• 2016 CoSIDA Special Awards general announcement/release
• Special Awards feature story schedule
By Evan O’Kelly, Montana State Billings Director of Communications and Sports Information
Throughout its 15-year history, the Great Northwest Athletic Conference has served tens of thousands of student-athletes, representing the premier venue of competition at the NCAA Division II level in the Pacific Northwest.
Student-athletes, coaches, and staff from the conference’s 11 member schools have come and gone throughout the years, contributing their respective portions to the GNAC’s history. The physical location of the conference office has even changed, moving from Spokane, Wash., to Portland, Ore., in 2012.
But from Day 1, there has been a single constant. One man who has been there for every pitch, tipoff, starting gun and whistle, and whose work has been unparalleled throughout the GNAC’s history.
After announcing his retirement from his position as information director for the GNAC in the spring of 2015, Bob Guptill hasn’t had much time to consider what his next step will be.
“I have been doing the same thing for 35 years, so it is definitely going to be different,” said Guptill, who will receive a CoSIDA Lifetime Achievement Award this June at CoSIDA's annual convention. “I am definitely going to miss coming into work every day, but I haven’t thought about what I’ll be doing.”
Perhaps before he shuts his door at the conference office one final time, he will turn his attention to the bookcase on his left. Its brown shelves sag bearing the weight of numerous black binders, all of which are stuffed to capacity. The progressive yellowing of the pages down the rows gives away that they are organized by year, each perfectly in its place.
it is the entire history of the GNAC, each and every page compiled by Guptill. Every putout made on the diamond and javelin thrown on the infield is stored in one of the most magnificent record databases in the history of college sports.
Guptill alone is responsible for the thoroughness and accuracy. It is a testament to his work as an SID. They are the final chapter in a book he started authoring when he began taking statistics for the Colfax High School baseball team in 1967.
From there, he has gone on to contribute more information to the world of college sports than most ever have, his work spanning three decades. It is a contribution that will live on for decades to come.
Dick Fry is a legendary figure in the world of Washington State Cougar athletics, a World War II veteran who served as sports information director at WSU from 1957-70. He received the tip on Guptill at the tail end of his tenure in athletics, and during the brief time together Fry could tell that he had a bright young star on his hands.
“I worked closely with Bob in the SID office there, and he was doing a lot of research on the records for football, basketball, and baseball starting from year one,” said Fry. “It was a project I had started and one that he picked up and finished.”
Fry witnessed Guptill’s dedication to the monotonous task, but was unaware at the time the impact that the research would ultimately have on a project of his own. In 1989, Fry penned the historical book,
The Crimson & the Gray: One Hundred Years with the WSU Cougars, as part of the university’s athletic department centennial celebration.
Guptill’s early contributions while working in sports information proved to be too invaluable for him to stray from the industry, as an opening for SID at Central Washington University beckoned him in 1980. For the next 20 years, Guptill set a new standard for covering Wildcat Athletics, becoming a fixture in small college athletics in the northwest.
“What I enjoyed most about my time at Central was the opportunity to work with a lot of great coaches and people,” Guptill said. “Dean Nicholson was the basketball coach there my first 10 years, and he along with his father are the winningest coaches in the history of collegiate basketball with 1,114 wins.”
Today, the Wildcats’ Nicholson Pavilion is the home court for basketball and volleyball, the floor named after the historic figures in CWU Athletics. Guptill is quick to point out that their combined win total is a question in the board game Trivial Pursuit, one of a myriad of facts that has its place at the top of Guptill’s head.
“I have determined that 99.9 percent of the time, you can call and ask Bob a question, and he will know the answer from memory,” said Rob Lowery, longtime radio voice of Wildcat Athletics. “It could be any question going back to the beginning of the GNAC, his time at Central or at the PacWest, and he can pull the nugget of information. It is absolutely phenomenal.”
Lowery first crossed paths with Guptill when he began broadcasting CWU games for KXLE radio in Ellensburg in 1985, where he was quickly embraced by Guptill.
Thirty years later, the two have become the closest of friends and have continued to work together through the 2014-15 academic year. “For the last 30 years, Rob has handled the play-by-play for Central and we have had a long relationship,” Guptill said. “He has done a tremendous job for them and he is someone I feel fortunate to have worked with.”
On the heels of Guptill’s retirement announcement, another person whose tenure in the athletic communications industry dates back as far also announced he was moving on. Paul Madison, who spent the last 40 as sports information director at Western Washington University during his 47-year service there, was one of the few constants throughout Guptill’s career.
“I have worked with Paul since I got to Central, so he and I have had a working relationship for about 35 years,” Guptill said. “He is the cornerstone of sports information, and when you’re at one school for close to 50 years you’re someone who has been influential on a lot of people, including me.”
From the Crimson and the Gray to the Wildcats of CWU to the GNAC, one constant throughout Guptill’s career has been the quality and dedication to his work.
Guptill will miss the challenge of creating schedules with the GNAC’s unique travel, staying up late on Saturdays to receive results from basketball games in Alaska, and will miss the daily Subway sandwiches for lunch. What he treasures most, however, are the relationships he has built with colleagues and having had the opportunity to serve the entire industry.
“The main thing I have always thought is that providing information to all of the SIDs in the conference was essential, and that was my main goal,” Guptill said. “I wanted to do everything that I could possibly do to assist SIDs in the coverage of their teams. That’s why I have always thought keeping accurate and historical information was so important. Hopefully I’ve accomplished that.”