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CoSIDA.com/CoSIDA360 Magazine Archive
Note: This story appeared in the Spring 2021 May edition of CoSIDA 360 Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
Also read:
Cover Story Part 1
ALL Creatives & Communicators Deserve a Seat at Our Table
For CoSIDA to fulfill its mission, we must open our doors wider to be more inclusive of all types of communications and creative professionals in college athletics. We'll all be stronger for it.
by Beau White – CoSIDA Director of Creative Services @beau_white
CoSIDA Mission Statement
CoSIDA educates, advocates, and communicates with and for the intercollegiate athletics communications community. It is our mission to engage and empower members, develop exceptional leaders, and promote and enhance our profession.
When you read CoSIDA’s mission statement, what sticks out to you? For me, it’s the last three words: “enhance our profession.”
WHAT is our profession?
Is it sports information — a title that a recent informal survey showed that less than half our membership uses? (
see page 4 of the magazine with our 2021 Membership Staffing Survey Summary)
If you look at the last three words of the first sentence, it says
athletics communications community. WHO is included in that? In an industry that now includes a wide range of communications and creative roles and responsibilities, is it exclusive to the sports information director?
A better question than “what is our profession” may be “who is our profession” or “who should be included in our profession.”
Having equally spent my time in a college athletic department both as a traditional SID and then in a creative role, I hear opinions from different perspectives all the time.
Sometimes these opinions about the value of different roles are not productive and can, unfortunately, make some professionals sound more like rivals than teammates and collaborators. This is something we need to work on, starting with our national organization, to open the door wider for more communicators and creators to feel supported.
What’s lost on so many is that no matter your title or role, we’re ALL strategic communicators and creators who are at our best when we come together toward a common goal. Those departments that have already busted those silos are thriving — amplifying their creativity, messaging and branding.
I’m talking about traditional SIDs, social media specialists, writers, designers, videographers, photographers — everyone who plays an active role in the content creation and reputation management of an athletic department or organization. Whether you’re the official spokesperson in charge of the crisis statements, you cultivate the relationships with the media, you design the graphics or videos, or you create the social media voice — it takes an immense amount of intelligence, skill and strategy to effectively communicate. Great writing, whether long-form, Twitter-form or graphic-form, is important to telling stories. These are traits we all share although we use different abilities.
Imry Halevi serves as Assistant Director of Athletics - Multimedia & Production at Harvard. Halevi believes communicators should be focused on creating content.
When we’re siloed in separate offices and it becomes a competition between communications, creative/digital and marketing for who is the most important or who is doing the best work, the institution and brand — and by extension our student-athletes — suffer. When these professionals are not collaborating, all they are doing is confusing their fans, recruits, sponsors and donors. Worse, our bosses are confused and decision makers make decisions based on things they may not completely understand about our positions that affect our livelihoods.
If you work in a small or one-person shop right now you’re rolling your eyes saying “I am THE person who has to do all of that,” and it’s true.
Fortunately for small colleges it’s starting to happen that more creative-specific positions are being added — although not quickly enough — and those institutions making the smart investments in adding human resources have a chance to learn from the mistakes and successes of the larger schools before them.
A one-person shop simply can’t do it all and do it all well. That’s not meant as a slight. Ask anyone who’s keeping stats, doing PA, running a video stream, trying to get some photos for the website and posting social content by themselves during a game — while a whole other sport is also being played across campus — if they wouldn’t be better off with a full-time colleague sitting next to them, especially a full-time colleague with different strengths.
The differences in our strengths and weaknesses should be celebrated and leveraged. Those differences are why we have different roles. It does not make one role more important than another. To understand and respect what everyone can bring to the table and then use that collectively to your advantage…that’s what makes for the best athletic departments.
So what can CoSIDA do as an organization to encourage and support better unity among all types of communicators? How can we come together to use our collective influence to advocate for the communications profession as an industry, rather than our specific job roles?
At Middlebury College, Ali Paquette is the Assistant Director of Athletic Communications and manages the department’s social media and graphic design.
When I was coming up, CoSIDA represented the best of communications in college sports.
As a student SID at Missouri State, my introduction to CoSIDA was seeing my boss’s 25-Year Award on his wall and being excited when our office won recognition for our publications. As I learned more, the simple opportunity to be part of the national organization and attend the convention was something that felt aspirational. CoSIDA factored in my decision to take a job at Kansas because Past President Doug Vance led that office and was someone I wanted to learn from.
The first two media guides I ever produced on my own were recognized with second and sixth in the nation awards. Later that year when I attended my first convention — then called a workshop — it was an awesome experience to sit with and learn from names I’d previously only known and admired from a distance.
The awards and confidence I gained as I was welcomed into CoSIDA in those early years made me feel like I truly belonged. All young communicators and creators in college sports deserve this, but only the ones exposed to CoSIDA are getting it. We should open those doors wider.
In my estimation the first true
digital communicators in college sports emerged around 2003 or 2004 but, with the first iPhone coming out in 2007, we were a long way from where we are now. In 2006 I made a leap of my own to a graphic design position. At the time, most of the people doing this were SIDs who were shifting responsibilities.
For the newly refocused SIDs-turned-creative communicators, CoSIDA no longer felt the same, even for those who remained members. The term SID didn’t fit. It was hard to get support because many administrators and coaches didn’t understand the evolution that was beginning right in front of their face. People either “got it” or they didn’t. For the creatives, CoSIDA did not evolve to feel inclusive of our new roles.
These days, more people than ever feel like the term SID doesn’t fit
anyone. Indeed, the job title Sports Information Director is used less and less. It’s worth noting that even in 1957 when the organization was founded, past CoSIDA Digests show there was intense disagreement on the term as job titles varied widely, as they do now.
In 2021 and beyond, how should the organization known as CoSIDA — now more respected than ever among leaders at all levels of college sports — evolve as the communications industry evolves?
Why aren’t more digital and creative specific communicators part of CoSIDA?
Those are loaded questions but it’s easy to understand how we got here. If we are to advance the communications profession — not the SID role or the creative role or the social role — it’s going to take a selfless and intentional commitment to our colleagues of all communications disciplines.
It starts with treating all communications and creative pros as people first, and respecting what each of us brings to the table. SIDs are not dinosaurs. Digital communicators are not people who play on their phones all day. Designers are not just people who are good at Photoshop. We must be inclusive in valuing each other’s contributions. When you’re at the “external staff” table, take off your SID hat, take off your designer hat, take off your social media hat. Put on your strategic communicator hat and look around at your colleagues — who should also be wearing their strategic communicator hats — and commit to supporting one another. Fill in each other’s blanks.
Filling in each other’s blanks is something our organization has always done well, and is something we could do even better the more diverse our membership is. Our professional development programming is second-to-none and, working together, SIDs and creative pros can learn a lot from one another when we provide opportunities for all to share their unique expertise.
CoSIDA has worked for years to gain that seat at the proverbial table and, as an organization, we largely have it at the national level. We become stronger when we invite our creative colleagues to join us at the table.
Does CoSIDA still represent the best in communications in college sports? I want to be confident that that’s true. I’m not sure it can be until we all put aside our specialty hats, put on our strategic communicator hats, and come together as a national organization where all communicators and creatives feel like they belong. Let’s keep this conversation going.
CoSIDA leadership is discussing a branding exploration and study, which was last done by the organization in 2012. If that is something you’d like to be part of or would like to share any thoughts, contact 2020-21 President Sam Atkinson, Executive Director Doug Vance or Director of Creative Services Beau White.
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