The
Helena (Mont.) Independent Record profiled
sports information directors Dave Guffey at the University of Montana, Bill Lamberty at Montana State University and Bruce Parker, a longtime SID at Montana State, who is now athletic director at Carroll College.
Editor’s Note:
Independent Record sports writer Mark Vinson is a former member of the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA).
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They are among the first to arrive at the stadium or arena on game day and often the last to leave.
No, they’re not the tailgaters. Or even the coaches or athletes themselves, on whom the spotlight shines most brightly.
By contrast, they labor long hours behind the scenes. But rarely does an athletic event take place without them.
Sports Information Directors, or SIDs for short, have become an indispensable part of the collegiate athletic landscape. Their duties range from compiling statistics, writing stories and conducting press conferences to public and alumni relations, sometimes even fundraising. They are as valuable to an athletic department as anyone on staff.
Montana is fortunate to have some of the finest SIDs in the nation, including Dave Guffey at the
University of Montana, Bill Lamberty at Montana State University and Bruce Parker, a longtime SID at Montana State, who is now athletic director at Carroll College.
PHOTO, RIGHT: Bruce Parker (left), former Montana State SID and current Carroll College AD and Carroll SID Brock Veltri.
“There’s such great congeniality in our league and we get along great,” Lamberty said. “We all kind of put up with each other’s idiosyncrasies and we bust on each other pretty hard. We’re all in together as a group.”
The electronic era
Like so many other professions, the dawn of the computer era and specifically the Internet changed the fundamental role of an SID. Whereas universities used to depend on the mainstream media to deliver information to fans, now almost every school - large or small - operates its own website, where fans can access everything from game scores and schedules to video of the latest games and press conferences.
“The web has become a huge, instanteous media,” Guffey said. “That’s been the most dramatic change, by far.”
“You have to deal with learning new technologies and programs,” Lamberty added. “Who had heard of Twitter two or three years ago? Now, it’s a constant factor in all of our lives.”
Long before the Internet arrived on the scene, the changes had begun. Statistic and record keeping - a vital part of an SIDs world - moved from the pen and paper to the computer and laser printer.
“I used to do all of that by hand with a black felt pen and a calculator,” said Guffey. “Now it takes 30 seconds because you do all your stats and input them as they occur.”
Within seconds, an updated complete boxscore can be printed.
“Back then you had fax machines you had to insert one sheet of paper,” Guffey remembered. “It took six minutes a sheet.”
Lamberty recalls his early days as a student assistant at the University of Wyoming.
“When I started at Wyoming, one of my jobs on football game days was to get the memograph machine up to the football press box and get it back down,” he said.
The work routine
Like the schools they serve, sports information staffs come in all sizes. A large NCAA Division I university may employ as many as a dozen full-time professionals, each with his/her own assigned sport or sports to oversee. At smaller schools the SID may double as a coach. Carroll SID Brock Veltri is also a men’s basketball assistant.
“We probably wouldn’t have the budget to do a full-time SID,” Parker said.
While the benefits of attending games and traveling with teams are obvious, the job is not one for slackers.
“What the public doesn’t realize is that the hours are ridiculous,” Veltri said. “There’s so many things to do.”
“It’s 70 hours a week during the football season,” Guffey said. “A lot of gameday starts on Friday when I set up the press box with name tags and press releases for both schools.”
“The hard part comes after the game, when you have to write a game story for the media, the website, you have postgame interviews for both teams. Then you send the stats in to the NCAA and that’s the gist of it. Usually, I get out of here about 7 or 7:30 at night for a one o’clock kickoff.”
“Football’s become such a monster here, so I spend probably 70 percent of my time covering football, 25 with men’s basketball and the other five with miscellaneous type things.”
An SIDs schedule is determined by his/her team’s schedule. Guffey, who first came to Montana in 1978, recalls skipping Thanksgiving most autumns.
“The Grizzlies have been in the (football) playoffs 17 years in a row (prior to 2010) and the first playoff game is over Thanksgiving weekend,” Guffey said. “My anniversary is Nov. 26, so we kind of celebrate those either early or late. It’s kind of like being a coach’s wife: If you don’t get it, it doesn’t work.”
The reward comes in the relationships that develop with students and coaches.
“The kids keep you young,” said Lamberty, entering his third decade in Bozeman. “Being around the kids is just great. And the camaraderie of working within a department for similar goals is fun.”
While the first rule of journalism is objectivity, being an SID allows one the freedom to be biased.
“It’s impossible not to root and that’s one of the reasons I like sports information,” Guffey said. “You become good friends with them. Most of them are great people. You get to know them personally and I’m just pulling for them to have success as they move on with their lives.”
“You get a personal relationship and know how much they put into it,” Veltri added. “When they win, I’m happy for them.”
Special memories
It’s only natural that each person has their favorite moments.
“The big one has to be 1995, winning the (football) national championship with Dave Dickenson, playing at Marshall and winning 22-20,” Guffey recalled. “That’s still the record attendance for an FCS championship game, at Marshall, over 30,000. They were lined up expecting Marshall to kick our hinies.
“Just to have Dave Dickenson cap off his career, win the whole thing and after the game I got to tell Dave he had won the Walter Payton Award, because they had awarded it two or three weeks ahead of time, because he didn’t know it.”
“There are NCAA basketball tournament games, Lady Griz basketball, the success they’ve had. We’ve been really lucky to have had great success in football and both basketball programs.”
Parker was the SID at Montana State for nine years (1979-88) before entering the corporate world and later coming back to collegiate athletics.
“As an SID, my favorite memory was winning the national championship in 1984,” he said. “We were down to Rhode Island late in the game. When we won that game, I knew we were going to win the national title.”
Now in his eighth year as athletic director at Carroll, Parker oversees the entire department, but still stays involved in the media aspects, hosting part of the team’s radio broadcast as well as a weekly highlights program that airs on Altitude Sports and Entertainment as well as locally. His background as an SID helped lay the foundation for his success.
“I probably do more in the SID area than most ADs,” he said.
Lamberty has his favorite memories as well.
“Beating Montana in 2002 over there in football, winning the Big Sky championship here in hoops and in 2005, our women won the Big Sky indoor track meet here,” he recalls. “That was such a thrill because we had such a great group of girls.”
Crisis management
It’s the phone call everyone dreads, whether a parent, teacher, coach or SID. Something has gone wrong. A student-athlete or coach has been arrested or involved in some off-field incident. It’s the unpleasant part of the job, but just as essential as extolling the virtues of a team’s All-America candidate.
“It’s the least favorite part of my job,” Parker admitted. “You need to be proactive. When rumors come out, it does you damage. The official word is better than rumors.”
Veltri hasn’t had to deal with many of those moments, but accepts it as part of the business.
“They’re 18, 19, 20-year-olds that are going to make mistakes,” he said.
In the end, somehow the long hours , low pay and crisis moments still seem worthwhile.
“You have to have a great love for athletics,” Parker said.