Office of Advancement
Development, Marketing, Diversity, Alumni Affairs, and Special Events
Sandy Knapp
As a student at the School of HPER in the 1960s, Sandy Knapp (B.S.‘67) was vice president of her sorority, a member of the Mortar Board Women’s Honorary, and president of the Panhellenic Association. She received the Elvis J. Stahr Outstanding Senior Award, the Indiana University Outstanding Sorority Woman Award, and the Outstanding Senior in Recreation Award.
Still, it was with trepidation that she returned to HPER one year after graduation to present the 1977 Outstanding Senior Award. “I wasn’t working in the field, I was working at a bank,” says Knapp. “I was absolutely mortified to face my professors!”
She needn’t have worried. Over the course of her prestigious career, Knapp has served as the Indiana Pacers’ vice president of Marketing and Public Relations (she was the first-ever woman in management in men’s professional basketball); president of Sports Marketing of Indiana; and president and executive director of the Indiana Sports Corporation. She chaired a site-selection committee for the U.S. Olympic Games, served on the board of directors of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, and was co-chair of the site selection committee for the 1998 Goodwill Games. Knapp became a nationally known sports marketing consultant after her move to Austin, Texas, in 1991, a role from which she retired in 2002.
“When I started out, there was no such industry as ‘sports marketing,’” she says. “I stumbled into the Pacers job and in an accidental way was able to apply so much of what I had learned at IU.”
Prior to her marketing position with the Pacers, Knapp was one of the Pacers’ four original “Pace Setters,” a role she likens to “Vanna White before there was Vanna White. We wore nice clothes and walked around talking to people, but we didn’t dance or cheer.”
In the late 1990s, Knapp chaired HPER’s Recreation Endowment Campaign and subsequently received the school’s 1998 John R. Endwright Alumni Service Award for her efforts. She was honored with IU’s Distinguished Alumni Service Award in 2000.
Currently, Knapp is on the board of directors of the Indiana Sports Corporation, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and the National Spirit Group, and is the chair emeritus of USA Gymnastics. In 2002, she took a part-time job at a preschool near her Austin home “just for fun.”
During the process of planning the HPER Endowment campaign, Knapp and her husband were finalizing plans for their own estate. They established a remainder trust for HPER’s Hilltop Garden Center. The gift aligns with Knapp’s belief that life runs full circle. “You simply don’t take without giving back, in my opinion. You have to give back somewhere, whether it’s your church or your community. Going to school at HPER was my great good fortune, so giving back is an opportunity.”
