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Past CoSIDA 25-Year Award Recipients
Gregory Ruff – Trevecca Nazarene University, Communications/Broadcasting Director
2019 CoSIDA 25-Year Award recipient
by David Boclair, Senior Writer-Sports, Nashville Post
Greg Ruff was not burdened by knowledge.
About the only thing he knew for certain was that in the late 1990s Trevecca Nazarene University needed a sports information director.
The realization came to him one night and was so clear, so profound that it woke him from his sleep. The only way he got his mind to quiet was to write a note to himself to make a phone call the next day to David Deese, a communications professor who also ran the campus radio station. The next morning he followed through and picked up the phone.
“I said, I had an urge to call you about a job and here's why, and all that type of stuff,” Ruff said. “He said, ‘Well, I don't really, having anything.’ Then he said, ‘Hang on, I'll, call you back’ — and he said a couple of days.
“So he calls me back like a week later and says, how would you like to be our sports information director and do broadcasting?”
With that, a career was born. Ruff became the first full-time SID in the history of the school. To date, he remains the only one. And, he will receive a 2019 CoSIDA 25-Year Award at the upcoming CoSIDA convention in Orlando for his long-time commitment to the athletic communications profession. Along the way, Ruff and his staff have been honored for their athletic media guides and website design and content, earning more than 30 CoSIDA or "Best of NAIA-SIDA" publication or website awards. He was named the 2007-08 TranSouth Conference Sports Information Director of the Year.
Gregory Ruff with his wife, Amy Manson Ruff.
In his time as an athletics staffer on the Nashville, Tenn. campus he has been educated in many ways, formally and informally. He completed his undergraduate degree (he left the school several years earlier three credits shy of that degree), earned as master’s degree in organizational leadership, and is a dissertation short of his PhD, which he expects to complete this summer.
Ruff also has learned the ins and outs of sports information from a couple different perspectives, courtesy of Trevecca’s transition five years ago from NAIA to NCAA Division II competition. Plus, he found out that much of what he already knew translated well to the profession … or it did eventually.
Never mind that early on the particulars of his situation did not exactly make sense.
“When I started, the radio station that we had was paying 90 percent of my salary and athletics was paying 10 percent,” he said. “But I did 90 percent work for athletics and 10 percent for the radio station.”
Ruff had worked in broadcasting since he left college and that history set the stage for his early days at Trevecca.
One of his jobs was associate producer for a local sports television show that aired nightly. It was in that producer role that he recognized the Trevecca’s need for someone to disseminate information about its athletic teams. At the time, the closest thing the school had to an SID was a volunteer.
“I would get harassed, maybe not every night, but regularly harassed because we would enter Trevecca into the score template for the scroll on the bottom of the screen and then we would never get the score,” he said. “Everyone else who worked on the show knew that I had gone to Trevecca. So they gave me a hard time.”
Other than making sure local media outlets got the scores, he was not sure exactly what to do. So he did what he knew. He broadcasted Trevecca Nazarene athletics.
Even before the turn of the century, before Facebook and Twitter had taken hold or evolved into their current formats, Trevecca was live-streaming its sporting events. The combination of some donated bandwidth and Ruff’s expertise made every game on campus an opportunity. He even found a way to show golf, which for years ranked as the school’s most-watched events because of the number of teams and players that participated in a single event.
“I was trying things out,” Ruff said. “They allowed me to try things and we were all smart enough to know that if it didn't work that we would quit doing it, you know?
“We've actually gotten kids to come here because their siblings were playing at another school, their parents saw the video here and knew that they'd be able to watch all their kids’ games when they came here.”
At the time, Ruff had no idea that he was ahead of the curve. He was not even sure he was anywhere near the learning curve in his new job, let alone making progress along it.
Yet over time, he and the profession moved toward one another and eventually met somewhere in the middle so that he has built a reputation of equal renown in the eyes of campus officials and media members.
His operation, which once consisted of he and a few student workers each year, now includes a graduate assistant who is on the payroll. The competition has changed and the athletics department has grown to include 13 or 15 teams (depending on how one views cross country and track).
Somewhere along the way his salary became strictly part of the athletics department’s budget because his value to Trevecca Nazarene’s athletics department, which once was not so clear, could not be ignored.
“I just approached the job asking, what did I want as a media person?” he said. “As I thought about it later, that's how sports information really started. It was a lot of former sportswriters going to work for schools to kind of the schools’ press agents.
“But I had no idea what I was doing. I had zero. And they had no idea what I was supposed to do.”
Yet, as Ruff gets ready to receive his CoSIDA 25-Year Award, things could not have worked out any better.