Related stories
• 2017 CoSIDA Special Awards Announced; Awards Presented During June Convention in Orlando
• More 2016-17 Special Awards Honoree Feature Stories
Steve Fenk (Oregon State University), 25-Year Award
by Blake Timm, Great Northwest Athletic Conference, Assistant Commission for Communications/CoSIDA Special Awards Committee
Steve Fenk with wife, Laura, and dog, Opal.
Over the years, it has been easy to knock on Oregon State.
“It’s the agriculture school, the small town school.”
“It’s that ‘other’ college up the road from the University of Oregon.”
“They should be in the Big Sky, not the Pac-12.”
Those were common refrains 20 or 30 years ago, but not today. With multiple football bowl games, back-to-back Baseball College World Series championships, a Final Four women’s basketball program, and a national-ranked gymnastics squad, it’s hard to knock Oregon State now. It is big time.
Promoting the rise of Beaver Nation for much of that time has been
Steve Fenk. The Beavers’ associate athletic director for athletic communications will receive his 25-Year Award at the CoSIDA Convention this June in Orlando.
“Being in Corvallis, I always felt like I needed to work a little bit harder to build relationships and be a little bit more open with the media,” Fenk said. “I have been lucky enough to have coaches who have believed in that. I have been pretty proactive with the Portland media (Portland is a 75-minute drive from Corvallis). I will volunteer people to go on the radio shows, do stories, etc.”
Steve Fenk hooks 97 pound halibut in 2016.
It was relationships in the media that landed Fenk in Corvallis in the first place. While finishing his associate’s degree at Mt. Hood Community College, Fenk took an internship at 1190 KEX Radio in Portland. It was there that he developed a relationship with longtime Beavers’ play-by-play voice Darrell Aune.
During that internship he realized that the cutthroat business of broadcasting was not where he wanted to be, and Aune turned Fenk on to the opportunities at Oregon State. “By getting to know Darrell, I got to come to a couple of games. I then enrolled as a junior and needed a job.”
Before long Fenk was working as a student employee for CoSIDA Hall of Famer Hal Cowan, who in turn helped him land an internship at the Pac-10 offices upon graduation. As intern, he worked the 1988 Rose Bowl and was a press row assistant with the Golden State Warriors.
Following the internship, Fenk applied for a position at Montana State. They had openings for both a men’s and women’s SID (their department was split at the time).
“I was 24 at the time and I decided there was no way I would ever get the men’s job,” Fenk said. “So I went and interviewed for the women’s position and got a call a few days later. They told me they weren’t interested in me for the women’s job, but they wanted me to be the men’s SID.”
That first big time job had a big time start. Within days of his arrival at Montana State, Fenk accompanied the Bobcats’ football team to Gainesville and a date with Florida.
“I was thinking ‘Whoa! This is crazy. My first game as the head guy is at Florida?’ It’s Emmitt Smith. It’s The Swamp,” Fenk recalled. “I’m getting calls from media down there asking what Montana State is like. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know, I’ve only been here for a week!’”
Fenk spent two years at Montana State before Cowan called him back to work as an assistant SID at Oregon State. He was promoted to assistant athletic director for communications upon Cowan’s retirement in 2005 and then to associate athletic director in 2011.
When Fenk returned to OSU in 1990, the Beavers were known mainly for its men’s basketball program with the magic of Gary Payton and the Ralph Miller era. The 1990s proved to be thin years athletically in Corvallis.
Yet Fenk stuck with his alma mater and, in time, he reaped the rewards of the program’s resurgence. He watched as Dennis Erickson and Mike Riley turned Oregon State football into regular bowl game participants and witnessed Pat Casey taking Oregon State to College World Series titles in 2006 and 2007. He currently has a front row seat to watch Scott Rueck take the women’s basketball program from also-rans to national title contenders.
“It’s really interesting to see what Oregon State has done, not just in athletics, but the entire campus,” Fenk said. “There is an atmosphere and a pride that people have now that frankly wasn’t here in the early 1990s.”
One of his top memories was national success for two football student-athletes in 2005: Mike Hass and Alexis Serna. Despite a 5-6 record and a lower-half Pac-10 finish, Fenk led promotional campaigns that earned Hass the 2005 Biletnikoff Award for the top Division I receiver and Serna the 2005 Lou Groza Award for the top Division I kicker.
“We didn’t have a winning record. We didn’t go to a bowl game. And they still won,” Fenk said. “That is a big-time highlight. We worked hard at it. We did great work getting the word out on those two guys.”
That experienced proved beneficial eight years later when Fenk successfully promoted Brandin Cooks for the 2013 Biletnikoff Award. “Brandin won by one vote,” Fenk recalled. “Being there with his mother and sitting right to her, knowing he was going to get called for the award, was pretty classic. Something I will always remember.”
The baseball NCAA championships are also at the top of the list. No school from a northern state had won one since 1966.
“They said no one from the north could win the College World Series,” he said. “Before Pat Casey got here our baseball stadium was falling apart. He recruits a bunch of Oregon kids and wins back-to-back College World Series titles.”
It is these type of memories that have made Fenk grateful that life has kept him in Corvallis and part of Beaver Nation.
“If you had told me that I would stay in Corvallis all of this time I would have said you were crazy,” Fenk said. “But I have had great bosses, great ADs, good coaches. I can’t believe it has been 25 years. It doesn’t seem like it.”
Learn more about the 2017 CoSIDA Convention | Register Now