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By Dennis O’Donnell, University of Rochester Director of Athletic Communications
What started out as a casual conversation socially turned into a lifetime passion for Dan O’Connell. It gave him another way to promote and recognize the achievements of college student-athletes.
O’Connell was attending the ECAC-SIDA workshop at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. During one of the casual get-togethers, O’Connell was talking with Brad Tufts of Bucknell University. Tufts was a member of CoSIDA’s Academic All-America Committee. He spoke highly of the program; so highly in fact, that O’Connell looked for an opportunity to join the committee himself.
In 1987, the committee had an opening and O’Connell quickly applied. He had been working at Towson University as an Associate SID under Pete Schlehr. He was hired at Towson in 1979 after the program decided to make the jump to Division I.
By the time he retired from Towson, O’Connell was a vice-chair of the Academic All-America committee in charge of public relations. The Academic All-America program is CoSIDA’s signature outreach and its busiest and most-respected program.
“It’s not a perfect system,” O’Connell said, “but it is as close to perfect as it can be. The ‘right’ people get picked and the teams are selected by
people who care.”
He’s been with the Academic All-America committee since the days of coordinators typing and mailing ballots to the membership for the varying teams and genders. They would tabulate the ballots on a district basis. Once the district teams were selected, the national coordinators sent out a ballot of all the district winners and every SID was asked to vote upon it. Voting numbers were not great, but as O’Connell said, the ‘right’ people were making the national teams.
Now, SIDs can nominate and vote on line. Boy, have things changed.
“There was so much joy for me in that program,” he said. People quickly associated him with the Towson athletic program – due to his efforts with the AAA program. He was recognized for his commitments by the committee when he was selected to receive the Lester Jordan Award from CoSIDA at the 2008 workshop in Tampa, Florida.
Now, he’s getting another honor from CoSIDA – a Lifetime Achievement Award for his long-standing commitments to student-athletes, to media, and to CoSIDA.
When you spend 35 years at one institution, it says a lot about the individual and his or her sense of history. “Athletes come back to campus after 30 years and you have a perspective about their history and you remember them (as students),” O’Connell said.
They remember you, as well. Towson played a football game at Stony Brook University on Long Island several years ago. Sean Landeta, who won two Super Bowl rings with the New York Giants and played for 22 seasons in the NFL, came to the game. Landeta had a glorious college career at Towson before graduating in 1983. He led the nation in punting average as a sophomore (1980) and was named an All-American in 1982. He was elected to the Towson Hall of Fame in 2005 and a year later, elected to the College Football Hall of Fame.
He wanted to cheer on his alma mater and to connect with people he still knew on campus. He made sure, though, to find the one person with whom he wanted to share memories – the man who could recite Landeta’s accomplishments faster than Landeta could. He made his way to the press box and sought out Dan. He was joyous about seeing O’Connell – and the feeling was mutual.
O’Connell started this journey at Loyola College of Maryland where he was the manager of the basketball team and sports editor of the campus newspaper. Loyola didn’t have an SID. The athletics director, Kevin Kavanagh, and the public relations director, Fran Minakowski, asked if he would be interested in filling the role. As an undergrad, he couldn’t be the SID, so his title was assistant SID. His compensation was free tuition for two years.
A couple of years later, Jack Burk, the SID at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County (UMBC) was promoted to director of university public relations. He hired O'Connell as an assistant and as the SID. Then Schlehr called.
The industry has turned itself 360 degrees several times since O’Connell began as an assistant at Loyola. When he and Schlehr (who retired almost three years ago) started, they had two goals: get as much of the athletic program covered as possible and get everything into the newspapers.
Today’s SID has a wealth of resources to get the word out: the web page, audio streaming, video streaming, computerized stats, “live” stats. There are no shortcuts. Sometimes, the SID’s work session after an event is as long as the event itself.
“Everything is focused on the web (now),” O’Connell says. “Media service has disappeared in the business.” He’s seen examples of schools posting results and stats on their websites and the newspapers cut and paste into their own website or print edition to “get it covered."
Long hours? Yes. Plenty of demands? Yes. High and consistent expectations? Definitely. He refers to the SID business as “…the last hope for integrity for athletics…”.
He has a word of advice to help SIDs keep their sanity and reduce the frustration level. “You can’t get too involved with who wins and who loses,” O’Connell says.
After all, it’s only a game. There will be another one tomorrow – or maybe within the next hour.