See complete list of 2014 Special Awards recipients and feature story schedule
Call them whatever you want: directors of athletic communications, sports information directors, athletic media relations directors. They ply their craft in multiple locales.
In Dave Hilbert’s case, he wound up going to his first Final Four in Honolulu, Hawaii thanks to a guy who turned down a scholarship from Bobby Knight.
Huh?
Hilbert, currently the Sports Information Director at the University of Saint Francis in Joliet, Illinois, was working as the SID at Indiana-Purdue Fort Wayne in the early 1990s. The flagship sport was men’s volleyball, coached by Arnie Ball. His son, Lloy, was highly-recruited for basketball. The younger Ball turned down a basketball scholarship to Indiana and the chance to play for Knight because he wanted to play volleyball for his father at IPFW.
“If you played high school basketball in Indiana, you didn’t turn down Bob Knight,” Hilbert said.
The decision turned out to be the correct one for Lloy and his dad. IPFW reached the Final Four in Honolulu that year and finished third nationally. A year later, they returned to the Final Four, much closer to home. IPFW went to Muncie, Indiana.
“It was exciting to go through it,” Hilbert said. The CBS television network did a highlights show each year. The network sent its personnel and its lead announcer, Verne Lundquist, to Indiana to cover the event.
This was well before the internet and videostreaming. At the 1991 Final Four in Honolulu, one of the Hawaiian network affiliates prepared a tape of IPFW highlights. Hilbert took the tape to the airport and put it on an airplane. The video was flown to Fort Wayne and the news shows had highlights for the following morning.
“You can’t do that any more,” Hilbert said. “I don’t think the airlines are allowed to accept those kind of packages.” It paid off because he hustled. He liaised with the TV stations at home and in Hawaii, helped the Honolulu stations get the highlights, then got those highlights to the airport so the stations back home could see real footage of the game, not an announcer just
talking about stats.
Hilbert will receive his CoSIDA 25-Year Award for long-time service to the profession on Wednesday, June 11th during the 2014 CoSIDA Convention at the World Center Marriott in Orlando.
As one of CoSIDA’s 25-Year Award recipients, Hilbert’s seen plenty of changes. When he started in the business as an intern under Dave Fischer at Michigan Tech, he called in the radio reports after basketball games. The first time he did it, he woke up the next morning to the sound of his own voice, recapping the Tech victory the night before.
He fell in love with the job – writing features that made it into the newspapers, calling in highlights for radio, keeping stats. “Halfway through the internship, I began to feel that this would be a really cool job,” he said.
Hilbert enrolled at St. Thomas University in Miami in the Sports Management program. He worked at Florida Atlantic University under Ken Elder. In his first year, Elder left to take a position at Georgia State and Hilbert replaced him at FAU.
Two years after taking the job at FAU, Hilbert relocated to IPFW. It brought him back to the Midwest. (He grew up in Wisconsin.)
“My boss was Jim Orr, an assistant athletics director,” Hilbert said. Orr focused on marketing and was a liaison with the booster club. Hilbert was the SID. Fort Wayne had a population of 200,000 and the media covered the Mastodons like they cover Division I basketball – beat writers, television at all the home games.
Orr left IPFW in 1993 to become a teacher. He and Hilbert met each day, sometimes for lunch, sometimes just to chat. Hilbert wondered how many of Orr’s ‘other’ responsibilities would fall to him. Then he saw a job advertisement.
The University of Chicago was looking for an SID to replace Chuck Sadowski. As a kid growing up in the Midwest, Hilbert had a short list of two or three cities he would like to live in. Chicago was one of them. He was hired. A year later, he married his fiancée, Susan Hitchcock.
Now he was in a major media market, dominated by the professional teams and the Division I presence. Being the small fish in a big pond didn’t faze him. “I dealt with it at FAU,” he said. “Everyone at Chicago understood it. You try to get what you can. There was never a day where you were really frustrated. And when you do get coverage, it’s such a great thing.”
There were terrific feature stories. In the early part of the 20
th Century, Chicago’s baseball team played a series of games against Waseda University of Tokyo. This took place every five years and the sites alternated – in the Midwest one time, in the Far East the next time. Eventually, the series halted.
Five or six years ago, both schools wanted to resurrect the rivalry. Chicago went to Japan to play a couple of games in Tokyo with a third game in Hiroshima. There was an underlying irony here. The University of Chicago provided scientists who worked on development of the atomic bomb.
The 2011-12 academic year turned out to be his last year at Chicago. He accepted the SID’s position at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. At the end of Chicago’s basketball season, he landed a feature story on Taylor Simpson of the women’s basketball team. She was one of the top players on a team that was highly ranked all year. Hilbert pushed with the media. Simpson was First Team All-UAA and an All-American.
“Nice,” was the media response. Simpson won the Josten’s Trophy, given for a combination of athletic skill, academic achievement, and community service. No response. She organized a relief organization overseas. No response. He kept trying.
Simpson was accepted into the Teach For America Program where college graduates work as educators in underprivileged areas. That did it. Philip Hersh, a columnist with the
Chicago Tribune called Hilbert and did a big feature on Simpson and what she achieved. This ran early in the baseball season and during the NHL and NBA playoffs.
Hilbert learned his work ethic from his father, Udo Hilbert. His dad was a mechanical engineer at General Motors and he worked on guidance systems for rockets. Hilbert’s parents came to lots of Chicago games and visited him in the office. They could see what he did. When the internet arrived, his father could look at game notes, the media guide and game stories and features.
“My dad was like me,” Hilbert said of his father who passed away in January. “He enjoyed going to work every day and that’s all you can ask for.”