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Past Lifetime Achievement Recipients
Ralph Zobell (BYU) – Lifetime Achievement Award
by Norma Collett Bertoch, BYU Director of Media Relations- Women’s Basketball
Ralph and his wife, Janet at the TD Ameritrade Park at the
2017 College World Series in Omaha.
Countless are the box scores, releases, notes, guides and programs disseminated to the media and posted to BYU ‘s athletics website for a career that spanned four decades.
For
Ralph Zobell, it’s been his life for 41 years. He started distributing box scores and stats via a telecopier that took four or six minutes to transmit, to sending them via fax, then by emails and most recently posting them directly onto the news media’s website.
In the ever-present 24-hour news cycle we live in, he was the first member of the athletic department to tweet.
Through it all, Zobell has been the consummate professional, whose contributions to the sports information profession are immeasurable. Even more important are the lives of countless student-athletes, coaches and administrators Ralph has touched over the years.
Zobell, who recently announced his retirement, will receive a 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) on June 28 during the organization’s annual convention, taking place at the Gaylord Resort and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland.
Since his first year in 1977, Zobell has worked 1,065 baseball games, 242 football games and 320 basketball games. Those totals also include countless conference tournaments, 10 bowl games, 10 NCAA championships while logging more than 300 flights in and out of Salt Lake City. In addition, he’s gone on numerous trips oversees with both of the school’s football and basketball teams.
His career began in 1976 as the lone intern in a sports information office of two full-time staff member. The following year he was promoted to full-time.
Over his 41-year career Zobell has been instrumental in the promotion of hundreds of student-athletes for All-America and major national awards like the John Wooden Award, won by Danny Ainge in 1981, and 16 major national football awards including the Heisman Trophy, won by Ty Detmer in 1990.
He recalls one campaign for Super Bowl center Bart Oates, an Outland Trophy nominee, who was competing against the defending Outland winner Dave Rimington.
“We took a picture of Oates hugging this big bag of oats, and then inside the envelopes we sent out to the voters, we put a sprinkle of oats so when they opened the envelope oats would fall out,” Zobell said. We got a lot of “feed” back from that one.”
It’s always been his philosophy that, “If you can get someone else to say it instead of you, that’s the best thing in the business.”
In baseball, Zobell assisted with the award nominations for Cory Snyder, Wally Joyner and Scott Nielsen. He was the SID when the BYU baseball team was ranked No. 1 in 1983 prior to the NCAA Regionals.
Zobell was president of the National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association (NCBWA) in 1990, and received the organization’s 42nd Wilbur Snypp Award for outstanding contributions to college baseball at last year’s College World Series.
He remembers back in his early years that he and then radio announcer Raeldon Palmer developed a pattern of numbers, which helped him create a box score so he could write a recap of road baseball games. Palmer would dictate a series of 13 numbers back to Zobell like, 0, 0, 5, 2, 1, 1, 3 and those became his box score.
Zobell has also made extensive international travels while serving at BYU. The first of four overseas trip took him to Japan where the football team played in the Silk Bowl in 1977 against the Japanese All-Stars. That year, BYU went 9-2 and tied for first place in the Western Athletic Conference (WAC) with Arizona State, but the Cougars held the tiebreaker with a win over ASU. The WAC champion got the automatic invitation to the Fiesta Bowl, but the Cougars declined the invite because the game would be played on Sunday. ASU represented the WAC in the 1977 Fiesta Bowl.
Cougar supporters felt the team should be rewarded for its success. The school’s men’s gymnastics coach at that time was Greg Sano, who was from Japan. Sano made some calls and with his help, and the help of the American Football Association of Japan, the Silk Bowl was held.
Zobell was on the staff when the BYU football team won the 1984 national championship, and has worked 10 bowl games. Not only did Zobell work as an SID on these trips but numerous times he’d be the chauffeur who shuttled the media to and from the venues.
On one particular trip to Laramie, Wyoming, he was waiting for the media to file their stories. The temperature had dropped and snow was falling, so people were anxious to leave and head to Ft. Collins, Colorado. Dick Rosetta was still writing his story when head coach LaVell Edwards came up to the press box to tell Ralph that it was time to go.
“We were flying commercial then and one thing I knew for sure was that the plane would not leave without LaVell,” Zobell recalls. “LaVell and someone else picked me up and put me in the elevator and said, ‘Ralph we are going now.’ We were some of the last cars to get through before the road closed.”
Despite trying to keep up with LaVell, who was driving 80 miles an hour (or so it seemed) everyone made it to the plane on time, although Rosetta hasn't let Zobell forget that he left him behind.
Lessons learned are numerous in a 41-year career, a couple of which he’s shared over the years with student-athletes and others.
Zobell developed a trusting relationship with football Academic All-America® standout Chuck Cutler. The friendship started when Cutler began selling insurance in the late 1980s. He’d been at the Zobell home regarding life insurance where personal questions like, “How much do you make?” came up. Later, Cutler became the Zobell’s financial planner, a relationship that still exists.
Another lesson came when he worked with football Hall of Famer and All-American Marc Wilson. In 1978 he was the starting QB, but due to an injury he finished the season as the backup. Zobell continued to develop his friendship with Wilson and the following year, he was the starter. Good relationships with student-athletes, whether they are the star or not are important, Zobell realized. Wilson, as the quarterback, did every interview request the entire season.
Zobell attended the University of Wyoming for two years, and then transferred to BYU after serving an LDS mission to Indonesia. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communications from BYU. His master’s thesis was titled appropriately — “The History of Sports Information in Utah.”
How we work as SIDs in 2018 is drastically different from how it was done in 1977. For Zobell, the 41 years have been a joy and a pleasure.
“Just think about it, we get paid to watch sports. I look at sports as the great common denominator because you usually can start a conversation with something related to sports.”