Ahh, the age of cost containment college athletics. For larger schools it means get more advertising revenue and leaning on the boosters a little harder. For smaller schools it means cutting back on expenses, and the sports information office is inevitably hit by this cost cutting.
When the budget cuts hit, the SID at a smaller institution usually has the choice of deciding what to cut, though that is not always the case. Prior to my arrival at TAMUK, media guides had been cut out of the budget. The thought process was for the sports information to produce CD media guides and post them on the Internet in PDF format. While that is an excellent idea, it doesn’t serve the media the way that they are used to. And like it or not, especially at smaller schools, we have to make life easier on the media to get as much publicity as we can. Producing media guides only on CD’s is not media-friendly.
But what do you do when you don’t have $5,000-to-$10,000 burning a hold in your budget? Well producing your media guides and putting them on the web site in PDF format is a good start. Making copies on CD is also solid. I don’t believe that you can try too many different ways to distribute your media guide and guides on CD cost you literally pennies a copy.
However, there’s no substitute for a hard copy in the hands of a newspaper reporter at the game or in the office when he or she needs to look up a record or honor. Faced with the option of no hard copies of my media guides and no money to fund them last year, I improvised. I’ll admit I got a bit lucky along the way as well.
First I laid out the media guides just like I would if I was creating them to send to a printer. Just because you don’t have the budget of the University of Texas doesn’t mean you can’t take your guide as seriously as they do. You can put an unlimited size guide up on the internet (at least until the NCAA decides what to do with the future of media guides) and, if you are a non-Division I school, you can put it up in full color.
After completing the guides I printed them out and made copies. Actually I simply printed all the guides out from my LaserJet printer. It does tend to take up quite a bit of toner, but most LaserJet toner cartridges will last a while. Obviously I don’t recommend printing copies of a guide off an inkjet, as it will become more expensive than going to a printer. Probably the most cost-efficient way to print the guides is to use a copy machine. If you have one that gives you good quality, I recommend that route, as it will save money.
After the inside pages are done I then got some cardstock paper and printed out the covers off a color inkjet printer. I mentioned earlier that I got lucky last year, that’s because I was given a new color inkjet printer at just the right time. That being said the printer only cost about $200. Basic inkjets are relatively cheap – it’s the ink that’s expensive. But for just printing covers they’re reasonable.
All right, the cover and the inside pages are printed. From there I bought a binding machine, which punches about 15-20 small rectangular holes on the left side of the page similar to a three-hole punch only smaller. The machine also binds the guide using a plastic comb binder. I bought a basic binding machine for about $60 on OfficeMax.com and the plastic comb binders were about five cents apiece. Viola! A media guide for about a dollar apiece.
Now, the downside to this process: it’s time consuming, no doubt about it. You have to print the guide, either one at a time on your printer, or by making copies. You have to print the covers. Then you have to bind them. It certainly isn’t as easy as sending it off to a printer.
The upside to this process is simple. It allows you to have a printed media guide when you wouldn’t otherwise. It’s cheaper than a printer and you can make changes throughout the season, so you always have an up-to-date media guide (if you so desire).
There is no perfect world here. This was a process I came up with because I walked into a situation without printed guides and tried to make the best of it. My coaches and administration were satisfied with the results, and the media got a printed media guide. A cautionary note: this is a process that must be carefully started. Recognize in advance that you can’t realistically produce 500 guides this way for a single sport. So you either have to set boundaries for your coaches as to how many you will give them or tell them that they can only have CD guides. Don’t open up Pandora’s box without recognizing what you’re getting yourself into.
All this being said, I think that this route is a realistic way to produce hard-copy media guides on a shoestring budget. If you have the means to produce standard media guides, I would still do it. But if you don’t, this is an alternative that allows you to still produce a guide without the money.
Equipment used by Texas A&M-Kingsville and associated costs for in-office produced media guides:
Color inkjet printer (for covers) $200
Inkjet cartridges – color $25
Inkjet cartridges – B&W $15
Binding Machine $60 (basic machine, better ones go for up to $800)
Binding combs $5/100
Toner Cartridge for LaserJet Printer $100
Derek Smolik is a 10-year veteran of the industry and is currently in his second stint with the CoSIDA Computer Committee as the Vice-Chair. He is in his first year as Sports Information Director at Texas A&M University-Kingsville.