Photo cutline, below: Longtime Christopher Newport University (CNU) SID Wayne Block (left) and his wife, Linda, were honored this winter for their services to the institution by Athletic Director/Basketball Coach C.J. Woollum following the 2010 USA South Basketball Tournament semifinal game in CNU¹s Freeman Center.by Peter D. KoryznoThe New York Knicks’ newest ball boy patrolled the Madison Square Garden sideline collecting warm-ups and towels seconds before the start of what would become a hapless 1961-62 season, unforgettable but for the players later allowing Wilt Chamberlain to score 100 points against them in a Hersey, Pa., gymnasium.
“Hey, come on over here,” yelled Sam Stith, a Knicks rookie and future St. Bonaventure Hall of Famer, from his seat at the end of the bench. “Put that stuff down and sit next to me, because I am going to be here about as much as you are. We can watch the games together.”
Stith’s prognostication proved true. He played sparingly in his only NBA season. However, his newfound bench mate, Stuyvesant High senior Wayne Block, would remain around athletics for nearly his entire professional career, the bulk of it taking place in Virginia’s Tidewater region.
Block, who turned 65 in May, will retire in June from a 27-year career as the Christopher Newport University (CNU) sports information director. On July 5, he will accept the Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Sports Information Director’s of America.
The CoSIDA Lifetime Achievement Award is presented to members who have served a minimum of 25 years in the profession and have retired or left the profession. Block will receive the honor during the CoSIDA Kickoff Luncheon at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis in San Francisco, Calif.
Block’s tenure spans more than half the life of the Newport News, Va., institution, a campus whose prestige and athletic prowess has undergone a remarkable transformation in the past decade under its president, Paul S. Trible, Jr., explained Block.
“He came to a school that had just opened its first dorm two years before,”’ Block said. “It was basically a commuter, small, sleepy, little college. What he has done is just phenomenal. We have put a half-billion dollars in buildings and expansion and are going to spend another half billion in the next six or seven years.
“At the same time, the athletic program just exploded, not just in terms of the number of sports but in the success we have had. Up until 1990, we were very mediocre, to say the least. Then our athletic director, C.J. Woollum, built something here that has become one of the premier Division III programs in the country. We’ve been so extremely successful in so many different things here. Having been able to part a part of that and to watch it grow has been phenomenal.”
Block, the 2005 Warren Berg Award recipient, has hardly been a casual observer to the success. He has firmly placed his own imprimatur on CNU’s 22-sport program and a generation of its student-athletes and coaches.
His publications have captured 80 national Awards of Excellence from the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA), including 16 Best in the Nation. Under his guidance, CNU became a leader in instituting Internet coverage of sports, founding its first website in 1990. The university was a Division III pacesetter in live webcasts of sports starting in 2003.
“I’ve been surround
ed by some great people here,” he said. “We have had three full-time people in sports information here for 10 years and, in Division III, that just doesn’t happen. I credit our athletic director for his support. Dave Gosselin and Francis Tommasino have been on my staff for a long time.”
For 18 years, Block was publicist for the Dixie Conference, now called the USA South Athletic Conference. He has served as president of the Virginia Sports Information Directors’ Association, the first organization of its kind in the U.S., and received its Distinguished Service Award in 1997.
“I have met so many great people all throughout the state of Virginia that it has just been a tremendous experience,” he noted.
Block was inducted into the Christopher Newport University Athletic Hall of Fame, a body he helped to establish. The Peninsula Sports Club presented him with its 2006 Bob Moskowitz Award for service to athletics in the local area. Within the community, he has read newspapers to the blind over a special radio station signal and has coached youth baseball.
His own passion for sports was fostered as a youngster growing up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. While most junior high students dream of grabbing an autograph from a professional athlete at a stadium, Block actually interviewed them alongside media newcomer Howard Cosell for ABC’s national radio show All League Clubhouse.
“They would have me bring two other students from our school and we would walk the three blocks to the studio,” recalled Block, whose older brother Curt, later an NBC East Coast executive, landed him the job. “They would have different sports stars, depending on who was in New York that day. We would ask them prewritten questions off from little cards. We would go around the table and ask them two questions each during the broadcast. It was quite an experience.”
Block attended Hofstra University, where he admittedly made the freshman basketball squad solely on the knowledge gained from sitting alongside Stith at the Knicks’ games the previous year. Realizing his future in athletics was not as a player, he befriended Hofstra SID Dick Gordon, an ECAC-SIDA pioneer, and volunteered in the SID office for his remaining three years. He also worked as the school newspaper’s sports and managing editor.
After graduation, Block landed a job with the Albany (N.Y.) Times-Union. He became its college sports beat reporter and covered RPI, Albany, Union and Siena, along with the local junior colleges.
From 1968-70, Block was the SID at RPI, site of one of his greatest sports memories. He vividly recalls the capacity crowd that witnessed RPI’s overtime upset of the visiting Cornell University powerhouse ice hockey team, directed by former RPI National Champion Coach Ned Harkness and led by legendary goalie Ken Dryden.
In 1970, Block accepted the SID job at C.W. Post on Long Island to be closer to home, but drastic budget cuts eliminated that position by the end of the year.
“I literally wrote letters to just about every fairly large school I could think of, just saying if you had anything please let me know,” Block recalled. “One of the places I heard from was Virginia Tech, where Wendy Weisand, who is a CoSIDA Hall of Famer, was SID at the time. I wound up becoming the first full-time SID they ever had at Tech.”
He doubled as the part-time spots editor of the Blacksburg Sun and did local radio broadcasting of high school sports and Virginia Tech baseball. Meanwhile, Weisand provided Block with an outstanding sports information foundation and standard of excellence that has remained his barometer in the four decades since.
“He taught me so much in my four years there, I think that was the reason I got so anxious to leave,” he recounted. “I kind of got itchy to become the head guy again. It was probably not the best decision I ever made.”
When the promise of editing the corporate magazine for a large food chain did not materialize, Block found himself the assistant manager of a Rustler’s Steak House in West Virginia, something he can laugh about all these years later.
“People who know me can’t believe I ever worked in a restaurant because I don’t cook,” Block said. “I’ve been married for 38 years and I doubt that I’ve cooked two meals.”
Block came to the Tidewater region in June of 1976 as the news bureau director at Hampton Institute, where his former Virginia Tech student assistant, Mike Ballweg, was the SID. The following year, Block founded and published Tidewater Life Magazine. In 1980, he moved into radio as the news director at WBCI Radio in Williamsburg, Va., and, from 1982-83, as news director at WNSY in Hampton, Va.
“I wasn’t looking for a job, but I just happened to notice in the local newspaper a classified ad that CNU was looking for part-time SID,” Block recalled. “I thought maybe I could get back into it part-time in the afternoons. I was done at the radio station by noon. They hired me and that’s exactly what I did for the first year.”
When CNU Athletic Director Bev Vaughn offered him a fulltime position the next year, Block accepted and set into motion his exemplary sports information operation.
“I think it goes back to my experience at Tech and learning how things were done at the Division I level,” he said. “What I’ve tried to do ever since I got here was take some of the things I learned there and some of the ways that Division I schools work and boil them down to the level that can work, especially in terms of budget, for a Division III school. I have tried to take that mentality and use whatever monies are available to run the programs in as close to a Division I model as possible.”
Block credits his wife, Linda, and son, Kevin, as integral partners “since day one” throughout his sports information career.
“Linda and I met at a bowling alley while I was at Tech,” he said. “She really couldn’t do much because women weren’t allowed in the press box in those days. She would make the 25-mile ride with me to Roanoke where we would deliver the press releases to the post office and drop the game film off to be developed. That’s how our relationship got started.”
At CNU, she has been the football scoreboard operator and a versatile statistician, while Kevin, now 35, sold game programs when he was younger.
The Blocks will relocate in a year to Maricopa, Ariz., where they have purchased a retirement home. Wayne plans on giving Pacific West Conference Assistant Commissioner Tom Di Camillo a phone call at some point with an offer to help, if needed.
As he leaves CNU, Block envisions the high standards he set there as his legacy.
“I just hope that some of the coaches that are here now and some of the coaches that I have known over the years will feel that really did things the right way,” Block concluded. “I always felt it was important for us to do as much for the athletes as we possibly could. At Division III, they are doing it because it’s what they love to do. They are giving of themselves incredible amounts of time and energy, and doing great things for the university. I think I have enjoyed it as much as I have because the athletes always seem to really appreciate anything that can be done for them.”