Athletic director Alanna Wren discusses recent coaching shakeups and NIL.
As an alumna who has worked at her alma mater in various capacities for several decades, Alanna Wren C’96 GrEd’99 GrEd’15—Penn’s T. Gibbs Kane Jr. W’69 Director of Athletics and Recreation—is a great believer in what her school can offer. And so “one of the great frustrations” of her job, she said in an early February interview with the Gazette, are the athletic teams that punch below their weight in the Ivy League.
“I won’t be shy,” Wren said. “We have an incredible brand. We have an incredible physical footprint. Our facilities are next to unparalleled. … I’m not saying we have to win a title every year, but my expectation is we’re competitive year in and year out.”
With that in mind, Wren has also not been shy about shaking up the coaching corps. Since her tenure as Penn’s athletic director began in 2021 [“Sports,” Jan|Feb 2022], Wren has hired 13 new head coaches, culminating with fresh appointments in three of the University’s marquee sports: men’s basketball, football, and men’s lacrosse.
“It’s been a run of transition,” she said. “There’s no doubt.”
Wren’s most notable move was the dismissal of Steve Donahue after two straight seasons in which Penn failed to qualify for the four-team men’s basketball Ivy tournament, followed by the eye-catching hire of Fran McCaffery W’82, who returned home to his alma mater after a successful career that most recently included 15 years coaching at the University of Iowa [“Full Circle,” Jan|Feb 2026]. While she admits to having to “remind him of how the Ivy League does certain things differently than the Big Ten,” she’s been thrilled at how McCaffery “intrinsically believes in what we do” and knows how to “best sell a Penn education in light of what’s happening in the NIL space.”
The NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness) space has certainly been murky at many colleges, with alumni pooling cash toward collectives that often distribute money to student-athletes “outside the context of what we would consider appropriate rules,” Wren said. In an online event ahead of the 2025–26 season, McCaffery shared with supporters that Penn basketball has a collective too, but that collective “actually predated Fran,” Wren clarified, adding that “we should probably stop using the term collective because people assume we’re talking about what’s happening at the power four [conference] level.” Penn’s far more modest collective, Wren said, “should be more seen as a group of alums who care desperately about Penn basketball and who want to help students, whether that’s via jobs, networking, or commercial NIL opportunities.”
While many top athletes will continue to go to the teams with the deepest pockets, Wren expressed optimism about the Ivy’s pathway to success, pointing out that “we’re one of the few leagues that’s still recruiting high school students, [with] so much of the country just recruiting out of the transfer portal.” And although the portal has loomed large for the Quakers (with standout players exiting and more recently entering), Wren believes McCaffery can build a program the old-fashioned way, with freshmen who receive four years of “individualized attention on player development” by a coaching staff that can point to a good track record in that regard.
The transfer portal and NIL landscape also hang over college football, but it was another change that helped lure new coach Rick Santos to take over the University’s historic program in December [“Sports,” Jan|Feb 2026]. The Ivy League’s reversal of a longstanding policy that banned its teams from participating in the Football Championship Subdivision Playoffs [“Sports,” Sep|Oct 2025] was a key factor in Santos leaving the University of New Hampshire, where he was a winning head coach and had been a “celebrity athlete,” said Wren, who admitted that “there were absolutely moments where I was afraid we were going to lose him through the search.” Now that Penn can compete for a national championship in football, as it can in every other sport, “we don’t have some sort of inherent obstacle to our success,” Wren said of a program that hasn’t won an Ivy title in 10 years.
“I’m not sure he contemplates this move if we’re not in the postseason,” Wren continued. “And I really do believe him coming to campus was a huge piece of this: his ability to see the investment we made in the locker room. I think he was really wowed by the facilities … and just the alums and their love of the program, and the success we’ve had historically. I think that was really powerful.”
Taylor Wray, hired in July to take over a men’s lacrosse program that Mike Murphy GEd’04 had run for 16 years, won’t have to contend with some of the NIL and transfer challenges facing football and basketball, given that the Ivy is among the best lacrosse leagues in the nation. But like McCaffery and Santos, Wray—the winningest coach in Saint Joseph University’s program history—is “just a winner” who Wren believes has the skill set needed to be successful in this particular college sports environment.
“There’s a relentlessness that you need today,” Wren elaborated. “The college athletics landscape is changing constantly. So if you’re not sort of malleable, or on some level an innovator as far as how to manage challenges, this is not an environment where what you were doing 20 years ago is going to work today.”
Wren said that when she looks to hire new coaches—as she’s also done recently for field hockey (Scott Tupper) and volleyball (Tyler Hagstrom)—student-athlete feedback, via survey and small-group conversations, plays a big role. Those surveys also factor into the athletic department’s renovation projects, which of late have included the opening of an indoor track and field facility, a new football locker room and training complex, a renovated boathouse, and a renovated pool. “We had a three-year stretch where we had over $100 million of projects underway,” Wren said. “Now we’re at the point we’re starting to take a deep breath.” But that doesn’t mean Penn will stop trying to help its coaches. Among the upcoming projects are a new wrestling center and renovations to the locker rooms at the Hollenback Center for more than 200 student-athletes.
Combined with other recent initiatives, like the hiring of a full-time mental health professional and a dietician to manage a fueling station for athletes, those renovation projects and so many exciting new faces populating coaching staffs has Penn’s AD feeling bullish about the future. Said Wren: “It’s an energizing time for Penn athletics.” —DZ
