Staff Directory

Jamie Pollard

Title:
Endowed Cyclone Director of Athletics
Email:
Phone:
515-294-0123

Updated July 2026

Follow @IASTATEAD | Documents and Reports (PDF)

Jamie Pollard, Iowa State’s longest-tenured Director of Athletics and the nation’s longest serving active Power Four Director of Athletics, enters his 22^nd year of providing transformative leadership to the Cyclones’ 18-sport program in 2026-27. His bold and innovative vision for the academic and athletic success of ISU’s student-athletes, coupled with an unbridled passion to creatively execute that plan continues to have a major impact within the campus community, throughout the Big 12 Conference and across the intercollegiate athletics landscape.

Introduced as the Cyclones’ 14^th Director of Athletics on September 19, 2005, Pollard has reimagined nearly every facet of the ISU program since moving from the University of Wisconsin, where he had served seven years, including the final two under then-Badger Athletics Director and Hall of Fame football coach Barry Alvarez.

Iowa State student-athletes have thrived academically and competitively under Pollard’s leadership, and they continued their record-breaking classroom achievements during the 2025-26 academic year. Based upon the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) most recent academic metrics, ISU’s 95 percent 2025 institutional GSR equaled the school record of the previous three years while its most-recent multi-year 992 institutional Academic Progress Rate (APR) was also a school-record.

ISU's institutional GSR has improved each of the last 11 years, from 77 percent in 2014 to 95 percent the past four years, while equaling or establishing a school-record every year during that span. Iowa State's 2025 mark, which ranked third in the Big 12 Conference, also came in five points higher than both the most-recent NCAA FBS and Big 12 averages and marked the seventh-straight year it surpassed 90 percent. All-told, eight Cyclone teams led the Big 12 in GSR—men's golf, women's basketball, women's golf, gymnastics, softball, women's tennis, women's track & field/cross country and volleyball. ISU's women's golf program recorded a perfect GSR for the 21st-consecutive year, while gymnastics had its 17th-straght 100 percent performance, softball its 10th-straight such effort and men's golf its eighth-straight perfect year.

Iowa State placed 43^rd in the 2025-26 Learfield Directors’ Cup standings; fueled by Top 20 NCAA Championship finishes in men’s cross country (3^rd), women’s outdoor track & field (6^th), wrestling (8^th), women’s golf (9^th), women’s indoor track & field (15^th), men’s basketball (Sweet 16) and women’s cross country (20^th). All-told, 12 teams represented ISU in the 2025-26 postseason.

The Cyclones also continued their recent dominance of Iowa in the Iowa Corn Cy-Hawk series, capturing their fourth title in five years, 16-8, in 2025-26 to take an 11-9-1 lead in the all-time series.

Since his arrival in Ames, he has invigorated the Cyclone fan base, registered all-time program bests academically and athletically, and shattered attendance marks in the department’s five major sports. Landmark achievements of Pollard’s tenure include:

Iowa State has earned 27 of its 30 all-time academic NCAA Public Recognition Awards in 11 different sports under his direction.
The Cyclones have won 24 of their 32 all-time Big 12 team titles in eight different sports with at least one league championship squad in 12 of the last 15 years.
Every Cyclone team has produced at least one postseason appearance during his tenure with nine producing or tying their respective program’s highest postseason finish ever—Football (2021 Fiesta Bowl Champions, No. 9 AP poll), Women’s Outdoor Track & Field (6^th, 2026 NCAA Championships), Volleyball (NCAA Elite 8, twice), Women’s Tennis (NCAA Elite 8, 2023), Women’s Basketball (NCAA Elite 8, 2009), Women’s Golf (9^th, 2026 NCAA Championships), Women’s Indoor Track & Field (9^th, 2013), Soccer (2005 NCAA Tournament), Softball (2021 NCAA Tournament).
ISU student-athletes have won 24 NCAA individual championships, most recently Mercyline Kirwa in the 10,000m at the 2026 NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships.
After breaking ground in March 2023 on CyTown, Iowa State’s innovative 40-acre mixed-use entertainment district being built between Jack Trice Stadium and the Iowa State Center, he announced in February 2024 the selection of Midwest-based Goldenrod Companies to lead the project’s design, development, financing and construction.
CyTown’s initial phase was completed in 2024 to include a makeover of the Iowa State Center parking lots south of Hilton Coliseum as well as installation of the infrastructure necessary to support the multi-use district which is slated to be completed ahead of the 2027 football season. In April 2025, CyTown’s first tenant, McFarland Clinic, broke ground on its 78,000-square-foot sports medicine and urgent care facility that will open in January 2027.
Modeled after the Green Bay Packers’ Titletown and Kansas City’s Power and Light District, CyTown will be the first-ever entertainment district built in the heart of a college campus. The project will include a full-service hotel, 60 three-bedroom suites, a 3,000-seat outdoor amphitheater, and over 200,000-square feet of additional commercial and entertainment facilities.
An investment of more than $400M in new construction and facility renovations impacting nearly every Cyclone sport; the two most-recent large scale projects being completion of the $90M, 110,000-square foot Stark Performance Center which opened in August 2021 to serve every Iowa State student-athlete, and the Gateway Pedestrian Bridge and RV Village which debuted in 2022 to further enhance the game day experience for Cyclone football fans at Jack Trice Stadium.
Two more capital facility projects, the conversion of the McKee Tennis Center into a state-of-the-art volleyball practice facility and the construction of a new Tennis Center, to include six outdoor courts, six indoor courts and a team facility, were completed during the 2024-25 academic year.|
Iowa State’s Cyclones Serve program received the Fiesta Bowl’s 2023 Community Service Award as selected by the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics (NACDA). The Fiesta Bowl Community Service award was designed to recognize NACDA member institutions in Division I honoring exceptional athletics departments that make volunteerism and community service a way of life.
ISU remains the only Big 12 Conference institution to have earned this prestigious honor. The Iowa State Student-Athlete Engagement Team oversees the Cyclones Serve program, annually coordinating community outreach activities that stretch throughout central Iowa and touch a multitude of lives. The goal of Cyclones Serve is to encourage student-athletes to volunteer their time while using their platform to build "Community" through sports. Participation in Cyclones Serve programs includes all 18 Iowa State Athletics sport teams.
Secured the largest donation ever received by ISU Athletics – a $25 million gift from the Reiman family – that was the lead donation for Jack Trice Stadium’s south end zone enclosure which increased capacity to 61,500— the Big 12 Conference’s second-largest stadium.
Since the 2011-12 academic year, ISU is the nation’s only institution to average at least 50,000 fans at home football games (13-straight seasons), 12,000 fans at home men’s basketball games (15-straight years), and 9,000 fans at home women’s basketball games (17-straight seasons), excluding the COVID-impacted 2020-21 academic year.
Assembled, arguably, the strongest coaching staff in ISU history.

Simply put, the Iowa State Athletics brand has never been stronger.

National observers have taken notice of the athletics revival in Ames, as Pollard was honored as the 2023 and 2019 Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) Athletics Director of the Year by NACDA, one of only 20 individuals to earn multiple FBS honors in the award’s 28-year history. The three-time (2025, 2023 and 2019) Sports Business Journal AD of the Year finalist was also the first collegiate administrator selected for Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal’s Forty Under 40 award in 2003.

Amid a six-year term as a member of the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee’s College Athletics Council, Pollard completed his five-year tenure on the prestigious NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Committee in 2023-24.

He served the 22,000-member NACDA organization as its 2021-22 President and previously was President of the Division I-A Athletics Director’s Association and the Collegiate Athletics Business Manager’s Association (CABMA) as well as chair of the Big 12 Athletics Directors Committee. He is the only individual to have ever been President of NACDA, the I-A Athletics Director’s Association and CABMA.

The Oshkosh, Wisconsin, native attended his hometown school, the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, where he earned four letters in cross country and three in track & field from 1983-87. Pollard became the school’s first cross country All-American as a senior in 1986 and then capped his collegiate career by winning the 1987 NCAA Division III Outdoor 5,000-meter title in a then-school-record time of 14:31.20. In 1999, he was inducted into the school’s Athletics Hall of Fame.

The 1987 UW-Oshkosh graduate spent two years working as a CPA at Arthur Andersen Company in Milwaukee, before launching his highly successful administrative career in intercollegiate athletics at Saint Louis University in 1989. Pollard then served in various administrative capacities at Maryland (1994-98) and Wisconsin (1998-2005) before his arrival at Iowa State.

Jamie and his wife, Ellen, have four children: Thomas (wife Kami), Annie (husband Greg), Maggie (husband Jon) and James, and one grandson, Shepherd James.

Iowa State’s Directors of Athletics
S.W. Beyer, 1903-14
Clyde Williams, 1914-19
Charles Mayser, 1919-23
Hugo Otopalik, 1923-24
T. Nelson Metcalf, 1924-31
George F. Veenker, 1932-45
Louis Menze, 1945-58
Gordon Chalmers, 1959-66
Clay Stapleton, 1967-70
Lou McCullough, 1971-82
Max Urick, 1983-93
Gene Smith, 1993-2000
Bruce Van De Velde, 2000-05
Jamie Pollard, 2005-present