College Sports Communicators Hall of Fame
* Veterans Committee Hall of Fame inductee.
Southern Illinois-Carbondale
Former Southern Illinois University SID Fred Huff is 2012 Veteran CoSIDA Hall of Fame inductee
by Bill Little, University of Texas/Special Awards Committee member
May 16, 2012
The historic link between the iconic Bismarck Hotel in Chicago and the College Sports Information Directors of America goes back more than 50 years.
Fred Huff knows. He was there.
Huff, the long-time Sports Information Director and Assistant AD at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Ill., is the latest veteran SID to be approved for induction into the CoSIDA Hall of Fame. Nominated by the veterans subcommittee and endorsed by the Special Awards Committee, Huff becomes the eighth former SID to enter the Hall of Fame under the vintage selection process.
“I had been on the job just a few weeks when I attended my first CoSIDA Convention in Chicago in the summer of 1960,” said Huff. “At my first meeting, they announced that for the first time ever attendance had hit the 100 mark. It was a major happening. What I remember, too, was how nice everyone was to me and my wife , Ann. She was far more popular than I was.”
At the time, CoSIDA was held during the week of the College Football All-Star game (which matched the NFL champion against a group of college all-stars) in conjunction with a meeting of the Football Writers of America, and the grand old Bismarck was its annual headquarters until 1972.
Huff’s odyssey to the SID profession had included a year at Marquette University before he accepted a job working at a daily newspaper in Du Quoin, Ill., where he spent 13 years doing everything from writing sports to helping typeset and deliver the paper. All of that changed in the late spring of 1960, when he began the first of two stints a few miles away with the athletics department at SIU.
For the next 11 years, he followed teams to the baseball College World Series and national championships, as well as the 1967 NIT crown (when he worked with the legendary star Walt Frazier). His career in sports took another turn in 1972, when he left SIU and became the general manager of the Du Quoin State Fair. There, he was in charge of the Hambletonian — the most famous harness race for horses in America.
The race, known as “the Kentucky Derby of Harness Racing,” brought Huff in contact with such sports journalism legends as Red Smith, Jim Murray, and Sports Illustrated writers such as Douglas Looney. Managing the fair, which annually draws 350,000 to 400,000 visitors, brought entertainers such as Bob Hope, Red Skelton, the Carpenters, Liberace and Liza Minelli into his life.
In 1977, a new SIU athletics director named Gale Sayers contacted Huff about returning to work with the Salukis, and Huff accepted a position as Sayers’ only assistant athletics director. Twenty-four years later, he retired after a total of 35 years in the SID profession, during which time he and Ann annually attended the summer workshop. He received CoSIDA’s Lifetime Achievement Award upon his retirement in 2001.
When Fred received the Missouri Valley Conference’s Hall of Fame award in 2010, more than 40 former assistants and student workers who had spent time at SIU returned to honor him.
Since retiring, he has written a 416-page “coffee table” book on the history of SIU athletics. He also writes a weekly column for a chain of six daily newspapers in southern Illinois and a column for a chain of 16 weekly papers in the area about - obviously - SIU and Missouri Valley Conference athletics.
Besides the MVC Hall of Fame, he is a member of the SIU Hall of Fame, was named Du Quoin’s “Citizen of the Year” in 2003, and is finishing a two-year term as the city’s Chamber of Commerce president.
Fred and Ann will celebrate their 62nd wedding anniversary a week before the CoSIDA Workshop in St. Louis. They have three children, Carol, Susan, and Fred.