From the Desk of President John Paquette – Find your fun in 2024
by John Paquette – 2023-24 College Sports Communicators President @wjpaquette
BIG EAST Conference, Senior Associate Commissioner, Sports Media Relations
Happy New Year to all associated with CSC! On behalf of the CSC Executive Board and Staff, we hope your 2024 is filled with personal and professional happiness.
We are about halfway through the 2023-24 athletic calendar. Please allow me to note briefly just a few of the highlights from the fall.
We celebrated our CSC 30 Under 30 winners. It’s very easy to get excited about the future of our organization while observing what these men and women have already accomplished in their careers.
We had a successful CSC Membership Appreciation Week that saw CSC professionals lauded publicly by our school administrators, conferences and the media.
CSC was represented at the CALS leadership symposium in Charlotte and at the annual Sports Business Journal forum in Las Vegas in early December. CSC is also a sponsor of the SBJ Forum. These two events include some of the highest level of leadership in college athletics and it’s good for us to be seen and interact with the attendees.
And, as promised, our Academic All-America program was reviewed and restructured to address concerns based on the feedback from our membership. See the updated nomination criteria and master calendar and more information here. Academic All-America ballots for the fall sports were reduced in size and made much more manageable. This is a huge project and we thank the AAA Committee led by chair Katie Gonzales of Illinois Wesleyan for their fine work.
Back to the New Year’s thoughts — we are in a profession where we have to plan our down time around the holidays. I do think that makes us a little more focused on making sure we use that time fruitfully, but we must make sure we follow through.
In some of our CSC Board meeting discussions, I like to say that our jobs are fun. Maybe it’s not fun every day, but there are so many rewarding benefits from working in college athletics. I hope you have some good friends and acquaintances from your own school or conference, some of your opponents and even the media(!). Keep those relationships going. Those friendships are what last.
Find your fun in 2024.
John
Talk about these stories on the Slack Community.