New Manager in CSUN’s Corner

Tiny, windowless and crammed with boxes, room 212 in the Physical Education Building at Cal State Northridge is the temporary headquarters of the athletic department’s new business manager, Debby De Angelis, who has to share the cracker box with a football coach, a track coach and her computer terminal.

The makeshift arrangement reflects the frenzy in which CSUN is getting ready for its move to Division I beginning in the 1990-91 school year. De Angelis relocated here from Boston earlier this month to find a computer accounting system that was not in place and a new office building that was not finished by its target date this month.

But De Angelis, 41, isn’t about to let a few glitches get her down. “I’m just happy to be back in Southern California,” says De Angelis, born and raised in San Diego.

To go into big-time athletics, CSUN needed a business manager for the athletic department “to pull all sources of income together,” De Angelis says. Her responsibilities include the overall athletic budget and “looking for a deal” in everything from purchasing equipment to making travel arrangements.

Until CSUN hired her, she had a similar position at Northeastern University in Boston for the past six years. At revenue-poor CSUN, she will have to make money go a long way. But that ability is on her resume. “They hired me from a place that had to squeeze the dollar,” says De Angelis, who has a master’s in sports management from the University of Amherst.

De Angelis took the CSUN job on the condition that she be allowed to continue her volunteer work with the U. S. Rowing Assn. in Indianapolis. A former rower who was once an alternate on the national team, De Angelis represents U. S. women’s interests at meetings of the sport’s international governing body.

Women rowers were second-class citizens until fairly recently--they weren’t even allowed in the Olympics until 1976. De Angelis, working for the USRA since 1978, has helped push through rules changes--such as increasing the racing distance from 1,000 to 2,000 meters, the same as the men’s--and create a junior championship event for women.

“I suspect I’m fairly typical of American women,” she says. “I believe anything a man can do, a woman can too. But women are still not equal in sports. It’s an ongoing, uphill battle.”

In rowing, it hasn’t been as difficult getting women in the boats, De Angelis says, “as it has been in leadership positions, especially coaching.”

De Angelis, women’s rowing coach at Northeastern for four years, is the third generation of female rowers in her family. As a student, she helped start the women’s rowing program at UC Santa Barbara and ranked ninth in U. S. singles for two consecutive years. But a bad left knee, operated on three times, forced her to retire in 1975.

“I had a lot of energy left,” she says, so she stayed involved with rowing. From 1976-80 she was the manager of all the U. S. women’s national teams, including the Olympic teams in ’76 and ’80.

Her first few weeks in L.A., De Angelis lived out of a suitcase at a friend’s house in Lakewood, an hour’s drive to Northridge, while her husband was still in Boston, tying up loose ends. And then there were all the new faces she had to sort out on the second floor of the PE building. It was a hectic time.

“But the dean of students has had the athletic department over for dinner,” she says, “and I already feel like one of the family.”

Now if she could only get her own office.