Related Content
•
2019 Special Awards Annoucements and Features
•
#CoSIDA19 Convention Home
•
Past CoSIDA 25-Year Award Recipients
Jerry Emig – The Ohio State University, Associate Director, Communications - Football
2019 CoSIDA 25-Year Award recipient
by Austin Ward, Lettermen Row senior writer
A dip in enthusiasm from
Jerry Emig would have been completely understandable.
The Ohio State sports information director had replied to hundreds of emails. He was double-dipping in a second sport, helping run the operations at the NCAA National Basketball Tournament while also keeping tabs on his responsibilities as the primary contact for a football program with a nonstop, yearlong news cycle. And he was running on almost no sleep thanks to health complications that sent one of his sons to the hospital during that March week that was perhaps his busiest time of the year.
But just like it has for the last 25 years in the profession, Emig kept smiling, kept joking and kept on piling up statistics with the kind of passion that few can match. It’s never waned, and it might actually be stronger than ever as he prepares to be honored for his longevity this summer at the CoSIDA convention in June with a 25-Year Award.
“Personally, I spent 50 hours from Thursday to Tuesday down at intensive care, then it was just texting updates with my wife Jody,” Emig said after a football practice at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. “And then [professionally], during the week of the NCAA Tournament from Monday morning until halftime of our sixth game, I had sent 420 emails. I guess that speaks to the life balance that you need to have, and that you have to try to have. But I’ll tell you, I’ve been an SID longer than I’ve been a husband and a dad or virtually anything else. It’s something that just makes me really, really proud — because I love being a sports information director.
“I love this job. I love the relationships. Relationships with coaches, relationships with student-athletes, relationships with the media who I work with. And that just keeps this job so special for me.”
Emig laughing with former Ohio State wide receiver and NFL player Braxton Miller.
Finding it was something of a happy accident for Emig in the first place, since he had every intention growing up of becoming a famous broadcaster. But after trying a little bit of every form of journalism while in college at Murray State, nothing quite fit exactly what he wanted to do in the sports world.
So, he scheduled a meeting with Murray State SID Lee Moses, asked what all his job entailed and how Emig could follow that career path — which he then tried to duplicate all the way down to applying to the very same Master’s program at Ohio State. And while there have been stops at SIU-Carbondale and Temple during his career journey, it’s with the Buckeyes where Emig found a home for both him and his family.
“When I was a little kid, I would tell my grandma and my mom that when I grew up, I wanted to go to Notre Dame and I wanted to be just like Howard Cosell,” Emig said. “I didn’t quite do either of those things, but I had an idea that I wanted to work in sports. I wondered then about how to get into this, and I feel like I’m continuing to learn something every day that helps foster this relationship building for me.
“The passion has grown, and I would say it’s because my knowledge of the business has grown,” Emig continued. “As my knowledge has grown, as my experiences have grown, I’ve become more cognizant of my role and how my role works in this communications world. I’m obviously much more confident today, which makes this job much more enjoyable than it was 20 years ago or even five years ago.”
With 25 of them now behind him, Emig is aware there might only be a few more left of them as the guy stationed just a few feet to the right of the football coaches who take turns speaking at a podium in the southeast corner of the Horseshoe. And he’s been known to crack a few jokes about the motorcycle he’ll ride off into the sunset or the old rock-and-roll albums he’ll play to fill his day when he’s not fielding interview requests anymore.
Yet it’s also hard to imagine a day at Ohio State without Emig greeting every media member, rattling off details about every last scholarship player on the football roster or keeping bonus statistics in his notebook about how many questions Urban Meyer or Ryan Day answer during a season.
Thanks to his bottomless support at home, boundless energy and remarkable ability to communicate, Emig was seemingly made to be an SID.
“I love what I do,” he said. “To reach 25 years as being an SID, I’m extremely proud of that.”
And even after one more crazy week in the life of an SID, Jerry Emig clearly isn’t ready to give it up yet, either.