You never know what inspiration you might find flipping through a magazine.

Kelly Landry Mehrtens was doing just that when she saw a picture of Vivian Fuller, who at the time was the athletics director at Northeastern Illinois. What she saw was an African-American woman who was running an athletics department on a college campus.

She also learned that Charles Harris, an African-American male, was the director of athletics at Arizona State. Mehrtens, then an aspiring administrator at Northeastern, picked up the telephone and spoke with both Fuller and Harris, who became her mentors.

“A lot of times some people may or may not take the call,” Mehrtens said. “They both did, and we chatted. I told them I wanted to be like them someday and asked for any advice. I’m the type of person when I ask for advice, I take it to heart.”

A couple of hard-working decades later, Mehrtens’ dreams were realized when she was named director of athletics at North Carolina-Wilmington in August 2007.

She prepared for the role working on the staffs of Dave Maggard at Miami (Florida), Ron Guenther at Illinois and Lew Perkins at Kansas – all white males who believed in Mehrtens’ ability to manage revenue-producing sports on campus.

“They all gave me an opportunity to prove myself, and that in and of itself is very important,” Mehrtens said. “While I was at Kansas and Illinois, I had the opportunity to get involved in fund-raising. The exposure to that part of being an administrator helped me tremendously.”

Mehrtens, an All-American discus thrower at Alabama during the mid-1980s, manages an athletics department with 19 sports at North Carolina-Wilmington.

“It’s been phenomenal so far,” Mehrtens said. “This institution, our coaches and our supporters have been great. It all stems from having a chancellor who supports athletics and what athletics can mean to an institution.”

Kelly Landry Mehrtens knows the importance of mentor relationships, having benefited from the insight of Charles Harris and Vivian Fuller. / Photo courtesy of University of North Carolina-Wilmington.