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Jeff Bechthold (University of Washington) – 25-Year Award
by Rich Myhre, HeraldNet (Everett, Washington) sports reporter
Bechthold with his family (wife, Meghan and daughters Emelia and
Adalaide) at the White House in 2016.
Jeff Bechthold’s longtime ambition — indeed, his dream since early childhood — was to become a sports writer.
As a boy in his native Kansas, Bechthold worked on school newspapers, beginning in elementary school and continuing on through high school. At the University of Southern California, where he studied print journalism, he again worked on the school paper while also earning pocket money as a stringer for the now-defunct
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
It provided a lot of great reporting experience, but over time it left him with something else — a change of heart.
“By the time I was done with college,” Bechthold said, “I didn’t want to be a sports writer anymore.” He would sometimes string at LA Dodgers games, “and I’d think, ‘What would I write about if I had to write this game story?’ And I knew I couldn’t do it 162 times a season.”
He eventually sought advice from USC sports information director Tim Tessalone, and that conversation led to a slight detour in Bechthold’s career path. After his 1990 graduation from USC, he served an internship with what was then the Pacific-10 Conference and later a second internship at Stanford University.
In the fall of 1991, Bechthold was hired as an assistant sports information director at the University of Washington. And now, more than a quarter-century later, he has yet to leave.
At the outset he handled men’s and women’s soccer, women’s gymnastics and baseball for the Huskies, though he has dabbled in virtually every other UW sport over the years. For the last eight years he has been Washington’s Director of Communications, overseeing the entire department while also having primary responsibility for football.
Not surprisingly, Bechthold has seen vast changes in the entirety of college sports, and specifically in the role played by sports information departments. His own duties have changed significantly, too. He once spent every Sunday of the college football season at the office, processing statistics and press updates for upwards of 10 hours. These days he can easily do it all from home, and in half the time.
For that much he is thankful, though his gratitude extends well beyond the benefits of latter-day technology.
“Back in 1991, I applied for 60 (full-time sports information) jobs, had interviews at Northwestern and Washington, and I ended up getting hired here,” Bechthold said. “It’s no exaggeration to say that I got the best job of all the ones I applied for. There was no interest or follow-up from (almost) 60 other colleges, none of which have programs on the same level as the one I ended up at. So I was very fortunate about that.”
In his long tenure, he has seen the ups and downs of collegiate athletics, including the routine comings and goings of coaches and administrators. He has worked with four full-time athletic directors (Barbara Hedges, Todd Turner, Scott Woodward and Jennifer Cohen), seven head football coaches (Don James, Jim Lambright, Rick Neuheisel, Keith Gilbertson, Tyrone Willingham, Steve Sarkisian and Chris Petersen), four men’s head basketball coaches (Lynn Nance, Bob Bender, Lorenzo Romar and Mike Hopkins), and six women’s head basketball coaches (Chris Gobrecht, June Daugherty, Tia Jackson, Kevin McGuff, Mike Neighbors and Jody Wynn).
He has watched some UW teams soar to great heights and others plummet. As an example, Washington won a national football championship the year Bechthold was hired; 17 years later, the Huskies went winless.
Across the board, though, the UW athletic department “is a better class of program than a lot of them,” he said. “I’m not saying that we have the best of everything at Washington, or that we have more than everybody else. Our conference is tough at the highest level of programs. But if you want to talk about the city, the university, the facilities, the coaches and all the other people, maybe there’s someplace that’s better than this, but I don’t know where it is.”
Bechthold’s years at Washington have included many highlights, both professional and personal. Among the former, he traveled with the UW baseball team on a goodwill trip to Cuba in 2000. Among the latter, he met his future wife Meghan when she worked in the UW athletic department as an administrative assistant for Olympics sports coaches in the late 1990s; they were married in 2004.
And if his job produces occasional headaches, they are more than offset by the ongoing benefits. Among the best of those, he said, is the proximity of youth.
These days “I feel a little different physically because I’m older,” said Bechthold, who turns 50 in April. “But mentally and emotionally, I don’t feel much differently now than I did 20 years ago. And that’s probably because I’m always around college kids. They get recycled every year, so they never get any older.
“I’m not hanging out with college kids,” he went on, “but you’re still around them every day. They stay the same age, and I think that mentality rubs off on you. You don’t feel like you’re still in college and you’re certainly not doing the things you used to do when you were in college. But I think just being around college kids keeps you young.”
And for the most part, the student-athletes he encounters are elite in many ways beyond sports.
“The vast, vast majority of college athletes are high achievers. They get better grades than everybody else, they’re more organized, they’re more put together, they’re more everything.” Being around them, Bechthold added, “is just such a positive thing.”
Aside from the part-time jobs and internships of his younger years, Bechthold’s entire working life has been spent at Washington. For that reason, he has trouble assessing his career “because I really don’t know what to compare it to.”
That said, there is something telling about the career longevity of SIDs everywhere, and particularly among Bechthold’s peers in the Pac-12.
Despite being at Washington more than 25 years, he said, “I think I’m the seventh- or eighth-longest tenured SID in this conference. And that tells you that people do not move out of these jobs very often. Which shows you that either, A) there just aren’t many viable alternatives out there; or B) these are pretty good jobs to keep.”