Game changer
As a teenager growing up in New Jersey, Patty Raube Keller always had a part-time job, but instead of spending her hard-earned cash on clothing or CDs, she bought softball cleats, goalie gloves, and downhill skis. While her parents were at work, she got herself to swim competitions, soccer and softball games, becoming an accomplished athlete in multiple sports. Looking back, the ski slopes and the pitcher’s mound were where she felt most at home.
“I had a very emotionally abusive family so sports is where I was raised,” she recalled. “I had friends, my coaches believed in me. I’m also six feet tall and built like my father, who was a football linebacker, and sports was my way to be a big girl and be okay with that.”
Raube Keller’s love for sports, and her belief in their importance in the lives of young people, has shaped much of her personal and professional life. Today, as director of Boston College's M.S. in Sports Administration program, offered through the Woods College of Advancing Studies, Raube Keller is educating leaders to create more ethical and effective athletics programs at every level, from high school to the pros. The program is currently ranked #21 in the world, and #14 among postgraduate sports management programs nationwide.
“Sports for kids are game-changers. For a lot of them, it’s how they get out of poverty,” explained Raube Keller. “For me personally, if it wasn’t for sports, I wouldn’t have gone to college. Who knows where I would be now?”
Learning the ropes
There was no such thing as a sports management degree when Raube Keller attended college in the 1990s, so she majored in athletic training while playing Division III lacrosse and soccer at Greensboro College in North Carolina (a broken hand her senior year had dashed her Division I softball dreams). After graduating, she entered the male-dominated world of college athletics, often working long hours for little pay and no benefits. Some of her bosses, she said, were volatile and unethical—but she forged ahead, building a professional network and occasionally waitressing to pay the bills.
In the early 2000s, while working as an assistant athletics director at Rowan University in New Jersey, Raube Keller entered a doctoral program and wrote her dissertation on a subject close to her heart: the marginalization of women working in college athletics. She had just met her husband, a strength and conditioning coach at the University of Pennsylvania, and been told by her boss that she could only get married during the offseason. In search of a more supportive work environment, she accepted a one-year contract at the University of Mary, a Benedictine school in North Dakota with a Division II athletics program. Her husband stayed behind in Pennsylvania.
“The oil boom was going and rents were $3,000 a month for a two-bedroom, so I moved into subsidized housing that the University helped me secure,” Raube Keller recalled. “It was crazy but I loved working there.”
As the school’s assistant athletic director for compliance, Raube Keller helped out wherever she was needed, traveling with younger coaches on road trips and providing support to student-athletes who were struggling. She brought in food for younger staff members and took in a graduate assistant who had become homeless. When her husband suffered a heart attack at 42, Raube Keller’s job was made permanent, allowing her and her husband to begin putting down roots in a townhouse in Bismarck. They knew biological children were impossible, so at the suggestion of a colleague, they applied to become foster parents instead.
A new journey
Four-year-old Dana arrived at the Kellers’ house two days before Christmas in 2013, wearing a two-day old pull-up, a SpongeBob t-shirt, and one sock. Her backstory was heartbreaking: born on a nearby Indian reservation, her parents had abandoned her at a gas station along with her half brother. She had endured five foster care placements already, wasn’t potty trained, and was nonverbal.
“Her teeth were rotten,” Raube Keller recalled. “Cheetos probably were her main source of sustenance. I remember giving her watermelon and she wasn’t quite sure what it was.”
Dana Howling Wolf Keller with her adoptive parents.
Raube Keller got Dana involved in sports right away, bringing her to a UMary soccer clinic and signing her up for swimming lessons and tee-ball. When she noticed that Dana didn’t like to be touched, she tried non-contact sports like softball and volleyball. Slowly, she watched her daughter (Raube Keller and her husband officially adopted Dana in 2016) overcome her trauma and gain confidence on and off the playing field.
Today, Dana Howling Wolf Keller is a star volleyball player for her high school team, even drawing attention from her local paper. She competes in pageants, volunteers with Special Olympics Massachusetts, is an academic honor student, and attended BC’s Ever to Excel summer program for high school students in 2024, which has gotten her excited for college.
Raube Keller is proud of her daughter’s accomplishments, and shares them openly in order to combat the misplaced assumption that foster kids are damaged or difficult. Although she and her husband are content as a family of three, Raube Keller recently became a court-appointed special advocate to support foster kids in the system.
“Foster kids aren’t problem kids, they’re amazing,” she said. “They’re coming with baggage but they really just need a stable, loving home.”
Inspiring future leaders
Raube Keller took over BC’s sports administration program in 2021, just two years after its launch, and has grown it into a nationally-respected program with a diverse student body (nearly half of the program’s current students are women, along with half the faculty). The program emphasizes practical experience: all faculty members have worked at least 10 years in the field, and students are guaranteed internships in some of the area’s top programs. In her survey course, Raube Keller brings in a panel of industry professionals every other week, and works with students to perfect their resumes and cover letters. She and her colleagues are constantly breaking out the virtual Rolodex, using their networks to connect students with coveted job opportunities at organizations like the Boston Red Sox and the San Francisco 49ers.
Raube Keller at a recent networking night. Photo by Lee Pellegrini.
Working in sports requires hard and soft skills, and Raube Keller is determined to help her students graduate with both. She gives feedback on the way they interact at school social events, and on whether an email they sent is striking the right tone, because in her experience, networking and communication skills are critical to one’s professional success.
“In this field it’s often about who you know and how you present yourself,” she said. “I tell my students, ‘I’ll always correct you in private, but I’m going to correct you.’”
Raube Keller also shares her personal story with classes, so they understand where she’s coming from when she stresses the importance of ethical decision-making and affordability in sports. In the future, whether they’re launching a new club or coaching in a top-tier college program, Raube Keller hopes they’ll consider ways to include students who can’t pay exorbitant fees or buy fancy equipment.
“You never know, the next Michael Jordan might be the kid that can't afford anything,” she said. “Do we want to hold that kid back?”
As she has at other institutions, Raube Keller has become a mentor to BC students who grew up in foster care, including Abigael Peterson, a track and field athlete currently enrolled in the M.S. in Sports Administration program. As a child, Peterson attended five different elementary schools while living in foster care and a group home, and struggled with lack of confidence. Like Dana, sports were the key to overcoming past trauma.
“The more I ran, the more my grades improved, the more my attitude improved, and the more I began to understand my path to success,” Peterson recalled.
Peterson chose the Woods program for its educational and networking opportunities, and hopes to pursue a career designing and marketing running footwear and apparel after graduation.
“Dr. Keller has been a great advocate for foster youth,” she said. “It has been great to learn under someone who understands that your circumstances do not dictate your future.”