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Rick Meyers (Northern Kentucky University / Great Lakes Valley Conference) – 25-Year Award
by Jay Stancil, Union College (Ky.) Director of Strategic Sports Communications
Meyers is married to Paula and has two daughters, Molly (27) and Kelsey (31).
Confucius famously said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life.” Never more was this the case than it was for
Rick Meyers.
Meyers got a taste of sports information in high school, compiling statistics for the school’s boy’s basketball team. Upon his arrival at Northern Kentucky University as a freshman in 1972, he continued his stats keeping for the Norse men’s basketball squad, and a career was born.
“That is where all that started for me,” Meyers said.
This introduction into sports information led Meyers to a 10-year stint at his alma mater Northern Kentucky before he moved on to be the Great Lakes Valley Conference (GLVC) league SID for 18 years.
Meyers loved sports but admits a career on his athletic ability was not in the cards.
“I wasn't good enough to play, but I was around a high school coach that I admired and I wanted to be involved with it in some fashion,” he said.
Meyers’ high school coach, Ken Shields, gave him a chance at stats during his junior year. Meyers did so well in high school that Shields called persons at Northern Kentucky to recommend the incoming freshman to do stats for the Norse, which is exactly what Meyers ended up doing for the next five years.
(SIDE NOTE: Meyers and Shields reunited at NKU when Shields became the head coach at NKU in 1988. Shields coached the Norse for 16 seasons and remains the program’s winningest coach with a 306-170 record.)
Joining the program in its infancy, Meyers got to witness the birth and watch it go. The first day Meyers stepped on the NKU campus as a student was the first day for NKU at its new permanent home in Highland Heights, Ky. The Norse basketball team was in its second year, but the 1972-73 season was its first in its own home arena.
Meyers went straight from being a student worker to the sports information director at NKU soon after graduation in 1977. However, Meyers was not certain he would get the position thanks to the final piece he wrote as the sports editor of the
Northerner.
“I was pretty close to the athletic program because I was doing the basketball stuff, and that particular year they had a very good team, but they didn't have anyone doing sports information for them,” Meyers explained. “They had a radio guy that was doing it part time. And my last column that I wrote — and I thought for sure this was my death knell, was that the school was cheating the athletes because they deserved a full-time SID. I turned that in, and I'm like ‘this is my death knell. I'll never get hired by anyone at NKU.’”
Later that summer, Northern Kentucky approved a full-time sports information position, and Meyers was hired for the job.
“I went into college preparing to do sports writing, and I had part-time jobs locally with the
Cincinnati Enquirer and the
Northerner,” he said. “But the only job I ever wanted was the sports information position, because I knew I could do it better than anyone. How lucky can anybody be to graduate from your alma mater and to have it hire you immediately to do sports information. It's a dream come true.”
What made working at NKU even more special was that everything was new. The program was new, so new milestones became a regular occurrence for a period of time.
“The really cool part of everything was that it was the first time it ever happened,” Meyers said. “My first game as a freshman was the first game in the new arena. Every time the school played back in the 1970s and accomplished something, it was the first time it ever happened for the school.
“It was a great opportunity to start with a program from scratch,” he continued. “It's the first game in the building; first win in the building; first time we hit a 100; first time we beat a (NCAA) Division II team; first time we played a Division I team. All that stuff was first and really exciting because I got to chronicle all that, and it was a thrill.”
Meyers served as NKU’s sports information director from 1977-86 when he became the school’s Director of Media Relations. He served in that role from 1986-2001 before becoming the Assistant Vice President for Marketing and Communications from 2001-14.
Out of the world of sports information, it did not take Meyers long to get the itch to get back in the game as he was named the SID for the GLVC in 1987.
“I missed it so much that I had to get back,” Meyers said of taking on the GLVC role where he served until 2005. “It was the perfect situation because NKU had just joined the GLVC and I knew the league, I knew the people. Plus, you're involved with something that you love. You're a sports fan to begin with, but it's a chance to help out with a team and a coach, help publicize them and get them to the next level. It's all the relationships you build.”
It was at the GLVC where Meyers honed his marketing and arena management skills, helping administrate the GLVC’s record-breaking post-season tournament which broke several attendance records at Roberts Stadium in Evansville, Ind. He won several CoSIDA awards in this capacity, including his conference media guide being named “Best in the Nation” for five consecutive years in the 1990s.
With a career spanning over four decades, Meyers saw the profession evolve thanks in large part to technology. He oversaw and helped developed the league’s first website during early part of his tenure with the GLVC.
“The difference between now and then is like the Stone Age,” he said. “Every week on Monday, you had to write down all the statistics and mail them off to the NCAA, and then a week later you got the top 50, 100 or whatever it would be in all the statistical categories. It was always a week late, but it was always a big deal when that big envelope came in the mail and you could see if any of our players got ranked or if our teams made the top 10. Today, everything is real-time updating. You can see all this stuff updated literally the second after the guy shoots the ball. It's incredible. The availability of information now is instantaneous in almost everything, which is great but it's a whole different ballgame than it was back in the day.
“Everything that has been done has been an improvement; that's the neat part,” Meyers added. “Over the years, you went from mail to the fax to computers. It's all been great stuff. It's been exciting to be a part of a profession where you got to live through that.”
In 2014, Meyers retired from his post at NKU and is currently a senior consultant at Chancticleer Consulting. Meyers was named to the Great Lakes Valley Conference Hall of Fame (inducted May, 2009), the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame (inducted January, 2012) and the Northern Kentucky University Athletics Hall of Fame (inducted February, 2015).
“It wasn't just me; it was the help of a lot of people along the way,” Meyers said. “A lot of times you get the credit for it, but there's so many people that are behind you, supporting you and helping you in so many ways that I couldn't have done it without them.”