Nancy Spencer, P.h.D, an emerita sport management professor at BGSU believes “there’s no formula for success, but the most important thing is to listen to your heart and to know what it is that you truly want.”
She seems to embody her own advice, as she worked hard to be able to take many different opportunities throughout her career based on what she truly wanted, eventually landing her as a well-respected professor in the BGSU Sport Management department since 1998.
Before she eventually became a professor, Spencer was just a girl from North Canton, Ohio with a big passion for sports and even bigger dreams.
“I grew up very active. My dad had been a gymnast and he did lots of activities with us that were exercise oriented,” Spencer said. “Baseball was the first game that I came to love. Until I was about 10, I wanted to be the right fielder for the Cleveland Indians. It took about that long for me to realize that there weren’t any girls that grew up to be baseball players.”
Pivoting her focus away from her early baseball dream, Spencer began to play tennis around the age of 13. She continued to play tennis through high school, but was once again matched with gender norms going against her favor.
“I was in high school before Title IX, so I could practice with the boys, but I couldn’t play,” she said.
Spencer’s tennis aspirations really started to take off after she went to college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in pursuit of a Sociology degree. It was there that she got the chance to play on the tennis team.
After her sophomore year at Miami, Spencer began to look for warmer places to transfer to. She eventually settled on a small, Presbyterian school in Texas known for their women’s tennis program, Trinity University.
“I transferred there in my junior year, and I loved it. It was warm all year round and the tennis was amazing. I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” Spencer joked.
After completing her undergraduate years at Trinity, Spencer started her professional career as a tennis coach.
“I ended up at a Corpus Christi public tennis center to work as an assistant teaching pro. They had some of the biggest tennis tournaments in the world there, including the NCAA’s for the men’s two of the years that I was there,” Spencer said.
In the spring of 1973, the USLTA (United States Lawn Tennis Association) started a tour. It was during this spring tour that Spencer made the jump from the local tournaments to playing professionally.
“I was encouraged by some of the people I knew through tennis that nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I should go for it,” she said.
Despite only playing on the tour for two months, Spencer got to matchup against two of the most prominent figures in tennis history: Chris and Jeanne Evert.
“On the tour they defaulted to us. So, I have a win over Chris Evert,” Spencer exclaimed.
While her professional playing career never picked up again after the 1973 tour, her career in academia was only beginning.
After an unfortunate car accident, Spencer had to persevere and pivot her career trajectory away from tennis. After a tough decision, Spencer decided to go to Kent State University for its Sports Psychology grad school program.
“After getting my degree there, I wasn’t planning on getting my P.h.D. But, by the end of my days at Kent, I had grown to love the academic arena,” Spencer said.
She loved academia so much she turned down tennis coaching offers from Louisiana-Monroe and Nebraska University to obtain her P.h.D at Illinois.
Despite the initial disappointment of 51 rejection letters, Spencer eventually ended up at the last school she interviewed with, Bowling Green, in 1998.
She works in the Sport Management department at BGSU and has taught classes such as sport and gender, sport globalization, and sport history in the past. Despite being immersed in the academic world, she doesn’t leave her tennis background far behind.
Her office is covered in tennis memorabilia and posters, including a Chris Evert poster: the player that she once beat on tour 51 years prior.
Spencer has loved working for Bowling Green over the last 25 years.
“I never really thought about going somewhere else while I’ve been here. Some people use Bowling Green as a steppingstone, but for me it just felt right to be here,” she explained.
Meredith Flaherty P.h.D, an assistant professor at BGSU, believes students are impacted by Spencer on a human level.
“She’s just a really great person and easy for students to talk to,” Flaherty said.
Lily Smith, second-year Sport Management student, also believes Spencer has had a huge impact on her academic and professional career so far because of how she treats students.
“She’s just the best mentor. She’s such an understanding person and is willing to help students on a personal level,” Smith said.
On top of the type of person Spencer is, Flaherty also sees Spencer as a professor that lifts the BGSU Sport Management program up.
“For students coming into this program, she’s one of the draws. She’s one of the reasons that the Sport Management program at BGSU is nationally known,” Flaherty said.
Flaherty also believes Spencer will leave one major lasting impact on BGSU’s sport management program after she retires.
“Her lasting impact at BG has a ton to do with gender treatment in sports across generations and spaces,” she said.
Spencer will soon be retiring to solely focus on her upcoming book that is within this gender realm of sports that Flaherty mentioned. The book is titled “Celebrity, Femininity, and Women’s Tennis: from Suzanne Lenglen to Serena Williams.”
Completing her book will be one in a long list of achievements that Spencer has put her mind to and succeeded in. From her tennis coaching and playing careers, to an academic scholar, to a respected professor, Spencer has had multiple successful careers.
However, as Flaherty states, at BGSU, Spencer will perhaps be most remembered for “her overall demeanor and personality of being open, engaged, and human-oriented toward her students.”
