Note: This is the ninth story/announcement in the CoSIDA Special Awards feature series which will highlight all 2013 Special Award recipients. All recipients will be honored at the
CoSIDA Convention (June 12-15) in conjunction with the NACDA and Affiliates Convention at Orlando's Marriott World Center.
See the full list of recipients and features schedule.
by Wayne Block
Mesa Community College Sports Information Director
In this day and age of huge sports information staffs at major Division I universities, East Mississippi Community College Sports Information Director David Rosinski has what may be a unique background. He was part of a two-person staff at Mississippi State University when he began his career in 1987.
Rosinski, who will receive the CoSIDA 25-year award this June 14 in Orlando during the 2013 CoSIDA Convention, was hired by former Bulldog SID Joe Dier directly from a graduate assistantship at the University of South Carolina and immediately became the office’s No. 2 man.
“I’ll forever be indebted to Joe for taking a chance on me right out of graduate school. He was by himself essentially, stuck in a hole in the basketball arena, sharing a secretary and with very limited student help, in the Southeastern Conference no less.”
A self-described military brat, Rosinski found himself in South Carolina after spending part of his youth in central New York. His father had been transferred there late in his Air Force career and Rosinski enrolled at the University of South Carolina, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism/public relations after initially dabbling in mathematics.
Winding up in sports information was the result of a fortuitous meeting with an academic advisor at USC.
“I was always intrigued with stats,” he notes. “I was the kid scoring the games in front of the TV and checking the newspaper the next day to see if they agreed with mine.”
Advisors suggested that, because of his love of sports and statistics, he look into USC’s athletic department and speak with someone who had been involved with the department for many years.
That turned out to be CoSIDA Hall of Famer, the late Tom Price.
“What an awesome man. I owe everything to him,” says Rosinski. “He’s the one who took me in and taught me. On that first day he took me to where the USC athletes once ate, called the Roost, and introduced me to players and others. I was star struck.
“I just wish he could have lived to see the success of his beloved baseball Gamecocks. TP was an avid fan and he must be smiling down with great pride about USC’s back-to-back national championships.”
After learning the ropes at South Carolina both as an undergraduate and grad student under Price and others, Rosinski was thrown into the fire with Dier and Mississippi State, handling just about everything.
He was hired primarily to handle men’s basketball, something highly unlikely to happen to a first-year assistant these days.
“Football is and always will be the top sport at MSU, although it wasn’t doing very well at the time," Rosinski noted. "Baseball was king in the eyes of many of the fans (the days of Will Clark, Rafael Palmeiro and Jeff Brantley), but college baseball in the late ‘80s didn’t have as much of a following as it does now.”
Rosinski was also charged with trying to get a student assistant program going to help with the other sports. Among the many future sports publicists he helped recruit and tutor was a bright-eyed, young student whom he convinced Hall of Fame MSU baseball coach Ron Polk could handle the duties of covering his team – Scott Stricklin, now Mississippi State’s director of athletics.
In that era everything was done by hand.
“Early on Joe and I shared one desktop computer and printer, not even located in our offices. It was in a section of the basketball arena in a room we called ‘The Dung
eon.’ It was right underneath the Coliseum seating area and we had to duck when we got out of our seat so we wouldn’t hit our heads on the concrete.”
Despite the hardships there were some great memories.
It all has to begin with the 1996 NCAA Final Four in the Meadowlands.
(Photo, right, is of David and wife Nadine, after MSU qualified for the '96 Final Four).
“Our basketball program at the time was not well known, but it started with an SEC championship in 1991. During those days it was very rare for Mississippi State to win a conference championship in anything but baseball,” he remembers.
The Bulldogs had gone to the NCAA Sweet 16 the previous year and had a lot of players returning, including former NBA veteran center Erick Dampier. There was a lot of pressure to do well, but not many would have had the Mississippi State Bulldogs in their Final Four bracket that year.
“That Final Four experience was, obviously, a memorable time. I just wish I had taken some time back then to really enjoy the moment a little more.”
A rare road win over nationally ranked Kentucky in Rupp Arena on Valentine’s Day the year prior also stands out. “I’ve never heard that place as quiet as it was on that day. We nearly played a perfect game to beat the Wildcats on national TV that night.”
But it isn’t only great successes that stand out in Rosinski’s mind.
A memorable March night in 2008 at the Georgia Dome may have been the most frightening of his life. MSU’s SEC Tournament game against rival Alabama went into overtime when a Crimson Tide player hit a three-pointer at the buzzer. That was a prelude to the Georgia Dome roof rippling and swaying in the force of a tornado that struck downtown Atlanta.
“If not for that game going into overtime, a lot of the fans might have been out on the streets,” Rosinski stated.
At East Mississippi Community College, life is quite different. No longer part of a multi-person shop, Rosinski is the school’s entire sports information department since being hired there in 2008.
Never having had a chance to experience a national championship among the NCAA ranks, the 2011 EMCC football team earned him a ring with the school’s first-ever national title. He’s also accompanied EMCC basketball teams to five straight trips to the national tournament in Kansas.
In summing up his 25-year athletic communications experience, a grateful Rosinski said that “I’m very privileged to have experienced so many great memories and honored to have been associated with so many great people both at Mississippi State and now here at East Mississippi.”
Rosinski’s love of statistics may have earned him a career but also contributed to his enjoyment of sports. Along with his old school statistical knowledge, one of the learning experiences of his young life was manually keeping score of bowling. He has, however, had five games in that sport that couldn’t have been easier to score – perfect 300s. He has carried a 200-plus average on the lanes for the past decade.
Whether in the SEC or NJCAA, Rosinski’s love for sports has earned him an outstanding career.
Rosinski, who will turn 50 in August, has been married to the former Nadine Jackson, of West Columbia, S.C., for 25 years, and they have one son, 14-year-old Jackson.