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Howard University athletic director Kery Davis found formula for Bison’s success
Coaches credit Davis for surge in championships fueled by quality hires and increased resources
When Howard University athletic director Kery Davis took the reins of the department in 2015, many of the university’s athletic programs were suffering from decadeslong championship droughts. However, under his leadership many of those same programs have experienced a resurgence.
According to Howard, the Bison have won 31 conference and national championships since Davis’ hiring. In the last two years alone, several athletic programs have won Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference titles – football (November), men’s basketball (March), women’s indoor and outdoor track and field (February, May), softball (2022), women’s cross-country (2022) and men’s golf (2022), to name a few – and multiple coaches agree Davis has been the difference maker.
“When you have a person who hires you, brings you in, believing in you and aligning to give you most of the things that you need to really get [the program] off its feet and build it, it is tremendous,” said football coach Larry Scott, whose team will play Florida A&M University in the Cricket Celebration Bowl on Saturday in Atlanta.
Before Scott’s arrival in 2020, the Bison football program had cycled through three head coaches in three years and hadn’t won a conference title since 1993. In 2022, Scott’s second full season, the Bison shared the MEAC title with North Carolina Central, and this season they won the title outright, earning their first Celebration Bowl berth.
“[Davis] stands in support of what we’re trying to do,” he said.
Davis, a former senior vice president of programming with HBO’s sports division, joined Howard with a vision of making its athletic programs mirror the academic success commonly associated with the university.
Despite lacking experience as an athletic director, Davis said his primary focus to transform the programs had to include assessing coaches and increasing department resources.
“I came in with two approaches. The first one was to evaluate the coaches that we had, and some of them were dynamic, creative coaches who were doing well with the resources that they had but didn’t have enough resources to get over the top,” Davis said. “[Secondly] what are the resources you need to get you to win championships, and then what things you need to get you to be a top 100 program.”
Davis sought to weed out coaches who he believed saw Howard as only a steppingstone to their next big job.
“I want coaches who understand and recognize how special this post is [and] who want to be here. I want a coach who is going to match my passion,” he said. “I want to be here. … This is the only place I wanted to be an athletic director.”
Scott applauds Davis for finding the right balance between additional resources and the hiring of good coaches.
“He wanted to make sure that he was starting to put the right people in place that had the right experience and the right level of care and passion for what they do and how they do it,” Scott said. “Because he knew and understood that we had a name. We had a great brand already.
“But then, at the end of the day, it’s not about buildings. It’s not about facilities. … It’s about people.”
Coaches rave about the gradual increase in support positions such as academic advisers, trainers, sports psychologists and mental health professionals.
“The bolstering of the support staff, with assistant coaches, the compliance staff, training staff and that athletic academic resource staff, those are all things we’ve seen continue to get better and better over the last couple of years,” said Howard alumnus Nicholas Askew, who is responsible for coaching four programs at the university: men’s and women’s tennis and men’s and women’s swimming and diving.
In February, the men’s swimming and diving program won its first NEC championship. Howard is currently the only HBCU with a swim team.
“The athletic training, our strength and conditioning … those have been the big shifts in athletics, and now we’ve begun to really see those benefits over the last few years truly pay off,” Askew said.
As his vision took root, Davis said he believed women’s sports also offered fresh potential.
“About five years ago, we started really emphasizing the opportunities for us to excel in women’s sports,” Davis said. “That’s a big part of our strategy.“
Howard’s women’s basketball coach Ty Grace ended a 21-year title drought in 2022, when her team won the MEAC Tournament and secured the program’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 2001.
Grace said the emphasis on women’s sports was crucial to the team’s success.
“He’s a visionary. He talked about how he viewed Howard, where he saw the programs, and he talked about how we should be winning championships,” Grace said. “It wasn’t easy. Obviously, it took some time building, getting the right people, players and resources in place. But he definitely believed in it before it happened.”
Davis negotiated a 20-year deal with Jordan Brand in 2022, a partnership that Grace said “transported us to a different bracket.”
“I know people think that brands and those things aren’t important, but they’re important to recruits and their families,” she said. “It’s a global brand, so that definitely has helped us to be able to have more conversations with recruiting players.”
In 2019, five-star recruit Josh Christopher took an official visit to the Mecca, and in 2020 five-star prospect Makur Maker committed to Howard, playing in two games during the season shortened by the coronavirus pandemic before seeking a pro career.
For Davis, the attention from those top prospects meant Howard was shrinking the perceived athletic gap between Power 5 schools and historically Black colleges and universities.
“[Recruiting] is an arms race. … We had a unique athlete who saw the importance of going to an HBCU at that time. We might have been a year early, maybe two,” Davis said. “But at the same time, you want to make sure that they [athletes] have all of the basics that they need, they have a good strength and conditioning room.
“I don’t want the gap between what we’re providing and what they could get at another school to be that great. If it’s close, then the other elements of Howard can kick in to put us over the top.”
The Jordan Brand agreement has been instrumental in creating better facilities for Howard, Davis said. Earlier this week, Howard unveiled new basketball practice courts for its men’s and women’s basketball programs.
Even alums have noticed the changes in Howard’s athletic programs, Askew said.
“They wish they were training and competing for the university now versus back in the day. They always tease these current players [saying], ‘Man, they don’t know how good they have it,’ ” Askew said, “because, when we were coming up, our resources were very small. We didn’t have a Jordan deal or Speedo deal like we do now.”
Along with all that the athletic programs have accomplished during his tenure, Davis has another goal.
“I’m happy about the [football] team being competitive and strong and winning a share of the conference championship last year,” Davis said. “But our goal has always been to go further. … Our goal now is to win a Celebration Bowl.”
More athletic success is in Howard’s future, Askew said.
“We are still scratching the surface of where we can be, and where we will be,” he said. “I don’t think anyone’s satisfied with the success that we’ve shown in the last couple of years.
“I think everybody has the same mindset of a new season, new goals. … So I think in the next couple of years, we’ll see even more programs we may not have seen do exceptionally well in the past stepping up.”