Marshall Steward - Deputy Athletics Director/Chief Competitive Officer - Staff Directory

Staff Directory

Marshall Steward

Title:
Deputy Athletics Director/Chief Competitive Officer
Email:
Phone:
(865) 974-1250

Updated: November 2024

Marshall Steward serves in the dual-title position of Deputy Athletics Director/Chief Competitive Officer & Associate Provost.

A member of the Tennessee Athletics AD Cabinet and Executive Staff, Steward is the sport administrator for the rowing program while sharing sport admin duties for women's basketball.

As Deputy Athletics Director, Steward oversees a variety of critical, student-facing areas including sports nutrition, sports performance, sports science and sports medicine. Additionally, Steward has oversight of athletics camps, equipment, parking and housing along with student conduct and Title IX.

In his Associate Provost role, Steward has a voice on the University’s academic affairs team and provides administrative oversight of Tennessee Tailored, a unit located in the Thornton Athletics Student Life Center designed to maximize the student-athlete experience through championship-level academic investment, professional preparation, leadership development, and community connection.

Under Steward’s leadership, Tennessee’s student-athletes have raised all-sport GPAs, graduation rates, and post-graduate placement to unprecedented heights, establishing school records in all three areas during his tenure.

During the 2023-24 academic year, Tennessee’s student-athletes tallied the best department GPA (3.40) ever in the fall 2023 semester and followed that with its second-best spring GPA (3.37) ever.

Spring 2023 marked 12 straight years in which the Vols and Lady Vols combined to post a GPA of 3.0 or higher, including a remarkable three straight semesters where every sport at UT had over a 3.00 GPA.

For the first time in Tennessee history, UT’s student-athletes have posted a GPA of over 3.20 in six of the last seven semesters.

In 2024, Steward and his staff took its ninth cohort of the VOLeaders Academy, a year-long, best-in-class leadership development program designed to cultivate student-athlete leaders through sport to create positive change on their teams, campus, and local and global communities, to South Africa and Botswana on a 2-week cultural exchange trip providing applied leadership and service opportunities focused on community development and social change. Past locations have included: Brazil (2016), Vietnam (2017), Ecuador (2018), Rwanda (2019), Belize (2021), Rwanda (2022), and the Philippines (2023). The VOLeaders Academy garnered national recognition as the sole recipient of the Model Practices Award at the 2023 NACDA Convention.

In 2022, Steward co-founded the Tennessee-Rwanda Leadership Experience (TRLE), pronounced “Trail”, a unique international and educational partnership with the Division of Access & Engagement, which provides student and student-athlete leaders from across campus an opportunity to engage in a 2-week cultural immersion experience in Rwanda and South Africa. TRLE Scholars, selected from campus and Athletics student leadership organizations, engage with governmental and local organizations to learn about the history of Rwanda and South Africa from the genocide to rebirth, apartheid to democracy, economic and educational investments, and efforts to address agricultural, educational, and social issues facing Rwandan and South African communities.

Steward has held leadership positions within the National Association of Academic Advisors for Athletics (N4A) and is a proud graduate of the NCAA’s Dr. Charles Whitcomb Leadership Institute, a nationally recognized professional development program designed to assist ethnic minorities in strategically mapping out their careers in athletics administration.

At the institutional level, Steward was named Tennessee Athletics’ representative on the Chancellor’s Council for Diversity and Inclusion in 2019 and served as a committee Chair for UT’s Commission for Black Communities prior to that appointment.

In July 2020—after previously serving as Executive Director of Academic Services—Steward was promoted to the dual-title position of Associate Athletics Director of Academic Services & Assistant Provost. He was elevated to Senior Associate AD & Associate Provost in December 2022.

He was first hired at Tennessee as an academic counselor in 2012 and was steadily elevated to assistant and associate director while working closely with UT’s football, track & field, soccer and men’s golf programs.

Prior to his arrival at Tennessee, Steward served as the Director of Athletic Academic Services at Western Michigan University, where he began as an academic advisor in 2009.

A native of Mt. Vernon, Indiana, Steward holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Sport Management from Indiana State University, where he was a member of the ISU football team as undergraduate and graduate assistant for tutorial services in his alma mater’s Student Academic Services Center. He is currently pursuing his PhD in the University of Tennessee’s Higher Education Administration program.

Steward and his wife, Kramer, reside in Knoxville with their sons, Kyron and Kaylor, and daughters, Hazel and Mira.