They asked me to keep up with a job description, just everything I do,” Alexander, 57, said. “My sport administrator is like, you need to keep updating it because when you leave we’re going to have a problem. It’s all in my head. I can’t write down every question or everything that’s going to happen. It’s in my head of who I need to go to. It’s just part of being here 7½ years.”
Alexander’s job, in a nutshell, is about balancing the endless moving parts that fold into the men’s and women’s golf programs. Truly, it encompasses a little bit of everything, from budgets to travel plans to uniforms to stocking Gatorade to creating goodie bags for recruits. And it takes a doer like Ale...