The following story is from the Fall 2025 edition of the "Roar Report" that came out September 24. It is authored by Gary D'Amato, the former longtime sportswriter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who joined the staff as the feature writer for the Roar Report in the Fall of 2018.

CHAIRING THE MADNESS
 
In 1995, when Amanda Braun was a senior at Siena College, her mother scored tickets to the NCAA Division I Women's Final Four, held at the Target Center in Minneapolis.
 
She crashed on a couch at a friend's house and witnessed a seminal moment in the history of women's college basketball as the great Rebecca Lobo led unbeaten UConn to the title with a 70-64 victory over Tennessee.
 
"It was another moment of real elevation in women's basketball," Braun said, "and I just happened to be there."
 
Twenty-seven years later, in 2022, Braun was back at the Target Center for the Final Four. This time, the director of athletics at Milwaukee was sitting courtside as a first-year member of the NCAA Division I Women's Basketball Committee.
 
"It was just such a full-circle moment," she said.
 
Braun now chairs the 12-member Women's Basketball Committee. It's a prestigious position and a tremendous honor, and it illustrates the high regard in which she is held nationally.
 
"Especially at this time, when (the women's game) has just taken a leap, it's so neat being on this committee," she said. "It means a lot to me personally, and professionally it's a cool opportunity. It's a pretty desirable position, and so I'm really proud to be a part of it."
 
The committee members are assigned to conferences and will spend the 2025-26 season watching and evaluating teams. Then, from March 11-16, they'll meet in Indianapolis to select, seed and draw up brackets for the 68 teams that will comprise the NCAA DI tournament field.
 
As one can imagine, it's a mind-numbing grind in which the committee members pore over reams of data in all-day meetings, engage in spirited debate and strive to produce the best possible field and the most equitable seeding and bracketing.
 
The responsibility weighs heavily on the shoulders of a few.
 
"We want to get it right for all the teams that work so hard all year," said Braun, who served as the committee's vice chair in 2024-25. "And that's more complicated than what people think. What you ultimately end up doing is comparing teams against one another and you sort of go down who are the one seeds, who are the two seeds … and it's splitting hairs.
 
"I really want us to look at the data, because it tells the story. It's pretty sophisticated data — the wins above bubble, the NET ranking. And then we watch the teams, too. That's a big part of it. We share those notes with one another. The biggest concern is that we somehow don't get it right. But we spend so much time on it, I'd be surprised if we didn't get it very close to just right, if not exactly right."
 
Braun grew up in Brodhead, south of Madison, a self-described gym rat who was known as the kid who walked around town with a basketball under her arm.
 
At Siena, she was a "highly injured" member of the women's basketball team, scoring exactly 42 points in 42 career games, a statistical symmetry that would have looked much different if she hadn't suffered a significant injury as a sophomore.
 
"It was basically a hairline fracture in the bone where your hamstring connects," she said. "That's really hard to recover from and I don't think I ever did fully because then I had some compensation-type strains and pulls.
 
"But what I learned from that experience was, a) how to be a teammate, but also, a little bit of perspective. I'm a better administrator for it because I understand what it feels like to not play. To have to sit there and not participate in the thing that you love so much and have put so much time into … so I have a lot of empathy for kids who have that experience."
 
Braun's college coaches, noting her passion and her high basketball IQ, tried to steer her toward coaching, but she was more interested in the administrative side of athletics.
 
Now in her 13th full year as Milwaukee's AD, she has forged a reputation as one of the best leaders in college sports. In 2023, she was named the NCAA Division I Nike Executive of the Year by Women Leaders in College Sports.
 
Braun has been a member of numerous NCAA committees during her career; her five-year run on the DI Women's Basketball Committee was preceded by 5 1/2 years on the NCAA's Competition Oversight Committee.
 
Over a 32-day span in February and March, she figures she'll be home just five days. Her schedule is a bit crazy, but luckily, the men's Horizon League basketball tournament is scheduled for March 11-15 in Indianapolis, so she'll just have to switch hotels for the Selection Committee meetings, which start the next day.
 
"I've learned how to manage my own schedule and energy," she said. "And then I have a fantastic executive team with Cathy Rossi, our deputy AD, Kathy Litzau (senior associate AD), and Adam Ahearn (senior associate AD). I don't worry about anything when I'm gone."
 
After a champion is crowned at the Women's Final Four, to be held April 3 and 5 in Phoenix, Braun's work on the Selection Committee will be done. So what's next?
 
"I will tell you that I am thrilled and honored and humbled to be a part of this," she said. "But I'll be ready when it's done. I'll take a break from committee work on the NCAA level for just a little while. This will be 10-plus years of being on NCAA committees. It has been an honor. And it's fun. I like challenges and I like doing different things.
 
"But I'll be ready for a break."