Nine weeks every semester, recruiting students for institutions that needed her to believe in them hard enough to convince someone else to. She was an admissions recruiter then not an executive, not an associate vice chancellor just a woman from Wilmington, North Carolina, who had not yet left the state she was born in, driving toward the next family, the next conversation, the next first-generation student who needed someone to tell them that a yard existed and that it had their name on it. What came after was twenty years of building systems inside institutions that often didn’t fully understand what enrollment really was. Enrollment is not the beginning of a brochure cycle it is the beginning of an institution’s survival. It is the quiet infrastructure that determines whether a university grows, stabilizes, or slowly fades whether the buildings stay lit, whether the programs stay funded, whether the next generation of students finds a door open or a sign that reads closed.

Cheryl Pollard has spent two decades understanding that at a level most people in higher education never reach. She is a Ram. A graduate of Winston-Salem State University, class of 1993. She is also an Aggie North Carolina A&T, where she later earned her master’s degree and eventually became director of undergraduate admissions. During her tenure there, NC A&T earned the distinction of becoming the largest HBCU in the country. That did not happen by accident. It happened because of the strategic initiatives and goals that people like Cheryl put into place quietly, structurally, without a press release.

She carried that same architecture to Jackson State University, where she served as associate vice president for enrollment management, building out a national strategy, a data-driven five-year plan, and a vision for what an HBCU could look like when it stopped reacting and started designing its own future and then she came home. But there is a chapter between those institutions that rarely gets told. Cheryl Pollard stepped away from the world of work to care for her mother, who was terminally ill. She sat with her. She stayed. She chose presence over position at a moment when most people in her professional lane would have kept moving. During that time, she found herself asking a question out loud why had she never left North Carolina after undergraduate school, thirty years later?

Her mother looked at her and said: “I don’t know.” Two weeks before she passed, her mother said something else.

“I’m getting ready to leave here. Now you can go anywhere you want to go.”

Cheryl called what came next her “reboot process.” She gave herself time to grieve with intention and when she was ready to step back into the work, she went somewhere she had never been Mississippi because she saw an opportunity to make an immediate impact. She saw where her skills and her experience could be put to use. That is the full architecture of a person. Not just the titles. Not just the institutions. The choices that cost something, and what those choices made possible afterward. There is a particular thing Cheryl does that almost no one talks about. When she launched her ambassador program the one she would later call the proudest moment of her career she started with 18 students. By the time she left that role, there were 80.

These were not just brand ambassadors. These were students hired by the institution to represent it. Students given their first professional experience inside the walls of the university that was supposed to prepare them for the world. For many of them first-generation students, students without networks, students who arrived on a yard with talent and need and no clear pathway into stability this was their first job. Not just their first campus job their first job.

That distinction matters enormously. Because stability for a first-generation college student is not just about tuition or housing or financial aid. It is about the moment when the institution stops being a place you attend and starts being a place that invests in you. A place that sees your potential before you have the résumé to prove it. A place that hands you a paycheck and says: “you belong here, and we are going to show you what that means.”

Cheryl Pollard built that. Repeatedly. Across multiple institutions. With 18 students that became 80. She is now the Associate Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management at Winston-Salem State University the institution that first put a degree in her hands. In April 2025, she launched a Transfer and Adult Student Services unit, recognizing what the data was already showing: that the next generation of HBCU students looks different than the last, and that the systems built to receive them need to evolve accordingly.

Enrollment growth, she said, will be driven by adult and transfer students. So the system needs to meet them not the other way around. That is the work. Not glamorous. Not viral. Not the kind of thing that gets a standing ovation at a homecoming game. But it is the reason the game happens at all.

Every Ram class begins long before move-in day.

It begins in a conversation with a recruiter who believes in the institution enough to drive nine weeks out of every semester.

It begins in an ambassador program where a first-generation student gets their first paycheck.

It begins with someone who stepped away from the work to honor her mother, and came back ready to build something that would last.

Before the yard becomes memory, someone has already done the work of making it possible.

Her name is Cheryl Pollard.

And she has been standing at the door for a long time.

This piece is part of the Notes from the Yard series on HBCUSHACK documenting the educators, administrators, and builders who shape HBCU culture before the cameras arrive.