College Sports Information Directors of America

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Maxey Parrish – Baylor University, Retired
CoSIDA Hall of Fame Class of 2019

by Jerry Hill, Baylor Bear Insider

Working for Baylor Athletics at a time when the department had to do more with less, former sports information director Maxey Parrish learned how to mentor and also rely on students, “because I had to have them.”

“I had no choice,” said Parrish, who returned to his alma mater in 1980 as an assistant SID. “I couldn’t do a spring weekend where we might have baseball, softball, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s tennis and men’s and women’s track. That’s 10 things. How do you cover it with two people? You don’t. You got students, and I learned to treat them with respect, to give them responsibility and try to teach them a thing or two, which I carry over to the classroom today.”
 
That experience working with students during his 20 years in the sports information office has proven beneficial in Maxey’s second career as a professor and now senior lecturer in the school’s department of journalism, public relations and new media.
 
“I absolutely love it,” he said. “This summer will be my 20th trip overseas with Baylor students. I’ve done 10 mission trips and this will be my 10th Study Abroad program. We’re going to Budapest, Hungary. All told, I’ve lived way over a year out of the country with Baylor students.”
 

Nearly 20 years after his SID career ended, Parrish was recently elected to the CoSIDA Hall of Fame and will be inducted at the CoSIDA Hall of Fame Luncheon June 10 during the organization’s annual convention in Orlando, Fla.
 
“I’m very grateful, very humbled,” Maxey said. “The thing that really surprises me more than anything is that it happened so long ago. It’s almost like it was old-timer’s committee. Not to say it should have happened 15 years ago, but I’ve been away from it since 2000. My feeling was that was a part of my life that was over, and that’s OK. Then, I got the email and I was like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’’’
 
As the son of Baylor vice president Tom Parrish, who founded the university development office, Maxey grew up going to Baylor sports events and was “always around that atmosphere.”
 
While Maxey has no recollections of it, his dad’s story was that when his son was 8 or 9 years old, he asked him who the men on the sidelines of a basketball game were. “They’re the sports writers,” his dad replied. Ever inquisitive, Maxey followed up with a question about who that man was that kept running down there, and his dad responded that he was the sports information director. “I’m going to have that job someday,” he said.
 
Whether it’s true, or just family lore, it’s still a good story.
 
“Way back in the day, I worked as a runner for (Baylor SID) Don Oliver, just passing out stats and things like that,” Maxey said. “And I kind of got a feel for it.”
 
What he really wanted to do, though, was become a sports writer. An avid reader of both the Waco Tribune-Herald and Dallas Morning News sports pages, Maxey earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism and served a stint as the Baylor Lariat assistant sports editor.

When it came time to do an internship during his senior year, he had to do something other than the Lariat and turned to the sports information office. That’s where he found his passion.

Helping out at the Southwest Conference track meet that spring, Maxey caught the eye of SMU Sports Information Director Bob Condron. “He told me that he had an opening, why don’t you turn in your resume? So, I did, and the rest is history.”
 
Working two years under Condron at SMU, Maxey calls his boss and now fellow CoSIDA Hall of Famer a mentor that not only taught him the basic skills of writing a press release and organizing a news conference, “but he really taught me the ethics of work and how to treat people and the things that are going to make you successful, no matter what you do.”
 
“Bob was a great teacher and very patient,” Maxey said, “so I learned a lot from him.”
 
Condron also opened the door for Parrish to work as a press officer with the United States Olympic Committee, and he served in that capacity at two World University Games, four U.S. Olympic Festivals and the 1992 and ’96 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, and Atlanta, Ga.
 
As a track and cross country athlete at Baylor (1974-78), Maxey had a knowledge and familiarity of the sport that “made all the difference in the world” in his work with USOC, “because I knew the sport and very few people really do.”
 
After two years at SMU, Maxey returned to Baylor in 1980 as the assistant AD under Mike Scott. Two years later, when Scott left for a job at Kansas State, Parrish became the youngest Division I football SID in the country at 26 years old.
 
“You look back now and say, ‘How did I do that? That seems impossible,’’’ Parrish said. “You just show up every day and do the best you can. We were working a minimum of 60 and sometimes 65 and 70 hours a week then. We had such limited resources.”
 
In 1997, Parrish left his SID role to become Director of Internet Operations, setting up the web site that is now baylorbears.com.
 
“I was at a meeting where this guy from the University of Missouri was talking about this thing called the internet,” he said. “It was like you got your own newspaper that you could put out there yourself.”
 
On a flight back to Waco, he sketched out the initial plans for the Baylor Athletics web site on the back of an envelope.  “We had to hire someone from Dallas to write the codes, because nobody in Waco knew how to do it,” Maxey said.
 
The CoSIDA president in 1998-99, Maxey stayed involved in the organization as founding editor of its first web site as well. “I remained on the board as a paid staff member doing their web site for another four or five years,” he said.
 
Calling the Hall of Fame recognition “special,” Parrish said he was fortunate enough to have good careers with Baylor and the Olympic Committee and then worked with CoSIDA, “so a lot of things came together.”