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Past Arch Ward Award Recipients
Herb Vincent – Southeastern Conference, Associate Commissioner/Communications
2019 Arch Ward Award recipient
by Bill Little, The University of Texas (retired) / CoSIDA Hall of Fame, CoSIDA Past President and Arch Ward recipient, 1998
This is a writer’s journey.
The call had come from Paul Manasseh, the legendary Sports Information Director at Louisiana State University. On the other end of the line was a long-forgotten voice in the offices of the LSU student newspaper,
The Reveille. It was in the middle of the Fall Semester in 1979, and one of Paul’s student assistants had just left.
“Do you know of people who are interested in sports who might want to work for us?” Paul asked.
“Well,” came the answer. “We’ve got this kid who’s been hanging around here…writing stories…but he’s not getting paid. Maybe he would be interested.”
The young writer’s name was
Herb Vincent, a freshman from North Little Rock, Ark.
And this is his story.
This June, he will receive one of CoSIDA’s most coveted honors, The
Arch Ward Award. He will also assume the duties of CoSIDA’s president for 2019-20. His has been an eventful journey, full of heroes and honors, championships and recognitions. It was a journey he never envisioned. A path of memories and crossroads that made him the best in the business at what he did. A story only a guy who loved writing might some day understand.
Herb Vincent with wife Jamey and daughter Kennedy at the 2016 Southeastern Conference Baseball Tournament.
“When I got to LSU, I wanted to write,” Herb recalls. “But there were not a lot of feature writing courses in my curriculum until my junior year. So I started hanging around the football stadium and talking to coaches and players. Charlie McClendon was the coach then, so I did an interview with him and some of the players.
“I had gone to the student newspaper and they said ‘we can’t pay you anything, but if you want to send us some stories, we will be glad to run them if they are good enough.’ So I started sending them and they started using them.”
Soon after Manasseh’s phone conversation, Larry White, who was then the LSU assistant SID in charge of men’s basketball, called Herb and offered him the job.
“Before that, I didn’t even know that the profession of sports information existed,” Herb recalled. “I started out as the men’s gymnastics SID and just fell in love with the profession from day one.”
It was a natural transition. For as long as he could remember, sports, and the chronicling of them, had been in his blood.
“As a kid I used to make up leagues and standings with kids in our neighborhood. We would play table top games like baseball and football. I would keep all the stats. My mom, back in North Little Rock, still has all of those notebooks with leagues and standings I made up and don’t even remember,” he says.
Soon, he had moved on to high school, where a new avenue presented itself. He kept writing and became co-editor of his Little Rock Catholic High School newspaper. At the same time, he started writing sports for the
North Little Rock Times covering American Legion baseball. Often, he was playing in some of the games he wound up covering.
“On Friday nights they would assign me to go to high school football games in the area,” he remembers. He wrote features on players, and by then he was completely smitten with the art of writing.
The transition from sports writing to the SID field was natural. His work was excellent, and he impressed not only his coaches and the media, but also those who worked in the sports communications field.
Down Interstate 10 in Lafayette, the home of what was then called Southwestern Louisiana, Dan McDonald was busy earning his way to the CoSIDA Hall of Fame. He befriended Herb, and the first turn in a road that would take many turns was about to occur.
“After he graduated, Herb went to work in the newly-formed USFL right out of college. I figured that was his first stop on what was going to be a great career for him somewhere, especially when he took over as PR director for the USFL’s Los Angeles Express. Little did I know that the USFL was about to fold, and that we were going to have the opportunity to work together for a year,” McDonald remembers.
“When the USFL imploded, Herb was suddenly looking for a job, and fortunately for both of us, there was an opening for an assistant in our office. It didn’t pay much, and he was vastly overqualified, but it was a place to land until something better came along. I knew it was temporary, but I also knew that my university would benefit from his talents no matter how short the time span became.
“I can say without reservation that the 1985-86 athletic year when Herb and I worked together became one of the most memorable I ever had, for a lot of reasons that had little to do with the school’s athletic success,” McDonald stated. “We were a two-man office with a couple of student assistants, and we pumped out volumes of work that still amaze me given our staffing and budget. Still what I remember most during that time was that we had fun during the chaos.”
It was then, at a workshop in Nashville in the summer of 1986, that McDonald introduced Herb to CoSIDA.
“I saw so many of the legends of the profession,” Herb remembers about that first workshop.
And it didn’t hurt the organization’s standing with him when he learned the power panel of the workshop was a day-long seminar on writing presented by the legendary Dr. Don Ranly, a journalism professor at The University of Missouri.
McDonald said goodbye to his friend as a co-worker soon after that, when Herb made his first move to the SEC as an assistant PR director. Then, in 1988, he returned to LSU as the SID, and a year later he was promoted to assistant AD. Soon, he was named Associate AD for communications. A term as Senior Associate AD followed, and when he left to rejoin the SEC several years ago, as Assistant Commissioner for Communications, he was serving as the Associate Vice Chancellor for University Relations for the entire LSU campus.
The biggest change in Herb Vincent’s life came at a sporting event in 1993, and it had nothing to do with who won or lost the game. Herb, as it turned out, would be the real winner.
“I was part of the communications committee at the SEC basketball tournament, and I was in charge of the distribution of stats and notes. I was running the copy machine and handing the paper to runners,” Herb said.
As he collected the papers from the copy machine in Rupp Arena and turned to hand them to the next runner, he was staring straight into the sparkling eyes of Jamey Cavacini, the daughter of an employee of the University of Kentucky athletics. Jamey was a UK grad who lived in Atlanta, but wanted to see the tournament, so she volunteered to work.
It was the beginning of a long-distance relationship which would have a perfect ending.
“I just turned around and there she was,” Herb said. “We started talking and stayed in touch. But, she lived in Atlanta and I lived in Baton Rouge, so we didn’t start dating right away. Over the course of time, things worked out. Sports was always our common ground.”
It is that common ground, or at least an understanding of it, which Herb believes is a corner stone of an SID with a family.
“You have to have family support in this business because there are so many hours and weekends that you work. Jamey has always been so understanding of that. If I had to go to an event and stay late at night or if I had to be up early the next morning to travel … she knows the business and enjoys being around it. Having that kind of family interest and family support in college athletics makes all the difference. My wife and my daughter may be bigger sports fans than I am,” he said.
Kennedy Vincent is a 13-year-old softball player and cheerleader who shares Herb’s love for baseball. It is not uncommon for her to be watching the MLB network when Herb comes home, or for Jamey or Kennedy to pick up the phone and call him during the day about something that has happened in the sports world.
“They are the lights of his life,” McDonald says of Jamey and Kennedy. “It is a great thing that they share him with CoSIDA, which showed great insight and intelligence in honoring its incoming president with the Arch Ward Award. They, and the rest of us, could not have done any better.”
It is not without irony that CoSIDA’s annual SID award is named for the sports writing legend Arch Ward, among whose contribution to sport was the creation of professional baseball’s All Star game when he was a sports journalist in Chicago.
After more than 40 years, Herb is a giant in the business who still maintains his professionalism and is moved by the joy and excitement of the moment.
“When I think of the places that this business takes you, and the things that you get to see, I am amazed when I hear people complain about their jobs,” he noted. “I know I have been fortunate in the places I have worked and the support I have had, but for me it is being on the sidelines for exciting moments. Nowadays I am lucky enough to be there for events like SEC championships, Final Fours and the College World Series.
“But in this profession, the excitement and enthusiasm of a victory is just as big at a regular season gymnastics meet, a Tuesday night baseball game or a Sunday afternoon middle-of-the-season women’s basketball game. It is just that sports is exciting and the participants get excited about winning, and they get down about losing. For me, it is being a witness and a participant in all of the emotion and the passion of it that makes it a unique profession,” he said.
In 2015, Herb Vincent was named to the LSU Alumni Hall of Distinction, and his work in the profession through the years has been recognized for its excellence many times. So why, when he has done just about everything in the business, did he decide to join the officer rotation at CoSIDA which will elevate him to the organization’s presidency this summer?
“I think seeing the change in the media, and the changes in our business made me interested in being a part of all of that change,” Herb notes. “It is about preserving our profession. You want to make sure that as the world around us changes, we don’t get lost in the shuffle. I was interested in playing a role in mapping out the future for sports communications in the short period of time I would be able to participate. I also have a lot of faith in the leadership of our executive director, Doug Vance, and was anxious to serve on the board with him and help him with his vision.”
The Arch Ward Award, started in the early days of CoSIDA as the premier honor an SID can receive.
“What does it mean?” Herb asks rhetorically. “I remember when Dan McDonald got me involved, and I have tried to be loyal to the organization ever since. The organization has always been important to me, and after all these many years it is hard to describe the honor that I feel, and how humbled I am to get this.”
In a way, this will be like a moment in time.
It is, as Herb said when asked to pick a favorite moment, “You can’t,” he said. “When you are on the sideline you remember where you were at significant moments in time. You celebrate over and over again the joyous occasions you remember for the athletes.”
For Herb Vincent, that includes a desperate call from Shaquille O’Neal to help him tie a necktie before a banquet (he was, after all, a bit taller than Herb ...) to those other moments that are etched like portraits in the hallways of the mind.
Thus, 40 years after “that kid” was hanging around doing stories for the student newspaper at LSU, he is now honored by his peers as the best in the business.
And the writer in him quietly gets to celebrate, not for himself, but for those whose story he told.