National Football Foundation

The National Football Foundation (NFF) & College Hall of Fame announced that Yale University Director of Athletics Thomas Beckett and Harvard University's John D. Nichols '53 Family Director of Athletics Bob Scalise have been named the 2018 recipients of the NFF John L. Toner Award. They become the first-ever-sitting athletics directors from the Ivy League to claim the honor in the award's 21-year history.

"Harvard-Yale is one of the most storied rivalries in college football, and it seemed fitting to honor both university's athletics directors with the Toner Award," said NFF President & CEO Steve Hatchell. "The leadership of Tom Beckett and Bob Scalise has spawned great success on the field and in the classroom at both universities. Their accomplishments place them at the forefront of their profession."
 
As a player, coach and athletic administrator, Tom Beckett has spent much of his life mentoring young people. The Pittsburgh native has served as the director of athletics at Yale University since 1994, overseeing 35 varsity sports and approximately 850 student-athletes, and he announced his retirement effective June 2018.
 
Under Beckett's tenure, Yale has led the nation in teams honored by the NCAA for Public Recognition Awards (Academic Progress Rate - APR) more than half the years of its existence. He has helped recruit outstanding student-athletes to a world-class university while building a highly successful sports program.
 
Since Beckett came to New Haven, Yale teams have produced 128 championships, including 28 national titles, 73 first-place Ivy League finishes, 10 ECAC events and numerous other postseason victories. He has seen 43 Olympic athletes and 337 All-Americans, while Yale has averaged more than 10 nationally ranked teams during his tenure.
 
Yale has claimed at least a share of the Ivy League football title three times during Beckett's tenure, including sole possession in 2017 under head coach Tony Reno, who Beckett hired in 2012. In the 24 editions of "The Game" since he took over as AD in 1994, Yale has beaten archrival Harvard seven times, including the last two meetings in 2016 and 2017. Beckett oversaw the final two seasons of College Football Hall of Fame coach Carm Cozza (inducted in 2002), and he kept on the legendary coach as a special assistant while Cozza handled radio color commentary for Yale football.
 
His tenure also saw the induction of former Yale great Dick Jauron into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2015, and the recognition of five Bulldogs as NFF National Scholar-Athletes for their combined effort on the field, in the classroom and in the community: Peter Lee (2001), Ed McCarthy (2006), Casey Gerald (2008), Patrick Witt (2011) and Tyler Varga (2014).
 
Yale is one of 29 colleges and universities to have at least one player honored in all 12 years (2007-18) of the NFF Hampshire Honor Society, which is comprised of college football players from all divisions of play who each maintained a cumulative 3.2 GPA or better throughout their college careers. Yale set a new single-year record for the Hampshire Honor Society with 22 honorees in 2018, and a total of 113 Bulldogs have been recognized overall.
 
The Yale AD has also been successful in fundraising to transform the school's athletic facilities into one of the nation's best. He has supervised the renovation, restoration or construction on 20 major projects, including the restoration of the historic Yale Bowl. Eleven new facility projects have been completed with nine other venues getting major renovations since 1994.
 
Beckett has made community involvement at Yale a high priority, and his leadership helped create the award-winning Thomas W. Ford '42 Community Outreach Program, which has brought youth from the New Haven area to the campus for events such as the National Youth Sports Program and Yale Youth Days.
 
A 1968 graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, Beckett earned three varsity letters in baseball, serving as the captain of the Panthers' 1968 team. He received a master's degree in education from his alma mater in 1972, and he is a 1975 graduate of Harvard's Summer Institute of Life Science. 
 
Beckett played professional baseball in the San Francisco Giants' organization for five seasons before embarking on a career in college athletics. He coached at the University of Pittsburgh and Butler Community College (Pa.), and was an athletic administrator at San Jose State University before moving to Stanford University, where he served from 1983 to 1994 as associate director of athletics. During his tenure at Stanford, Cardinal teams won 32 NCAA championships, and the program received seven NCAA "Champion of Champions" awards.
 
Beckett, a Positive Coaching Alliance (PCA) national advisory board member and his wife, Kim (Craddock) Beckett, a special education advocate and PCA New England board member, reside in the Town of Guilford with their son, Alex, a Special Olympics Unified Sports multi-sport athlete.