College Sports Information Directors of America

The difference between a good SID and a great SID is that the great SID uses all of the resources available to him to perform his or her job to the fullest extent. In these days of budget cutbacks, lack of man-power and diminishing marketing and advertising dollars, we need to find new and creative ways to attract students to our athletic departments, spreading the name recognition of the school, virtually assuring better recruiting. At Adams State College, a small, yet nationally successful Division II school in the heart of the pristine Rocky Mountains, we feel the tight grip of budget cuts and lack of help as much as anyone. In fact, our computers are so old, that it seems there is a hamster running in the back of the CPU to keep it going. Yet we have developed a system of extending our reach across the globe, accessing media outlets as far as Australia and England. Many schools have email systems where fans can subscribe and be updated with the newest press releases. Yet very few schools have the contacts for media sources outside of their local areas. And while these venues are not as much of a priority as the local sources we rely on every day, the added exposure, as well as the good publicity, is priceless. At Adams State we have created a database using Netscape Messenger 4.7 to access all of the local news sources of our athletes. In my short time as the Assistant SID, I have never once seen a paper pass up the opportunity to run a “Home Town Heroes: Where Are They Now,’ story. Granted larger papers are very rarely going to run your releases on the front page. However, the biggest rewards tend to come from very small papers located in the likes of Hazen, N.D. or Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Canada, the hometowns of two of our more prominent student-athletes. The process starts with gathering basic information from the athletes and the parents themselves. It doesn’t take the athletes any additional time. And you might be surprised how much work the parents do to facilitate the process. Often they provide names, numbers and email in the hopes of getting their sons or daughters more time on the front pages. Just make sure to tell them that no sources are too big or too small. Church bulletins, community news and high school newspapers all make a big difference. The next step is to do just a little bit of research on the net. Almost every newspaper now has a very clear and concise, “Contact Us” page. Often you can find the names of the editors and reporters as well as fax and phone numbers in just seconds using a handy search engine like YAHOO. Finally, enter all of the data into individual cards in a common address book on Netscape Messenger (4.7 works very well, even though it is very outdated). The key is to make sure that you place the right information into the correct fields. Obviously the name of your contact should go into the first and last name field. If the phone number or the fax is available, then enter those numbers into their respective fields. But to insure that the system works on multiple levels, enter the name of the paper into the nickname field and the name of the town or area into the organization field. Once you have completed entries for all of your athletes you will find that sending out emails is a breeze. Netscape will recognize the entry and the email if you enter the name of your contact, the name of the media source or the name of the town or area. Thus, if you have a national champion from Hazen, N.D., Netscape will automatically pop up with the appropriate email address by simply typing in the name of the editor at the newspaper, the name of the newspaper, or by simply typing in “Hazen.” Taking it one step farther, you can access more then one media source in a given city or for a given team by going back into the address book and creating an email group with all of the media in the same town or area or for specific sports events. For instance, if I have more then one paper that might be interested in a press release about my athlete from Hazen, I can create a group called “Hazen” consisting of all of my Hazen media sources. Instead of typing in half a dozen different Hazen sources, just typing in the group name bring up an entire group making the process a breeze. As member of COSIDA, someday we could all be on the same system, sharing geographic media information. If we could create a common database, then we could access papers around the world for all of our athletes benefiting each school. For a sample address book or a copy of the forms we send to parents or distribute to student-athletes, please contact Adams State College’s Sports Information Director Chris Day at clday@adams.edu. For technical questions or more information about starting your own hometown media database, please contact Brian Small Assistant Sports Information Director at briansmall@excite.com