Marketing professor named Professor of the Year at recent ROARS Awards

By Stephen Schmidt

For Wayne Keene, EdD ’17, the third time was indeed the charm.

Keene, an associate teaching professor of marketing in the Trulaske College of Business, had been nominated twice in his first five years at Mizzou for the Professor of the Year Award at the annual ROARS Awards.

In both instances, his wife, Misty, had attended the event, which is run by the Mizzou Made Department of Mizzou Athletics in the same spirit of ESPN’s ESPY Awards.

When the 12th edition of the awards were held virtually this year on April 19 and broadcasted on YouTube Live, Misty was stationed outside of the room where her husband listened for the name of the award recipient.

“For years, we had joked about whether she was bad luck or something, because for every other award I had received over the years, she was not in attendance. So this time around our kids were adamant that she would not even stand in the room where we all were,” said Keene with a hearty laugh.

Keene was one of 14 nominees — and ultimately one of three finalists — for the category, in which the award recipient “has demonstrated a commitment to serving our student athletes and supports them academically, athletically and socially,” in the words of the award’s description.

Nominee submissions are sent in by both student-athletes and members of the academic staffs within Mizzou Athletics, which currently fields a collective 18 teams in 13 sports. The names of those who submit the names of nominees are kept anonymous, but it was confirmed that the person who nominated Keene was a student-athlete.

“Keene is an inclusive and passionate teacher,” the submission read. “He made everyone feel welcome in our class and always told us how much he believed in every single one of us. Our class was so close (even while being a 100-percent online class) and I truly believe it was because Keene was such a great teacher.”

Since beginning teaching at Trulaske as an adjunct professor in 2007, Keene, who also serves as the director of the Inside Sales Lab and the college’s Center for Sales and Customer Development, estimates that he has had more than 150 student-athletes take his personal selling class and other related classes.

Over the years, he has worked to create a bridge from his classroom to Mizzou Athletics by being an active advocate of the Total Person Program and working directly with Adam Kiel, the director for student athlete development.

"Sales and athletics just go hand in hand,” said Keene, who has been asked to be an honorary coach for several of the Mizzou teams, including baseball and volleyball. “That's always been a good place for athletes because they're self-motivated. They know how to work hard, and they don't mind a scoreboard — and that's a big part of how sales people are measured: Did they get the win? Additionally, athletes know how to be on a team and create relationships through that dynamic. These characteristics are critical for success in sales.”

Keene, who recently also was awarded the Raymond and Mary Ann O’Brien Excellence in Teaching Award from Trulaske, said that on numerous occasions it has been the student-athletes in his courses who have assumed a leadership role in the classroom, which, in turn, have created a positive spill-over effect to the other students.

Being a former athlete in high school, Keene contributes much of his teaching philosophy to the lessons he learned from a former basketball coach, Ed Settles, in the late ’80s while growing up in Jerseyville, Illinois — such as driving performance through others and making sacrifices for the benefit of the team.

“Out of all the awards that I've won in higher education, the one I wanted the most as an ex-athlete was the Professor of the Year from the athletic department,” Keene said. “I could never be a Division-1 athlete, but I received an award from a D-1 athletic department, and that's super cool to me. You know, the 18-year-old me could have never imagined that.