Secret Superheroes of SMC Sports: Athletics Department Welcomes “New” Athletic Director
Heading into the 2026 school year, the Santa Monica College athletics department lost four of its veteran staff across several positions: athletic director Reggie Ellis, assistant athletic director Lydia Ayala, head athletic trainer Diane Watanabe, and assistant athletic trainer Anne Ozello.
Ellis and Ozello were both at SMC for 11 years in their respective roles, Ayala for five years, and Watanabe worked in the department for 41 years, from 1984 to 2025.
SMC’s new athletic director, Thomas “Tom” Briskey, is a former Division I Athlete at University of California Berkeley and Pepperdine University, where he played water polo. He is also an SMC alum, attending the college in 2015. Briskey received his master’s degree in coaching and exercise science from Concordia University Irvine.
Before being hired as athletic director, Briskey was coaching the SMC water polo team and then took over as interim athletic director in 2025. “I’ve worked pretty much every job under the sun,” Briskey said. “But at a certain point I fell in love with teaching and coaching and knew that was kind of what my like long term plans were.”
Briskey worked in real estate, did toddler swim lessons along with mommy-and-me classes, and was an entrepreneur. In the end, coaching and teaching is the one thing he knew he loved to do and could do for a long time to come.
“And so I kind of scratched my head and said, ‘hey, this is what I like doing, so let me figure out how I can do more of that,’” Briskey said.
During his first community college coaching job, the head coach he worked with explained that community college is a place where he could teach and coach and do it long term. So, once he got his master's degree, he reached out to SMC. “If there was any place in the world I'd want to teach and coach, where would it be? And this is the place,” he said.
Assistant athletic trainer Ryan Lee said he knows that Briskey has coached in the past because of his understanding of athletics and that he has been supportive of the athletic trainers. “You can really tell he's like trying to go out of his way to make our job easier,” Lee said.
Briskey loves getting to connect with student-athletes and coaches at SMC. “That's not just about the sports or the performance side, it's about team management, team organization,” Briskey said. He enjoys working with teams on building culture and having a mission, vision, and values.
Briskey’s affinity for learning pushed him to further his education in recent history. “So I'm a Ph.D. student right now and I study identity and values in elite sports and so any chance I have an opportunity to talk about some of those things with coaches, I'm always super excited,” he said.
He is currently seven months into working on his dissertation paper for his Ph.D. program. He is halfway through completing his paper and intends on completing it by the start of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. “My research study will be interviewing Olympic athletes and talking about how their identity develops around being an Olympic athlete,” he said.
While being a student, Briskey is also navigating the complexity and challenges that come with the athletic director position. “The way athletics operates is unlike any other department on campus,” he said.
Both Briskey and assistant athletic director Theresa Tang said there is a lot that happens behind the scenes to allow the department to run effectively on a daily basis. “It requires a lot of relationship building and coordination internally,” Briskey said.
When Briskey took over the athletic director position from former director Ellis, he appreciated the approach he took in passing off the job. “I had a lot of mentorship but also a lot of freedom to mess around with things, try things out, see what would work. So I'm grateful for both.”
Outside of SMC, Briskey enjoys photography and getting outdoors with his girlfriend Emily. “We like to get outside city limits when we can,” Briskey said. “We backpacked through Iceland for six days. We spent the previous summer in Switzerland and France.” Next year, they will be traveling to Japan.
Tang said that Briskey is the optimist to her pessimist. “Meeting with him, I thought he was very spirited, open-minded, and optimistic,” Tang said. “I’m an introvert, he's more of an extrovert.”
When describing their working relationship, Tang explained that their strengths and weaknesses are very complementary to each other. “His strengths and my strengths kind of, like, work well with one another. And then where I fall short, you know, he doesn’t.”
Briskey has come into his new position ready to grow SMC athletics. “It starts with every team and every student-athlete leaving here feeling like they had an excellent experience, and they're ready for the next challenge,” Briskey said. “I say, we have to be the best at doing that.”
One of Briskey’s goals is to strengthen the branding and image of SMC sports. He wants to see more spectators, especially faculty, at sporting events. Another goal of Briskey’s is to be the top academic, top athletic, and top transfer school, as those are qualities he said define the department and the college.
Briskey is appreciative for his chance to make an impact. “I can't emphasize how grateful I am for what I’ve inherited from the people who came before me,” he said.
“I’m grateful for the shoulders I'm standing on and I just hope I can continue that legacy and stick to the mission and really help our student-athletes achieve whatever it is they want to do in life,” Briskey said.