College Sports Information Directors of America

Eric McDowell became the sports information director at Union College (www.unionathletics.com) in 2005 after lengthy s tints in sports information at the University of New Haven and the University of New Hampshire and a public relations position in the NBA. He is serving as the CoSIDA president for the 2014-15 academic year. McDowell wrote the following column for the most recent Cryder Rinebold monthly e-newsletter.

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When you’re a small, liberal arts college jockeying for position in the ever-evolving higher education market place, you have to take advantage of every opportunity to promote your institutional brand.

I know that first-hand. 

I am the sports information director at Union College in Schenectady, New York, and as such, I am among a number of campus personnel charged with communicating strategically to our internal and external constituencies about our outstanding institution. I primarily manage media communications for our 26-sport athletics program, but before you go thinking that athletics has little to do with an institution’s brand, let me tell you a story.

Union College sponsors 24 of its 26 sports at the NCAA Division III level – student-athletes on those teams don’t receive athletics-based scholarships, and their participation in athletics is no different than their participation in any other extracurricular activity the college offers. 
Two sports, however – men’s and women’s ice hockey – are sponsored at the Division I level, which means those players receive athletics-based grants and play a schedule that attracts a little more media attention. But while our hockey teams are Division I, they’re rarely mentioned in the same breath as household names like Michigan, Boston College, Minnesota and Wisconsin. 

But this past April, the unthinkable (well, not unthinkable to everyone) happened. The 2,133-student, liberal arts college from a New York town people find hard to spell knocked off one of the big boys and won a national title. On April 12, the Dutchmen skaters took down mighty Minnesota in the championship game of the NCAA Men’s Frozen Four.

Was it big news in the sports world? You bet it was. Did we take advantage of the chance to promote our athletics department? You bet we did. But we also took advantage of the opportunity to promote Union College, and in collaboration with our college relations staff, we’re still doing it.
Not many people know this, but in Union College’s early years (the school was founded in 1795 and remains as one of the oldest non-denominational colleges in the country), it was considered among the “big four” along with Harvard, Princeton and Yale. At the time, Union was graduating as many students as any other college in the nation.

Union College also is directly linked to the formation of the NCAA, the governing body of intercollegiate athletics. In the early 1900s, a number of young men were suffering serious injuries and even dying while playing a violent game called “football.” After one of the Union College gridders died in a game against Columbia, President Theodore Roosevelt convened dozens of college presidents and chancellors and demanded either reform or abolition of the sport. The rest, as they say, is history.

In April, our Union College history was on display in front of a sold-out crowd in Philadelphia and a national television audience. And that Union College team on the ice made history by winning.

Knowing the sports media would play up our participation in the Men’s Frozen Four as a classic underdog story, that’s how we sold it on the front end. Our kids believed in themselves all year, and they understood that we used the “little engine that could” approach to our advantage, but in reality, they knew they were the best on the ice. Now of course they can be known as the “little engine that did.”

But they’re also one of 26 varsity teams that fit the Union higher education brand. Union student-athletes have an average GPA of 3.19. The average GPA of a Union team is 3.21 – the men’s hockey team GPA is 3.14. Ninety-two percent of Union’s teams have a GPA of 3.00 or better. Union College is not a “one and done” or a factory of hockey players – we are a factory of students who also play sports.

There are 600 student-athletes at Union, only 50 of which play hockey, and it’s our job to promote the other 550 just as we do the skaters. They are all representatives of – and ambassadors for – the college. Don’t ever take for granted the opportunity to promote your athletes as your students.

That message fits nicely with the organization of which I am a part – the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA), which is encouraging SIDs to become strategic spokespeople for their schools. In the past, SIDs were perceived broadly as simply statisticians or behind-the-scenes event managers, but that is changing for the better, thanks to the people at Cryder Rinebold who helped us define ourselves as an organization that has as much collective promotional power as any other campus department.

It doesn’t take winning a national championship to walk that talk, either. We serve our colleges and universities by promoting a large chunk of their student bodies who participate in athletics (which at many schools is upwards of 30-40 percent). 

And it doesn’t matter whether those student-athletes are on the ice in front of 18,000 fans or whether they’re on a softball field in front of 20 people. They’re all wearing the same college uniform – and sporting the same college brand.