DVC’s carousel of athletic directors has ended with the hiring of Christine Worsley. 

Worsley will be the Vikings’ second athletic director in the last two years after longtime director Steve Ward stepped down in the spring of 2007. 

Worsley brings experience coming from Division III school, Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, where she spent the last eight years as the associate director of athletics, a senior women’s administrator and director of sports medicine, which meant she was at the sporting events as an athletic trainer. 

Worsley comes to DVC in the midst of a massive state budget crisis, which, among other things, has forced DVC’s athletic teams to cut games across the board. 

“I think people who are from around here don’t understand that it’s happening everywhere,” she said. “There are budget cuts that are happening across the country. It was happening where I was coming from.” 

Worsley grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, and her former school RIT is also located on the East Coast, which makes a new location just one of the adjustments she has to make. 

But her husband is an Acalanes High School graduate and the one who saw the job advertised.

“When this position presented itself, my husband wanted to come back to California, and this position was exactly where I wanted to be,” Worsley said.

Her husband is still at RIT and will stay there through the year in order to finish the season as RIT’s volleyball coach.   

But the biggest adjustment is the jump from Division III to a community college, she said.

“Coming to a junior college, challenges are a little bit different,” Worsley said.  “In a four year, you have athletes longer, and you have a longer time to prepare them for their career outside of athletics.”

The academic challenges are different as well, she said.  Students look to move on to a four-year school, and they want to go where they could possibly get a scholarship. 

Men’s basketball coach Steve Coccimiglio said Worsley faces a challenging learning curve, because “it’s all new.”

“I’ll support her,” he said. “She seems like a solid, good, high–energy, intelligent person.”

Football coach Mike Darr said, “We’re just getting to know each other, but she seems very organized and will be a very hard worker. She understands some of the demands with the budget and recruiting rules and just this level in general.”

Worsley said she has the beginnings of a strategic plan, which includes creating an educational support system for student athletes, building alumni relations, and getting athletics to become a more inclusive part of campus life.

Worsley’s experience in the sports field isn’t limited to her administrative work.

She started out in science exercise physiology and worked with cardiac patients as a clinician in a hospital before going back to school and earning a certificate as an athletic trainer and a master’s degree in sports management from the University of Utah.

Worsley has worked at some notable Division I schools as an athletic trainer, Hawaii and Utah being among them.

“All those positions are important,” Worsley said. “When you’re an administrator it’s important for you to have experience in the ‘trenches’ to really understand what your staff does.

“It gives you a different perspective on how to manage. So when you’re making decisions, you understand how it’s going to affect them.”