Note: This is the 24th article in the CoSIDA Special Awards feature series which is highlighting 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 Bill Little
University of Texas Special Assistant to Football Coach for Communications
CoSIDA Special Awards Committee
Folks would tell you that sports journalism runs in Fred Stabley Jr.’s blood. But his roots in the college sports information profession go straight down to the soul.
Fact is, all he ever wanted to be was a newspaper sports editor, or a sports information professional. He came by it naturally. He is part of a family that spans three generations in the field of college media relations.
Stabley, who will be enshrined in the CoSIDA Hall of Fame at the organization’s annual convention in June at Orlando’s Marriott World Center on June 13, joins the 2013 inductees as a designate of CoSIDA’s Special Awards Committee’s Veterans committee. The Veterans committee was formed to recognize deserving Division I SIDs who had retired or left the profession and had been overlooked when they were active in the business.
The former SID at Central Michigan and CoSIDA’s president in 2000-2001, Stabley joins his late father, Fred Stabley Sr. as a member of the organization’s Hall of Fame.
While his greatest claim to fame actually came as a sports writer for the Lansing State Journal in 1974 when he tabbed a young high school player named Earvin Johnson with the nickname “Magic,” Stabley’s steady influence on the SID profession at CMU lasted from 1982 through his retirement in 2005.
“I guess you could say I was born to be an SID,” Stabley recalled recently. “Upstairs in our home in East Lansing was my father, Fred, the SID for 32 years at Michigan State, and across the hall downstairs was a college student named Nick Vista, who was a long-time assistant to my dad and then the head SID at MSU when Dad retired in 1980.”
Fred attended his first CoSIDA workshop 30 years ago in San Diego, and the next year when the group met in St. Louis, he and his wife, Barb, loaded up their car with their three kids and began bringing them to the meetings.
“Not many young people attended. We just felt the workshops were in so many neat places that our kids would enjoy the trips as much as we did. So for the next 22 years we continued to include them on select workshop trips,” he said.
The interest in the business became contagious, and after daughter Amy spent four years as a student in the CMU office and a year as an intern at Michigan State, she set something of a pioneering goal of being a woman as the head SID at a Division I school.
For a close-knit family nestled in the heart of the state of Michigan, leaving home was going to be a stretch—but neither Fred nor Barb realized just how far that stretch would be. In the summer of 1992, Amy Stabley completed the Stabley-clan’s third generation in the SID business when she took (with encouragement from her Dad and Granddad) a job as a full-time assistant as the baseball SID in the men’s athletics department at The University of Texas at Austin. As such, she became one of the nation’s first women employed as a full-time assistant in a department dealing strictly with men’s sports.
The 1,400 miles between Mount Pleasant, Michigan and Austin, Texas, soon meant another adventure for the Stableys, as Fred managed to balance his time at work at CMU with top-to-bottom drives in the family Oldsmobile on breaks to visit Amy in Austin.
And when Amy’s Longhorns made it to the College World Series in 1993, she proudly got him a media credential, fulfilling one of Fred’s “bucket list” dreams of being connected to a team participating in Omaha.
Several years later, Amy (who by then was married to a former Michigan State baseball player named Steve Hirschman) achieved her Division I SID goal when she took the head job at Oakland University, and the family was once again reunited in Michigan.
The next years were a busy time for Fred professionally. Always active in CoSIDA, he became an at-large member of the Board of Directors in the mid-1990s, and then moved into the officer rotation. He served as CoSIDA’s president in 2000-2001 and remained on the board through 2004.
The author of several books who began writing sports as a freshman in high school before earning a degree from Michigan State in 1970, Fred retired after 23 years at Central Michigan in 2005. He still works seven different part time jobs, several of which involve his abiding love of golf. He serves as a substitute teacher, as golf coach at two different schools, as a golf instructor and pro shop worker at two different golf clubs, and as a radio announcer for high school sports in Mt. Pleasant. Being busy is nothing new—among his many obligations, Fred found time to serve his country for nine years with the Michigan National Guard.
But there has always been a space on the Stabley calendar for the annual CoSIDA Workshop - an organization which his Dad, Fred Sr., helped form in the 1940s. For a number of years, Fred and Barb have been visible fixtures assisting with the workshop registration.
The Stableys have been married for 45 years, have three children, nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. They split their time now between Michigan and Florida, living seven months in Michigan and five in Florida.
But this summer, that trip to Florida will have added significance as CoSIDA gathers in Orlando. For a clan that arguably could be called “CoSIDA’s First Family,” this workshop will have special meaning indeed.