Story courtesy of SarahGraceBattles.com
Only having one more home basketball game to cover in my undergraduate journalism career, I decided to take the opportunity to interview an integral part of the men's basketball program, Jim Horten.
“It’s a hard thing in this world to find something that you love and to get to do it,” he said.
Not only is he the Men’s Basketball Sports Information Director (SID), he is also the Men’s and Women’s Golf SID’s and Director of Communications and Media Relations within the athletic department.
Horten’s job responsibilities include publications for assigned sports, press releases previewing and reviewing events and highlighting activities in support of the missions of the athletic department.
“I don’t read as much as I should to develop my craft. I feel things, I see things, I think things and I do them,” he said regarding changes he’s made to the way he’s creating and publishing content, which he maintains on gomocs.com.
He also works very closely with coaches and student-athletes. This includes press conferences before and after athletic events and practices along with working with different media.
He tells all of the athletes he works with the same three things and those three things are to “be positive, be humble and remember a teammate,” because he believes there are a lot of ways you can answer questions and answer them well with keeping these key concepts in mind.
Beginning at UTC prior to the start of the 2007-08 men's basketball season, he intended to use it as a stepping stone. “This will let me network some more. It’ll transition well for me, it’ll transition well for you,” Horten said reflecting on his initial thoughts regarding what he thought would be a short-term job at UTC.
Little did he know, that transition would have him going on ten years at UTC and him into the position of Director of Communications & Media Relations in September 2015.
Prior to moving back to Chattanooga where he grew up, Horten organized the collegiate printing division at Tennant Printing in DeLand, Fla. The company worked with two collegiate athletic programs when he began in 2000 and worked with more than 80 during his six years.
“It’s never as good as you think it is and it’s never as bad. It depends on how you let it affect you. If you let the bad and the negative affect you in a certain way, then it is as bad. It’s worse. You have to try to maintain positivity in everything.”
Horten was also an assistant SID at MTSU from 1993-98, followed by directing media relations staffs at Jacksonville in 1998-99 and Troy in 1999-2000. He worked as a student assistant at MTSU, where he is an alumnus, and worked as the main contact for women's basketball as a senior in 1992-93.
Initially thinking he wanted to be a lawyer, his involvement with the basketball program at MTSU shaped the path of his career.
“It’s difficult because we are a lot more limited financially than I think a lot of people realize with the amount of success that we’ve had,” said Horten when asked about how UTC competes with schools that have more resources. “Ticketing is so important. If we could’ve had 10 crowds of 6,000 this year, it’s amazing what that would do for us financially.”
When he’s not living, breathing and tweeting all things UTC athletics, you can find him trying his hand at new dishes in the kitchen or enjoying others cooking.
Some of his favorite local cuisine includes 212 Market, which he prefers to go to on Tuesday nights because of their half-price wine allowing him to “eat and drink in lavish style,” Local 191, where he gets a chicken and pancake, Taco Mac for the craft beer and watching Pens games and Alleia for “real Italian.”
“When people ask how I’m doing, I say ‘living the dream.’ Now, sometimes the dream is a nightmare, it could be a bad day and it may not be your dream, it may not be my dream, but it’s somebody’s dream.”