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Past CoSIDA 25-Year Award Recipients
Dave Walters – Guilford College, Sports Information Director
2019 CoSIDA 25-Year Award recipient
by Ty Buckner, Guilford College Associate Vice President for Alumni & Constituent Relations; former UNCG SID from 1981-1995
For
Dave Walters, sports information director at Guilford College, the work has always been about the students. And it always will be.
He is a champion for students,
Dave is celebrating 25 years in the sports information profession, dating to his days as an intern at Lafayette College which was followed by a year as an assistant at UNC Greensboro which led to his 22-plus years across town at Guilford.
To put it in perspective, most of the senior students on Guilford’s 20 athletic teams — Walters always refers to team members as
students, not athletes or student-athletes — weren’t born when he started working at the college in 1996.
Recently, the student newspaper published
a story about Dave. In it, Morgan Tompkins ’20, a member of the volleyball team and sports information assistant, recalled a conversation they had in his office last spring after she returned from a mission trip to Texas.
“He asked me about my greatest takeaways from the trip, and it turned into a very personal conversation about life. I mentioned how much hope it had given me in a very hard season,” Morgan commented for
The Guilfordian story.
“Working for Dave has made me a better student and better person. Dave has also been a mentor to me through my time here. We often talk about questions of faith and life, and he’s really helped me grow in that respect. He’s also been there for me on numerous occasions and shown me how to extend grace and support endlessly,” she added.
Walters and his wife Christine at Walt Disney World.
Sports Information As A Calling
Sports information is a vocational calling for Walters a man of deep Christian faith and commitment to his family, friends and work colleagues. A vocation is an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which they are suited, trained or qualified. That describes our SID perfectly. He loves sports, but for Dave it’s really about the people’s lives and stories.
In a typical year, 10 to 15 work-study students participate in the sports information program, helping manage game operations and other office duties. I have been in higher education myself for more than 30 years, the last 18 as Dave’s colleague at Guilford, and I never seen anyone cultivate, manage and sustain student workers like him.
“Dave cares,” baseball player Logan Shortt ’20 said for the student paper story. “He cares about his workers. He cares about Guilford College. He cares about the quality of his work.”
Nine of Walter’s former students have worked in the sports information profession, including two who are active. Four current students are aspiring SIDs, he says. Walters was a presenter at the inaugural
CoSIDA U Camp in 2018, and three of his students participated. Two students were among eight recipients of the NCAA Division III CoSIDA Student Program grants to attend the 2018 convention.
Dave and his students share in the joy of Guilford team and individual successes. The Quakers have won Division III national championships in men’s golf and made multiple NCAA trips in men’s and women’s basketball, and the SID and his group take a lot of pride in being part of the larger team.
Old School in Terms of Work Ethic and Integrity
Walters grew up in Philadelphia and completed his undergraduate degree in communications at Ithaca College, working in the sports information office under the mentorship of CoSIDA Hall of Famer Pete Moore.
I met him at ECAC-SIDA in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in the spring of 1995 in my search for my replacement as sports information director at UNCG. Even though he was not hired as our director and had no family south of the Mason-Dixon Line, he agreed to come to Greensboro to work with us in what was, effectively, a third internship year.
A year later, Guilford had the wisdom to hire him as SID. It may be the best decision our college made for athletics in the ’90s.
Now, all these years later he has seen and kept up with growth and change in the profession, especially in terms of technology and the media. But his commitment to the involvement and development of students as workers and as emerging young adults has never wavered.
Dave is widely respected in the profession, having served on the Board of Directors for CoSIDA as a College Division Representative (Southeast Region) from 2011 to 2016. His Old Dominion Athletic Conference peers honored him with the inaugural Sports Information Director of the Year Award in 2005.
He’s old-school in terms of work ethic and integrity -- important traits of a truly successful SID or human being, for that matter. And with the exception of a few years, he’s a career NCAA Division III guy, from his own college experience to the present. I think that says something about his priorities not only in work but in life.
What I am sure of is that the sports information profession benefits from having him in it.