Bulldog student-athletes, who enrolled on campus during the 2004-05 academic year, recorded the highest six-year graduation rate to date in department history at 57 percent.
Dr. Susan Gutkind joined Fresno State as Assistant Athletics Director for Student-Athlete Services on July 17, 2006.
Gutkind spent the previous two years as the Assistant Athletics Director for Academics and Student-Athlete Welfare at Tennessee Tech and served as the Senior Woman Administrator at the school since October 2004. While in that position, she directed a unit that designed and implemented strategies to improve academic success, acted as a liaison between student-athletes and the academic administration and faculty and planned and presented CHAMPS/life skills and success skills workshops. In four semesters at Tennessee Tech, the graduation rate increased to nearly 25% higher than the general campus population and the men's basketball team GPA rose from 1.89 to 2.66.
Gutkind has oversight of academic and student services operations for all student-athletes; provides leadership to Student-Athlete Services support staff, tutors and student workers that support student-athletes in athletic academic counseling and advising life skills and career preparation. She supervises special programs such as ACE, study table, Big Heroes/Little Heroes, and Student-Athlete Advisory Council.
She acts as a liaison to faculty and campus offices which impact the academic success of student-athletes. Additionally, Gutkind works with staff and coaches to identify and implement strategies to promote student-athlete academic success and graduation.
Prior to her position at Tennessee Tech, she was a Play It Smart academic coach at Austin-East High School in Knoxville and served as a graduate assistant in the University of Tennessee women's athletics department. Gutkind spent nine years as a teacher at St. Clement School in Hayward, Calif.,
Gutkind earned a Bachelor of Science degree from UC-Riverside in Psychobiology in 1988. She earned a Masters degree in Educational Psychology from Nebraska in 1990 and a Ph.D. in Sport and Leisure Studies with an emphasis in Sport Psychology from the University of Tennessee in 2003.
