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CoSIDA.com/CoSIDA360 Archive
Pictured above: Jerry Price with his new book — “I Can Do Anything … Stories From The First 50 Years Of Women’s Athletics At Princeton” — hot off the presses.
This story is part of our January 2022 CoSIDA 360 package, to view more stories,
click here.
The Novelists and Book Authors Among Us:
How CoSIDA wordsmiths are captivating readers outside the traditional SID writing roles.
by Jerry Price – Princeton University, Senior Communications Advisor and Historian @TigerBlog1
“Book writing is something you do to make yourself happy. You’re doing it for you. It’s not going to buy you a speed boat. It has to come from your creative side, not from a financial side and not from an ego side. There will be editors, and there will be rejection. You need a tough skin, and you get that from being in sports information. We all get negative feedback. A lot of people have more fragile egos than we do. We’ve all been beaten down.” - Melissa Dudek
If you’ve ever worked in athletic communications, and if you’re reading the CoSIDA website then odds are good you have, then you can truly appreciate the absurdity of what Melissa Dudek, University of Virginia assistant athletics media relations director, says.
“I wanted a more stable life,” she says, “so I became a sports information director … a Division III SID.”
Even she can’t get the words out without laughing. What could she possibly have been doing that being a Division III SID made her more stable? She was working in Minor League Baseball, that’s what. In fact she spent 10 years working in the minors, on levels from Rookie League to Triple-A, in places ranging from Charlotte to Helena, with many in between.
By her own count she spent 10 years going to around 120 Minor League games per year (you can do the math). Her entrance into sports information came at Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., before she moved on to the University of California and then her home for the last 10 years, Virginia. Here, she serves as the field hockey, women’s basketball and men’s tennis contact.
Melissa Dudek courtside at a Virginia basketball game.
When Bill Little answers his phone, it’s not too tough to figure out where he’s spent his entire life: Texas. His accent gives him away immediately.
A member of the CoSIDA Hall of Fame and a former president of the organization, Little is one of the all-time greats of the profession, a true old-time SID, and before that, an award-winning newspaperman. Little earned numerous CoSIDA Stabley Writing Contest national and regional honors throughout his career, and among his many other writing honors, also wrote Matthew McConaughey's script for the documentary The Story of Darrell Royal.
His life story includes meeting six U.S. Presidents, being on a first-name basis with five Texas governors and having been front and center for some of the most glorious moments in University of Texas athletic history. His story of the day of the Kennedy assassination, which happened when he was a student reporter at Texas, is beyond fascinating.
“I was having lunch in a cafe with my brother and another guy, and all of the sudden everyone started huddling around the radio in the bar,” Little says. “I figured it had something to do with Kennedy. He was coming to Austin that night for a dinner event after he was in Dallas. Did you know that? Not many people do.”
Little immediately went to the offices of UT’s student newspaper The Daily Texan, which at the time had a larger circulation than the local daily newspaper, the Austin American Statesman. Little had already developed something of a relationship with then-US Vice President Lyndon Johnson, formerly a U.S. Senator in Texas prior to serving as VP, and his assignment that day was to cover the new President.
Now retired, Little can tell stories like that all day. His range goes from the Longhorns’ triumphs to the depths of tragedy, such as the plane crash that claimed the lives of several members of the Oklahoma State men’s basketball team in 2001, when all 10 people on board were killed, including Will Hancock, the team’s SID and the son of Bill Hancock, a close friend of Little’s and now the executive director of the College Football Playoff. Little wrote a moving piece afterwards for the Texas website, a story that included this quote from a local pastor: "The only way to deal with grief," he said, "is to replace it with gratitude."
Bill Little with the collection of books he has authored.
As for me, I started working at Princeton University officially in 1994 and unofficially in 1989, the first of the five years I spent covering the Tigers for the Trenton Times, a local newspaper. I have had nine different titles in my time at Princeton, including Senior Associate Athletic Director for Communications. Today I am the Senior Communications Advisor and Department of Athletics Historian.
I have been the contact for 14 different sports in my tenure at Princeton, which fields 37 varsity teams and is adding a 38th (women’s rugby) next year. I started out covering football, men’s basketball and men’s lacrosse, and I have stayed the men’s lacrosse contact for the entire time. My current sports are field hockey and men’s lacrosse, and I also write a daily blog called TigerBlog, something I’ve written every business day since 2009 (yes, I haven’t missed a single day in nearly 13 years!)
I’d never met Melissa Dudek or Bill Little until I spoke to them for this story. So what connects the three of us, beyond having spent an incredible amount of our lives covering games? Seriously, how many games have we covered between us? It’s in the several thousands, that’s for sure.
The three of us are part of the subset of CoSIDA who are published authors. Melissa has written two novels and is working on a third (not surprisingly, the first two are about Minor League Baseball; somewhat surprisingly, the third is about wine).
Bill is the author or co-author of nine books about University of Texas athletics, with an extraordinary ability to humanize special moments in UT sports history in these books and in the feature stories and blogs he composed throughout his illustrious 47-year career with the Longhorns (1968-2014).
I have written one novel, With You, which has nothing to do with sports, though there is one squash match that figures prominently. It’s about relationships, and musical theater. [If you do read it, my disclaimer is that nothing in the book ever actually happened to me. My brother read it and asked me how much of it was autobiographical. I said “well, you’ve known me my whole life. Have any of those things ever happened?”]
Most recently, as in just around Thanksgiving, my second book arrived from the publisher. This one is entitled “I Can Do Anything … Stories From The First 50 Years Of Women’s Athletics At Princeton,” and the subject is relatively obvious.
Jerry Price with Merrily Dean Baker former AD at numerous schools who began women's athletics at Princeton.
That’s one fiction and one non-fiction. I always say that for me, fiction was easier to write than non-fiction because in fiction you could simply make up anything you wanted. The women’s history book, by contrast, was a fact-checking nightmare, but it had to be done properly. Bill has written almost exclusively non-fiction, though he did try his hand at a novel once, an effort that is unpublished.
Melissa has never written a non-fiction book, but she’s written enough game notes, feature stories, game stories and news releases to fill who knows how many full-length books. She grew up in San Diego and earned a bachelor’s degree at Loyola Marymount before getting her master’s in creative writing from Edinburgh (“online learning before it was cool,” she calls it). Dudek’s background was almost exclusively in theater, including having one-act plays that she’d written produced while still in high school, and she figured she was headed for a career in casting until she made a trip to a Phoenix Firebirds Triple-A game.
“I saw people with walkie-talkies on their backs and wondered what they were doing,” Melissa noted. “From there, I was hooked. The first time I went to a high school reunion and told people I was working in sports, they were like ‘You? Sports? No way.’”
Her rebirth in her new world came with a need to learn to write non-fiction.
“One of the reasons I got into sports in the first place is that it’s the opposite of fiction writing,” Dudek says. “The story presents itself, and you create the narrative. Everything I’d done until then had been fiction writing. One time at a baseball game, I came to the realization that sports are the opposite of fiction. When writing features about athletes, the character is created around you. In fiction writing, you have to create from the bottom up.
I find non-fiction easier. It’s right there in front of you. But I do enjoy fiction more. I love the creative side of it. You have a lot more control in the fiction world.”
Melissa Dudek's books along with her CoSIDA National Championship SID award.
My own desire to write a novel went back decades. I even started a few times, never getting past two pages before deleting it and saying “well that was awful.”
Finally, a few years ago, I was reading a book that my brother-in-law Joe Janes wrote entitled “Documents That Change The Way We Live” and thought “if he can write a book, so can I.” And that’s when it all started to flow.
I got great feedback from my novel. What I didn’t get was rich. The odds are stacked against you there. I also heard this from almost everyone who read it: “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
As communications professionals, we all have one inherent advantage when it comes to putting together a book, and that’s the ability to write.
Don’t take that for granted. So if you really want to write a book, you could learn a great deal from our experiences.
“Book writing is something you do to make yourself happy,” Dudek says. “You’re doing it for you. It’s not going to buy you a speed boat. It has to come from your creative side, not from a financial side and not from an ego side. There will be editors, and there will be rejection. You need a tough skin, and you get that from being in sports information. We all get negative feedback. A lot of people have more fragile egos than we do. We’ve all been beaten down.”
Ah yes, editors and rejection. Let’s talk about that for a minute.
Once I finished my novel, I found an editor, a woman named Gina Heiserman. She read it, and her basic feedback was this: “It’s great, but now we can get started fixing it.”
Of course my natural response was to dig in and say “it’s perfect as is, so I’m not changing a word,” but that is not how it works. Gina suggested several plot changes, some major and some minor. She told me that one of the main storylines didn’t work. She told me I went off on too many tangents. Eventually she got me to see it her way, with one exception: I didn’t shorten the squash scene the way she wanted.
My women’s history book was edited by a woman named Kathy Taylor (Gina had retired), and Kathy had no background in sports, which I think helped. She too made all sorts of suggestions, most of which made me think “what does she know?” In the end, she was pretty much right about all of them.
The point is that if you are stubborn and reject what a good editor tells you, then your final product won’t be nearly as good as it could be. My novel started out at 100,000 words. The finished version is about 95,000 words. Gina had me delete about 20,000 words and write about 15,000 others. It’s a process, to be sure. And there are no shortcuts. By the time you’re done, it’ll be impossible for you to reread it yet another time. Your brain won’t allow it.
Then there’s the rejection part. To get a book published in the traditional way, you almost surely need to get a literary agent, something that isn’t easy to do. I may be able to write, but I’m terrible at marketing and sales. I found a list of agents and starting reaching out, and of the 30 or so I contacted (which is a small number), only three got back to me. What? The other 27 didn’t think my book was great? What’s wrong with them?
Of the three I heard from, two backed away quicky. The third was a much different experience.
This time, I did my usual letter and submission and then heard back from his assistant. From there, they requested three more chapters, and after that, the whole book. The assistant told me that my book had made it to a list of 10 that would be advanced to the senior agent, and that he would choose three or so to represent. That’s when I heard from him, and I was one of the other seven it appeared. His advice? Self-publish and then write another for him to see. He likes repeat business, he said.
So that’s what I did. I was 11 chapters into the second novel when the women’s history project was given to me as part of the 50th anniversary of women’s athletics at Princeton. That book took me 14 months to write and then seven more months to edit, layout, proofread and publish. In the end, the final product has 131,000 words and 400 photos, running 500 pages and weighing just short of five pounds.
I have a book on my desk that is called “Athletics At Princeton, A History,” and it was published in 1900. It chronicles every Princeton athletic event in every sport in the 19th century, beginning with the first one, a baseball game against Williams in 1864. It also included the first college football game ever, between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. It’s a huge book, and I’ve always wondered if Frank Presbrey (he’s the author) ever imagined that someone would still use his work more than 120 years later. That was one of my hopes for the women’s history book, to write something that would still have value in 120 years.
Of everything I’ve done at Princeton, this is by far the best. The response, by the way, has been overwhelming.
So why do all this extra writing, when you’re already swamped with work in the first place?
“You don’t write books for money,” Little says. “You write to touch someone, to make a difference for someone. I wanted to write something that would have an impact on people’s lives, not just tell them about sports.”
“I knew I loved journalism, and I knew I loved to tell the story,” Little said. “What I found in sports was the human element. It’s the conquest of the human spirit. It makes you love the game — whatever it is — and you cry with it, whether you win or lose.”
That was how I looked at the women’s history book. Bill comes from a world that I can understand, having had the same sort of start to my career. He grew up outside of Abilene, and his mother wrote for the local daily paper, the Abilene Reporter News. When he went to the University of Texas to study, his mother convinced him to major in journalism.
“She said there would always be newspapers,” Little noted, laughing.
Bill Little with his wife Kim. The cake reads "I was a bad golfer and a worse tennis player...God's gifts to me were to write and speak." - Bill
He would graduate and work in the newspaper business, including time as the sports editor of the AP bureau in Oklahoma City. When he started in sports information at Texas, his first salary was $7,200 a year. By contrast, when I started at the Trenton Times while still a junior at Penn, I got paid $15 per story, though I also got 22 cents per mile on top of that.
Little and I have many similarities, beyond starting out as sportswriters before spending several decades in athletic communications at one school. We both view writing quickly as a strength. We’ve both done a ton of broadcasting. We’ve both been football public address announcers. We’ve both stayed in college athletics – with all of its time demands – while raising families, something many did others chose not to do. And, of course, we’ve both written books.
I can speak for Bill and Melissa when I tell you that it’s not easy to write a book. I can also tell you that you’ll love the final product, that moment when you finally get to hold all of that work in your hands.
More than that, though, you’ll learn something that you didn’t anticipate when you started. You’ll absolutely love the process.
“For me,” Dudek says, “the best part is the creation.”
So go and pick up one of our books. Or better yet, do what I did. Start to read one of ours and then say to yourself “hey, I can do that.”
And then go do it. You’ll be so glad you did.
Jerry Price is the Senior Communications Advisor and Historian for Princeton University Athletics. He has been writing for nearly 40 years in a variety of venues. He is a frequent national and district winner in CoSIDA’s annual Fred S. Stabley Sr. Writing Contest, earning several “National Story of the Year” honors. Price writes in the daily Princeton athletics’ TigerBlog, and is the author of the novel With You, published recently. Remarkably over the last 13 years, he has written DAILY for TigerBlog. In late November 2021, after 14 months of writing and seven months of editing, designing, and printing, he released his book on the first 50 years of Princeton women’s athletics. The newly-released book is entitled I Can Do Anything: Stories from the First 50 Years of Women’s Athletics at Princeton University (Prism Color Corp).
Check out their books!
Melissa Dudek’s two novels:
Bill Little’s books:
- Texas Longhorn Baseball – Kings Of The Diamond
(With Wilbur Evans) – The Strode Publishers, Huntsville, Alabama 35801 Copyright, 1983
- One Heartbeat – A Philosophy of Teamwork, Life, and Leadership
(With Mack Brown) – Bright Sky Press, Albany, Texas/New York, New York, Copyright, January, 2001
- One Heartbeat – A Philosophy of Teamwork, Life, and Leadership (Updated 2nd Edition, PAPERBACK)
(With Mack Brown) – Bright Sky Press, Albany, Texas/New York, New York, Copyright, December, 2001
- Stadium Stories: Texas Longhorns
Insiders’ Guide, an imprint of The Globe Piquot Press, Guilford, Connecticut, 2005
- One Heartbeat II: The Road to the National Championship
(With Mack Brown) -- Bright Sky Press, Box 416, Albany, Texas, 76430, Copyright, 2006
- What It Means To Be A Longhorn
with co-author Jenna Hays McEachern
- What It Means To Be A Longhorn – Darrell Royal, Mack Brown and many of Texas’ Greatest Players
(With Jenna McEachern) – Triumph Books, 542 Dearborn St., Ste. 750, Chicago 60605 ©2007
- Hoop Tales: Texas Longhorns Men’s Basketball
Morris Book Publishing, LLC/The Globe Piquot Press, Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437 ©2008
- Texas Football: Yesterday and Today
Publications International/West Side Publishing, Lincolnwood, Illinois 60712 ©2009
- Texas Tech Red Raiders – Tales From The Texas Tech Sideline
(W/Spike Dykes & Dave Boling) – Sports Publishing/Skyhorse Pub., Inc., NY, NY or sportspubbooks@skyhorsepublishing.com ©2004 and 2013
- L0NGHORN NATION – Texas’ Greatest Players Talk About Longhorns Football
(With Jenna McEachern) – Triumph Books, LLC, 814 N. Franklin St., Chicago ©2015
Both the original “One Heartbeat” book published by Bill Little and Mack Brown, and Little’s book with Jenna McEachern entitled “What It Means To Be A Longhorn” were honored as finalists for the Robert Hamilton Book Awards, presented to the top writers among the faculty and staff at The University of Texas at Austin.
Jerry Price’s novel
Jerry Price’s Women’s History Book:
Submit YOUR Best Writing Samples in the 2022 Fred S. Stabley Writing Contest
Throughout the month of January, we encourage all dues-paying CoSIDA members to be sure to submit samples of your top writing efforts to the annual
Fred S. Stabley, Sr. Writing Contest. Entries must have been written/published/produced between
January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2021. There is a date verification checkoff in the submission portal where you must list the first date that this entry was publicized.
Entries must be submitted by the end of this month - January 31, 2022. Submissions are all online at
CoSIDA.com/awards.
Entries from active CoSIDA members can be submitted in any of the following eight categories; there is a NEW category for 2021-22. We’ve created a new category for our dues-paying undergraduate student members, and their writings – from any and all of the seven categories below - can be submitted for review in the “Undergraduate Student Members” category.
You're encouraged to submit stories in as many of the categories as you'd like, but you can only
submit one per category.
- Athlete Profile (current)
- Coach/Administrator Profile (current)
- Event Coverage (current)
- General Feature/Blog
- Historical Feature
- Season Recap/Preview
- Social Justice (along with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion)
- NEW CATEGORY: For those who are 2021-22 UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT MEMBERS only – they can submit writings on any of the topics listed 1-7
Talk about these stories on the
CoSIDA Slack Community.