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Note: This story appeared in the Spring 2020 May edition of CoSIDA 360 Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here. 

 

Ahead of the Curve

Creating Efficiences Through Emerging Technology.

by Aaron Morse – Bates College, Assistant Sports Information Director

 

“Any time a new technology comes out that makes any part of the job easier, you’ve got to take it.”  Mario Bravante – University of Arkansas, Associate Communications Director

With sports on hiatus right now, thinking about the impact of new technology on the athletic communications profession may seem stressful. After all, we don’t know when sports will return. But when they do, our profession will be champing at the bit to once again be able to tell the stories that emerge from a new school year. Luckily for collegiate sports fans, there are communications pros throughout the country who are ahead of the curve.

The coach turned communicator

Jeremy Zalacca dreamed of a career in coaching.

“My entire life growing up I wanted to be a basketball coach,” Zalacca said. “My dad was a basketball coach; I was around basketball and college athletics my entire childhood.”

Zalacca played basketball at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, N.Y., and upon graduation in 2007 he entered the coaching world as an assistant. But after one year, he came to a surprising realization.

“I spent most of my childhood and most of life preparing to be a basketball coach,” Zalacca said. “It’s eye-opening when you do something that you think you’re going to do the rest of your life, and in one year you’re all of a sudden like, ‘This isn’t what I want to do.’”

So, he embraced a career change.

Fast forward to 2020 and Zalacca’s career change has paid off. He is the Assistant Athletic Director for Athletic Communications at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, N.C., and he hasn’t stopped embracing change.

That is good because the field of athletic communications is changing seemingly by the second. With so much new technology available, it can seem overwhelming.

“I don’t think that everything that is successful elsewhere would be successful where we are, so you have to pick and choose and sometimes it’s trial and error,” Zalacca said. “Sometimes you give something a shot, and you think it’ll be great and it doesn’t do as well. And sometimes you try something that you don’t think is great but it does really well.” 

“I think you just have to stay flexible and always try to be ahead of the curve and stay active.”

Zalacca’s willingness to try new technology led him to New Zealand. Well, not literally. But it did lead him to Blinder, a company based out of New Zealand.

 

According to Zalacca, one of the biggest challenges he faced from a communications perspective was providing the same comprehensive coverage of Lenoir-Rhyne teams when they hit the road as he did when they were at home. Getting instant reaction from student-athletes and coaches after, say, a no-hitter, was very important.

“I would try some apps that would record a phone call, and some worked and some didn’t and you wouldn’t realize it until after you did the interview if they worked or not,” Zalacca said. “You sit and you talk to a coach for 10 minutes and then you realize it never recorded.”

Blinder is a tool used by some major sports teams, such as the Atlanta Falcons, to coordinate interviews with the media without giving away the athlete’s personal contact information.

But at the NCAA Division II level, the athletic communications office is the media for many schools. And for Zalacca, it’s all about the power of Blinder to make video interviews with student-athletes and coaches as easy as a phone call. And he actually discovered it through CoSIDA, which uses Blinder to interview Academic All-Americans.

Zalacca thought Blinder looked exactly like what he was looking for but he had one big concern. And it’s a concern that many people in the industry can relate to: how much would it cost?

“I almost ended it before I even had our first conference call because I was thinking, ‘There’s no way we’re going to fit this in our budget, these guys work with the big boys, they’re not going to be interested in partnering with us.’” Zalacca said. “But we talked and we did the tutorial, and financially they actually made a lot of sense, with the product that they offer, so we ended up collaborating.”

And through unfortunate circumstances due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Blinder has become more relevant than ever. The technology is allowing Zalacca to connect with student-athletes even when there are no sports, such as a recent video his team produced showing the Lenoir-Rhyne quarterback and wide receiver breaking down a last-second touchdown pass from the past fall.

“Right now, if we didn’t have Blinder, it would be tough to do some of the things that we want to do in terms of people being able to tell their own story,” Zalacca said. “There’s never a shortage of ideas out there; it’s how can we best execute what we see as being successful on our level and at our university.”

 

"When learning how to lead in this digital environment, it means we have to embrace technology...if we lead by saying, ‘Well, this isn’t the way we’ve done it in the past, so we’re not going to do it in the future,’ that’s not leadership. That’s being stubborn. And being stubborn in 2020 isn’t going to work.” Jeff Rubin, CEO of SIDEARM Sports

Ready For Anything

When college athletics return, NCAA LiveStats from Genius Sports will once again be front and center when it comes to technology that’s changing what it means to be an athletic communications professional.

And SUNY Old Westbury Sports Information Director Nicole Sasu-Twum will be ready. From day one, she has been an enthusiastic user of the newest way to keep statistics during a game.

Sasu-Twum has been ready for anything since her college days at SUNY Institute of Technology (now known as SUNY Polytechnic Institute) where she played for the women’s basketball team.

“As a student-athlete, I had always worked in athletics,” Sasu-Twum said. “My senior year, the SID went away for one weekend and we had just started women’s lacrosse, and he needed somebody to cover. I just ran the whole game management team and immediately fell in love with it.”

Sasu-Twum graduated in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in business but initially did not follow up on a possible career in athletic communications. In fact, after graduation she worked full time in social services, but the experience of managing a game in college stuck in the back of her mind. So Sasu-Twum went back to school, receiving a master’s degree in sports administration from Canisius College in 2017. While getting her master’s, she first connected with Old Westbury, earning internship hours in the athletics department.

“One thing that I value most is the relationships that I build with everybody within the department,” Sasu-Twum said. “I wanted to stay in the profession, and was able to learn the office side of everything. Everybody sees the game management piece and they love that part, but the office side is what I really wanted to learn more about.”

With a well-rounded understanding of the field, she jumped at the opportunity for a part time job at Old Westbury in 2017.

A year later, NCAA LiveStats made its debut on the athletic communications landscape. 

“They first introduced NCAA LiveStats for basketball last year,” Sasu-Twum said. “I really enjoyed all the nuances and how quickly I was able to pick up on it. I’ve been playing basketball all my life so it was an easy transition for me.”

The 2019-20 school year was Sasu-Twum’s first as the full-time sports information director. She loves mentoring student workers and she found they liked NCAA LiveStats as well. Soccer and volleyball made their debuts this fall and Sasu-Twum bought-in completely once again, as did her students.

“It’s their speed, they’re used to everything being instant, touch screen, everything is just right there in front of them and they understand,” Sasu-Twum said. “As long as they know the sequence, they will buy in. This year I showed them what the program looks like, what we were working with, and then I showed them StatCrew, and I said, ‘Which one would you prefer working with?’ And they immediately gravitated toward Genius.”

Hearing that is probably music to SIDEARM Sports’ CEO Jeff Rubin’s ears. Under Rubin’s leadership, SIDEARM Sports has grown from one client (his alma mater Syracuse) in 2000 to 1,200 in 2020, including Lenoir-Rhyne and SUNY Old Westbury.

“We work closely with Genius Sports on all the products they release, making sure the stats are accurate, the data makes sense,” Rubin said. “Genius Sports is necessary. Something was necessary, right? StatCrew is a DOS-based environment. As much as I love everybody at StatCrew, without innovating their product, it was not the future.”

Rubin is scheduled to speak in a session during the 2020 COSIDA Virtual Convention about athletic communication leaders being digital change agents.

“When learning how to lead in this digital environment, it means we have to embrace technology,” Rubin said. “Now, it doesn’t mean we have to use every piece of technology that comes out.

“But if we lead by saying, ‘Well, this isn’t the way we’ve done it in the past, so we’re not going to do it in the future,’ that’s not leadership. That’s being stubborn.”

“And being stubborn in 2020 isn’t going to work.”

Leaders like Sasu-Twum know the importance of taking statistics to the next level. She worked closely with SIDEARM to integrate NCAA LiveStats into “Panthers All-Access”, the live video streams of SUNY Old Westbury sporting events. That combination helps provide more detailed coverage than what was even thought possible at the NCAA Division III level a few years ago.

“I find it very exciting because I know as a viewer, as a fan, that’s what I’m looking for,” Sasu-Twum said. “So if I’m looking for it, I’m pretty sure the rest of the population is looking for it as well.”

Tracking Down Numbers, with the Snap of Your Fingers

At the NCAA Division I level, information rules.

The Arkansas Razorbacks women’s basketball team’s media guide is more than 200 pages long. If you want to find a statistic about the Hogs, it’s definitely in there. It just might take some time to track down, even if you are the one who compiled the media guide in the first place.

But what if you could find the last time an Arkansas player recorded a double-double in back-to-back games or the last time the Razorbacks hit 10 three-pointers in a game, in a matter of seconds?

The concept seems too good to be true. But as Arkansas Associate Communications Director Mario Bravante was happy to find out, it’s reality. It’s all thanks to a brand new company: Athlyte (pronounced “athlete”).

Bravante credits being in the right place at the right time for his quick ascension to his current role. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 2018 and after one year as a strategic communications assistant at his alma mater, he landed the job at Arkansas.

“I was a broadcast journalism student, and just like every other broadcast journalism student, I thought I wanted to be on television,” Bravante said. “And then I was, once or twice, and I was like, ‘I don’t want to be on TV anymore.’”

So he cut his teeth as a student assistant in the athletic communications office for four years, making connections that proved valuable down the road, when his direct supervisor introduced him to Arkansas Associate AD/Communications Kyle Parkinson. Shortly after being hired by the Razorbacks, Bravante joined Parkinson in a meeting with representatives from Athlyte.

“We were all blown away,” Bravante said. “And I haven’t even been doing this very long, so you could see the reactions of people that had been in the game for longer, and had spent hours over the years trying to track down numbers, and now you could do it with the snap of your fingers.”

 

Thanks to Athlyte, Bravante is able to use his time much more efficiently. And the process is simple, if previously unimaginable. Athlyte takes the team’s game-by-game XML files from past seasons and creates a searchable database. They also have a way to turn PDF box scores, hard copies that you scan into a computer, into XML files.

“The biggest difference for me is the ability to do these searches in-game,” Bravante said. “I’m not wrapping up the game, going to a press conference, writing a recap and then looking up numbers. There’s a media timeout where I have two minutes. I can open up Athlyte, put the data in there, and have the information I need.”

Technologies such as Blinder, NCAA Live Stats and Athlyte, among many others, make the future of athletic communications full of endless possibilities.

“I think as athletic communications evolves, we’re going to turn into more than just statisticians,” Bravante said. “We’ve seen it already. You have to be able to do a little bit of graphic design, you have to be able to hold a camera, you have to be able to do videography, you have to be multifaceted.

“So any time a new technology comes out that makes any part of the job easier, you’ve got to take it.”  

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