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Judy Willson (Mountain West Conference), 25-Year Award
by Blake Timm, Assistant Commissioner for Communications, Great Northwest Athletic Conference
Judy Willson passed the president's gavel to Andy Seeley at the
2016 CoSIDA Convention in Dallas.
No matter where she has been during her athletic communications career, Judy Willson, a CoSIDA 25-Year Award recipient this year, believes that the force of a higher power has put her in the right places at the right time.
That higher power was most evident in August 2005. Willson had left the Sun Belt Conference in New Orleans eight months earlier for the University of Louisiana-Monroe when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Big Easy.
The camaraderie between sports information directors in the region created a family atmosphere. With Willson outside of Katrina’s bullseye, the ULM office became the focus for action. Contacts were made to make sure everyone in the SID family was safe. Willson mobilized other SIDs, through her own actions and through CoSIDA, to make sure colleagues were housed, clothed and fed.
“I call it God’s timing,” said Willson, currently an assistant commissioner at the Mountain West Conference and CoSIDA’s immediate past president. “It was like one of us needed to be outside of the city to be the keeper of where everyone was.”
Katrina was only one of those timings allowing Willson to not only take advantage of great professional opportunities, but to remain connected to family.
Willson didn’t realize until her final semester at Geneva College (Pennsylvania) that being a sports information director could be a full-time job. That realization turned into a graduate assistantship opportunity at Northwest Missouri State, a position that put her an hour away from her grandparents’ home in southwestern Iowa.
In a stroke of that divine timing and profession intersecting, the job allowed Willson a few months of Sunday dinners and UNO games with her grandmother before she passed away unexpectedly, plus two years of quality time with her grandfather.
In 1991, Willson moved on to her first full-time job as the first SID for the Mid-America Intercollegiate Athletic Association. At the time, only three Division II conferences employed a full-time communications person. Two years later, she enjoyed the opportunity to start another office as she became the first full-time SID at Eastern New Mexico.
Willson enjoyed the opportunity to build something from the ground up.
“It was great to see the others in Division II pick up on what we did,” Willson said. “Other conferences saw what Wallace (Dooley at the CIAA) and I would do and what could be done with promotion of our student-athletes and our teams. At Eastern, we built something that the department could take some pride in in terms of the coverage received for our sports.”
Joining the Sun Belt Conference in 2000, Willson worked everything from bowl games, to NCAA volleyball championships, to Final Fours and Super Bowls in New Orleans. At each step, the family feel of the profession was clear.
“There are very few places in the country where you get to host so many national events and do it with a great team of people,” Willson said. “The best part of those years was the camaraderie between all of the university folks, no matter what level, in the city. We all pulled together when we had a Final Four or a bowl game or a national championship.”
Willson might have stayed in Louisiana if the call to head west and be closer to family hadn’t been made. She moved on the University of New Mexico, closer to her parents’ home in Denver, before joining the Mountain West staff in 2010.
It was at the Mountain West where Willson received the call to her biggest professional responsibility yet: being selected as CoSIDA’s fourth female president.
“I had some big high heels to fill,” Willson said of following the likes of June Stewart, Tammy Boclair and Shelly Poe. “ To have Tammy serve when I was an at-large representative was a great experience and a great mentoring opportunity for me. Serving alongside Shelly for the last couple of years gave me a great example of strong leadership to follow.”
Much had changed between the time Willson first served on the board in 2002 and her presidential year. No longer is the president charged with running CoSIDA’s day-to-day operations. That responsibility has moved to paid professional staff, allowing Willson and the rest of the board of directors to think more globally on issues affecting the organization and the profession.
“What I appreciated the most about my time is how much we have grown as an organization and how we are thinking outside of the box,” Willson said. “We are trying to develop leaders. We are trying to become stronger at still doing our jobs, but doing it in new and innovative ways.”
God’s timing has called upon Willson to serve in many ways. She was recognized with the 2006 CoSIDA Bob Kenworthy Community Service Award as she helped raise $10,000 and spearheaded a CoSIDA effort to donate up to $45,000 in gift cards towards professionals - the CoSIDA family - affected by Katrina.
Willson also has served on the National Collegiate Baseball Writers’ Association Board of Directors and held the organization’s president role in 2013-14.
Willson’s professional walk calls her to be a mentor to others. She is likely to be one of the first to introduce herself to someone new, talk up the profession and encourage someone to be the best they can be.
“I want to be an encourager, especially in the tough days,” Willson said. “There are going to be coaches, administrators and even student-athletes who, on some days, you want to say to them ‘I’ve had enough.’ But then you have to remember the better days and the people who have been good to work with.”
And so that divine force, God’s timing, brings her back to what really keeps her going in the business: the people she works with and the people she serves.
“Getting to see kids come in as wide-eyed freshmen and graduate as amazing young men and women and watching them go on to do great things is always the highlight of this job,” Willson concluded.
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