Athletic Communicators

The Scrambled Aches are no longer the Bad News Bears of the CoSIDA fitness challenge.

Could they be the New York Knights instead? 

If you're not up on your baseball movies, the Bad News Bears were a collection of misfits in a California youth baseball league, at least until Tatum O'Neil and the kid on the motorcycle (who was also in another great sports movie, the very underrated "Breaking Away") showed up. The New York Knights were a collection of misfits in the National League, at least until Roy Hobbs showed up.

The Knights began the season in last place before making a serious move up the standings once Hobbs arrived. Eventually, they, well, TigerBlog isn't going to tell you what happened, in case you've never seen "The Natural."

And if you haven't, please stop what you're doing and go watch it, unless you've never seen "Hoosiers," in which case you should go watch "Hoosiers" instead because it's a slightly better movie, though both are among the five best sports movies TB has ever seen.

TB told you the story of the Aches a week ago, when his team in the fitness challenge finished last for the second straight week. Ah, but this week? It's all changed.

The power of teamwork is a beautiful thing to see. The Scrambled Aches have been pushing each other to do better, and so they have.

And as such, TB can tell you that the Aches vaulted all the way from last place of 10 teams all the way to fifth in this week's standings. What will this week hold? 

Who knows. If nothing else, it's been a fun, well, exercise, and a way to connect with fellow athletic communications professionals from around the country, on all different levels of college athletics.

As TB said last week, there's a bond that exists between people in his profession. He went on to point out that there's a commonality to all athletic communications people.

There's also another thing that binds the people in TB's profession. There's a sense that nobody really has a great idea of what it is people in sports information do.

More than that, there's a sense that people don't understand how much the position has evolved through the years. What goes on in the Office of Athletic Communications now bears no resemblance to what went on there 10 years ago, and what went on there 10 years ago bears even less resemblance to what went on there when TB first started doing this.

It's caused everyone in the field to take a hard look at how they do their jobs and what is required of them. It's also caused everyone in the field to learn new skills, radically different ones.

TigerBlog read a thread on Twitter Tuesday night written by Steve Kirschner, who has been in sports information at North Carolina since before TB was at Princeton.

In light of some recent industry layoffs I saw it asked what does an SID (sports information director, communications, public relations, media relations director) do for a college athletic department. Well okay then, here is a list (surely it’s missing stuff)...

— Steve Kirschner (@UNCKirschner) October 6, 2020

Read the thread. And then read all the comments underneath. And read what some of the biggest names in sports media had to say about athletic communications.

It's nice to see so many of those people stand up for those in athletic communications, but the job now goes so far beyond just that.

When TB first started at Princeton, it was all about media relations. Story placements. That sort of stuff.

Today Princeton's OAC still does that side of things, but it also is very much its own media outlet. And it continues to be a more and more demanding field.

Who in athletic communications ever really disconnects? Who puts down the phone, logs off of the computer?

It's actually the opposite. At their most peaceful moments, those in athletic communications are constantly tweeting out some reference to something that happened somewhere completely out of nowhere in the sports world that reminded them of a time that something similar happened at one of their games. They're constantly making graphics and gifs. 

They're constantly producing content.

It's how the business is. Everyone in it knows what they were getting into when they signed up.

And it's not for everyone. TB has seen a lot of good people who've left the business because the pace and the hours weren't for them.

For TB's part, he's never known anything else. He's been a lifer in this business.

That's why he liked Steve's thread the other night so much. It spoke for everyone in the business.

Athletic communications provides insight into a department and a university. It tells the stories directly that need to be told, the ones that speak to the heart of what each school is trying to be and what it values most.

Certainly that's the case at Princeton.

Actually, that's what's kept TB there all these years.