Isaiah Jones hired as associate AD

Utah State University announced the hiring of Isaiah Jones as the first associate athletics director for student-athlete programming and community engagement on Thursday, Sept.19.

Jones, an alum of USU and former Aggie football player, said he has deep roots with the Aggie community. Jones walked onto the USU football team and played from 2009-12, winning a conference title in 2012. His father Paul Jones also played football and participated in track and field, his sister Daphne Jones ran track and his wife Josselyn White-Jones played for USU volleyball, where she was a four-year letterwinner and still is ranked in the top 10 all-time for total blocks.

“My family are all alumni,” Jones said. “Dad was a student-athlete here. My sister was a student-athlete in track and field, and then my wife and I. So actually, it feels like a full circle of starting in athletics.”

Jones previously worked for USU for close to two years as senior director for inclusive excellence and for four years as the USU Parent & Family Orientation coordinator. During his time with inclusive excellence, Jones worked on creating, promoting and maintaining relationships between USU groups, community organizations and the inclusive excellence division across Utah. He said returning to athletics after playing and getting his start there was very exciting.

“It’s kind of all the way back, like, ‘Oh, I’m home again,’” Jones said. “I’m really excited just to serve student-athletes and faculty staff and community members.”

Jones’s new role will focus on increasing opportunities for student-athletes to connect with the Aggie community and overseeing community engagement and service initiatives. His work will also focus on building collaborations between USU and local groups “in addressing regional and societal challenges,” according to a press release from USU Athletics.

“Community engagement would be the keyword, and collaboration,” Jones said. “I think when you’re at a university that’s as large as Utah State, you have to be really intentional about making sure that we’re not duplicating efforts, making sure we’re creating the best partnerships across campus and off-campus that can enhance the experience for student athletes or coaches or community members and thinking about how we can build pathways.”

Jones shared how this new role will allow him to do things to improve the experience of student-athletes, and he will take things he remembers from his time at USU. As a native of Macon, Georgia, he especially hopes to help athletes from outside the Logan community adjust to life in Utah.

“You go through the canyon. Your head’s popping out of the window. It’s beautiful,” Jones said. “Then you get to Logan, and you recognize that it’s incredible, but there’s also a lot that’s different about it. For myself as an out-of-state student, or some of my teammates were international students, and so it took us a little bit of time just to get situated and into the Logan community.”

He added that he hopes to help athletes thrive academically, emotionally and socially. When he was a student, he participated in programs to help his peers.

“I was a student-athlete mentor, and that was a great experience. I was able to mentor younger student-athletes,” Jones said. “I was a teaching assistant, and I think that for me, just being able to pull all those pieces together in an intentional way, especially with all the improvements that have happened since 2012 and really utilize that will help to enhance the student-athlete experience.”

Vice president and athletic director Diana Sabau shared in a press release how excited the athletics department is to have Jones on the team.

“With the addition of Isaiah Jones as our new leader in this space, we are striving toward an enhanced level of support for our student-athletes,” Sabau said. “His familiarity with Aggie athletics and the challenges facing today’s student-athletes are outstanding assets, and his enthusiasm and knowledge make him the perfect person to begin implementing these initiatives.”

When it came to starting on his journey of becoming and continuing to be an Aggie, Jones said it started with his father and family.

“I did grow up looking at my father in pictures with Utah State,” Jones said. “We would watch the games, and then we would travel here from time to time. We would go to any games, or a lot of games where Utah State would play southern teams — so when they were playing Alabama or Clemson. I just grew up a huge, huge fan.”

He said that USU changed the trajectory of his father’s life and seemed like a magical place to him as a kid.

“It holds a special place for us in our family,” Jones said. “My dad coming from south central Los Angeles to Logan, Utah was probably the most significant thing that’s impacted who he is today, which is a president of a university. And so growing up, it was always like Hogwarts or something. How do I get there, you know? And so when I had the opportunity, I had to check it out myself.”

When Jones found out they had a spot for him on the team, he said he blasted the USU fight song through his PlayStation speakers, and his mom jokingly asked, “Did you get in?”

Jones said that coming here changed his life, just like it did his father’s. It allowed him to meet his wife and have a family with four kids, which he said is fun but creates a busy household.

Jones started in physiology and then started taking some history classes, which almost made him switch majors, but he was advised against it and was told to instead get a master’s degree in history. He graduated with those degrees from USU in 2012. His focus on European history, Latin and Greek and religions inspired him to go after a philosophy degree, which he did at Notre Dame as a Lourdes fellow. He’s currently working on his MBA with the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business.

“I love to learn,” Jones said. “It’s a lot of personal interest, and it’s turned into professional. It was just curiosity.”

He expressed that history, and especially the history of higher education, is a passion project he loves to learn about and discuss. He also said he loves talking about anything football or sports-related. But he said his favorite thing to “nerd” about is philosophy.

“I love talking philosophy and academic philosophy,” Jones said. “Hearing people’s ideas of leadership, hearing their ideas about success, those are probably what I’m most passionate about. Philosophy is the one thing that trumps all the rest of it.”

He said his goal is to make sure everyone has an opportunity to follow their dreams, which he said is partially inspired by stories like “Rudy” and “Rocky.”

“If people have the right structure and support, they can do incredible things,” Jones said. “I get really hurt when someone has written someone off but haven’t taken into account the right support they needed. I get really passionate about just ensuring people have what they need to get a shot at what they’re really passionate about and not dismissed right off the bat because they have no experience, or because on a surface level, they can’t see it happening.”

He said he’s driven by passion, curiosity, wonder and wanting to be a force for good in the community.

“How can I use all that knowledge to facilitate positive change to a community in a world that is in need of that?” Jones said. “It keeps me working because I know it takes a lot to even understand.”