Note: This feature is available online at the NCAA membership website only (not the public site)
Two NCAA staff members with a combined 66 years of experience and a shared devotion to membership service are retiring this summer. Jim Wright, longtime director of statistics, and David Pickle, veteran editor of The NCAA News and NCAA Champion magazine, are moving on.
Love at first stat
Jim Wright has always loved stats, even going back to high school.
“It’s funny the things you remember,” the Connersville, Ind., native said. “It was the first game of the Indiana high school sectionals, and Connersville, which was a pretty big school, was playing a team that was smaller than my homeroom.
“I’m keeping the stats, and I’m outraged not only that we lost the game, but our star guard went 5-for-33 from the field. And I was pretty vocal about it afterward, enough so that I couple of kids signed my yearbook that year, “Remember 5-for-33!”
“I have missed the writing part as I’ve gone along, because I was a journalism major at Ball State (he has since been inducted into the school’s journalism hall of fame in fact), but when I became an SID, I really enjoyed the numbers. The statistics are in many ways used in the same manner they always have, except now there is more demand for immediacy and volume.”
Both Wright and Pickle have worked under all five NCAA chief executive officers (Walter Byers, Dick Schultz, Cedric Dempsey, Myles Brand and Mark Emmert). Wright joined the national office staff in 1975; Pickle in 1977.
Wright has been involved with the statistics staff the entire time, while Pickle’s NCAA tenure was interrupted when he spent from 1982 to 1991 with the Houston Chronicle.
Both are household names within the NCAA membership. Wright manages an eight-person staff that continues to produce weekly national rankings and annual records books for 14 sports in all divisions, as well as five statisticians’ manuals. The staff also provides a Rating Percentage Index (RPI) for 11 Division I championships. In addition, Wright oversees a five-person media services team that handles publicity needs at NCAA championships.
Wright said the innovation he’s most proud of is the development of a single-game statistical reporting system. With the addition of women’s volleyball this past fall, every sport for which the staff keeps national statistics is done so through a single-game/match system. That means people can look up any box score on the NCAA site, click on any player and see his or her game-by-game totals. Wright said as an example, the staff will have compiled more than 8,000 box scores in Division III softball alone. In all sports by the end of this year, Wright estimates between 90,000 and 100,000 single-game reports will have been logged.
Pickle during both his stints with the national office staff was the editor of The NCAA News, a tabloid that chronicled the business of the Association and explored issues being debated within the governance structure and membership. The News was valued as a primary information source and offered an editorial platform for a diverse membership to express its views.
In 2007-08, Pickle engineered a shift from the News to Champion magazine, which has been published quarterly for the last six years. The award-winning magazine continues to offer the news coverage its tabloid predecessor provided but with a stronger portrayal of the thousands of athletics administrators, coaches and student-athletes who make college sports so successful.
Both men are grounded in membership service and in honoring a responsibility to recognize the NCAA in its entirety, not just the high-profile sports and programs.
“I take a lot of pride in the fact that, if you didn’t know the NCAA divisional structure and you looked up our stats, there would be no way you could distinguish the importance between Division I men’s basketball and Division III field hockey,” Wright said. “That’s because we treat every sport in every division the same way. The look is the same; the records books are the same. No matter the division, no matter the sport, the stats are the same.”
Pickle said, “We are the National Collegiate Athletic Association, not the National Big-School Athletic Association. In my mind, each NCAA member school and each NCAA sport is as important as another. It’s one thing I admire about stats, too – they deliver the goods for all.”
Committed to committees
Dave Pickle says he’ll “walk out of here believing that the membership is our primary constituent.”
“We (the staff) are here at their choosing,” Pickle said, “and the members are the ones we should be thinking of first. When I started in 1977, Tom Hansen, who went on to be the commissioner of the Pac-10 for many years, said the NCAA at its core is a collection of committees. That might make some people these days recoil (because of the bureaucratic image of committees), but it’s essentially still true.
“You might not like the portrayal, but it is a mechanism for schools to assemble, discuss a course of action, identify what they’re going to do and then implement it with the help of a staff. Ultimately, at least with the regulatory side of the Association, it is a collection of committees that continues to carry out the function of running the NCAA.
“I’m an unapologetic believer in that there is value in that committee work and that there is value in communicating to the rest of the membership what those committees are doing to shape the collective organization.”
Both men also have overseen their share of change.
When Wright began with the staff in 1975, only football, men’s basketball and baseball statistics were compiled. The NCAA did not govern women’s sports, and there were no records books.
“In the 1970s we would send out blank forms to the schools, which they would fill out and mail back to us. So if we were lucky, we’d get stats through Sunday on that Wednesday,” said Wright, whom CoSIDA inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2008. “Then we would type the statistics up on ditto masters, run them off, put them in envelopes and mail them. So by the time people would get them they’d be a week late. Now, it’s like, ‘Hey, it’s 2 p.m. Where are the stats?’
“Stats are valued even more now than they were then, in my opinion. I attribute that in large part to the emergence of USA Today and ESPN, both of which emphasize statistics at all levels. Once they started doing that, other media outlets followed suit.”
Technology also has driven changes in communication, Pickle said. As information online became more immediate, the biweekly NCAA News – while valuable as a membership record – could not keep up with the delivery demand. But while Pickle oversaw a transition of membership news and information from print to online, he thought it unwise for the national office to get out of the print business altogether.
“I felt like there were opportunities for us to dress up the presentation on certain kinds of content, particularly our exploration into issues that were affecting the NCAA at a given time,” he said of the creation of Champion. “I felt we could make that content more appealing and consumable and at the same time illustrate why people within college athletics support student-athletes. The magazine has been good for that. I think when NCAA members pick up a copy, our members say, ‘Yes, that’s me. They understand me, and they understand the value I believe I bring to the table.’ Champion gives them that due.”
Wright, a Connersville, Ind., native and Ball State graduate, plans to stay in the Indianapolis area. Pickle, who grew up in Big Spring, Texas, and went to Baylor, is moving to the Atlanta area to be closer to family. Both likely will continue contributing to NCAA projects as well.
Wright acknowledged the difficulty of leaving an avocation he has loved for so long.
“This fall will be challenging for me,” he said. “It will be the first time I haven’t been professionally involved in college football since 1969. Football stats will come out this September and I won’t have had anything to do with them. So that will be sort of weird.”