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Past Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients
Dennis O'Donnell – University of Rochester (retired)
O'Donnell retirement ends 50 year career in sports
CSC Lifetime Achievement Award
by Jim Mandelaro – University of Rochester, Communications Officer
Dennis O’Donnell played Little League baseball for three years in the late 1950s, but he admits, “I was awful at it.” The North Babylon, Long Island native had one career hit.
Fate was much kinder to O’Donnell when he was a sports information director for two universities over 42 years: that’s where O’Donnell out-homered the competition on a regular basis.
“Dennis was a special craftsman,” says George VanderZwaag, executive director of athletics at the University of Rochester, where O’Donnell worked from 1988 until his retirement in 2022. “The craft of sports information required that he be an efficient and effective communicator, a detailed and demanding event manager, and an honest and unapologetic promoter.”
Wife Carol (left) and daughter Megan (right) with Dennis O’Donnell at his CSC Hall of Fame induction in 2007 at the annual convention which took place in San Diego.
VanderZwaag says O’Donnell “relished this role and mentored others in the craft. The students he trained benefited immensely from his skills. The coaches and staff Dennis worked with appreciated his commitment to excellence. Our University was consistently strengthened through his work.”
O’Donnell was the sports information director at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy from 1974 to 1978 and again from 1984 to 1988, before leaving for Rochester. He earned a College Sports Communicators’ 25-Year Award in 2006 and was elected to its Hall of Fame a year later. In 2010, he was honored with the organization’s Warren Berg Award, presented annually to an individual who has made outstanding contributions to sports information and who brought dignity and prestige to the profession.
O’Donnell also was honored by the EAST-COMM organization with the Irving T. Marsh Service Bureau Award in 2003 and the Pete Nevins Award for Distinguished Achievement in 2019. In 2022, he was inducted into Rochester’s Frontier Field Walk of Fame at the Rochester Red Wings’ (MLB minor league affiliate) ballpark, to mark his contributions to the Rochester community. (Fellow Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Joe Seil, retired from Nazareth College, also was inducted with O’Donnell.)
He spent 20 years on CSC’s former workshop program committee — many as vice chair — and three on the board of directors. He was a basketball statistician at Madison Square Garden from 1981-88 and worked with his wife Carol at the media center during the 1994 World Cup, writing media notes for the Italy-Norway match.
O’Donnell’s first career goal was to be a sportswriter. He wrote for his high school newspaper and the student paper at Long Island University in Brooklyn, where he majored in journalism.
During college, he worked at Western Union Telegraph Company (where his mom worked) and drove a cab. Then, he landed a summer gig writing press releases for a community service organization in East Elmhurst, NY. One of his duties was calling results of youth basketball games to the New York papers, and even coordinated TV interviews.
O’Donnell had become friendly with LIU sports information director Bob Gesslein through his work for the school paper, and one day Gesslein told him he might be leaving for another college. Weeks later, Gesslein told him the money difference wasn’t enough for him to change jobs, but O’Donnell might be a good candidate at the other school. That school was the US Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, New York (located on the north shore of Long Island).
“They interviewed me on the morning of the 1974 home football opener,” O’Donnell recalls. “The following Friday, I was hired. Three days later, I was at the Academy.”
O’Donnell spent four years at Kings Point. When the position was eliminated in 1978, he became editor of
Soccer Week, which publicized the German American Soccer League (later the Cosmopolitan Soccer League).
Newsday’s John Valenti interned at
Soccer Week with O’Donnell in the late 1970s. Pele was running a summer soccer camp and had just completed the movie
Victory, starring Michael Caine and Sylvester Stallone along with a dozen international soccer stars. “Dennis took a picture of me with Pele – the days before cellphones, when we just had film cameras,” Valenti said. “Pele reminded Dennis to cock the shutter to advance the film, so he made sure to get the photo. We ended up with a picture of Pele reading
Soccer Week. I know it was an immensely proud moment for Dennis – that the greatest soccer player in the world was reading a copy of his paper.”
O’Donnell then returned to Kings Point in 1984 for another four years as SID before leaving for Rochester in September 1988.
In that time, O’Donnell left his mark on the New York media.
“Dennis set a very high bar for the way to operate sports communications on the collegiate level and in my 47 years at
Newsday, no one came close to equaling his know-how or professionalism,” former sportswriter Steve Marcus says. “His profession creates a delicate balance between serving his institution and the needs of the media. While Dennis was appropriately an advocate of his athletic programs, he never let that stand in the way of providing information to those of us who covered his teams at Kings Point.”
O’Donnell dreamed of working an NCAA basketball tournament game, and his wish came true with emphasis. In 1990, Rochester won the NCAA Division III men’s basketball championship. This would be one of four Final Four appearances by the men and three by the women in the coming years.
The most famous UR athlete O’Donnell covered wasn’t a star. Defensive back Brian Daboll, a 1997 UR graduate, played two seasons for the football team before an injury ended his career. Daboll spent his senior year helping the coaches and went on to a brilliant career in college and the NFL. He’s currently the New York Giants head coach—and reigning NFL Coach of the Year.
O’Donnell says the job of SID is different at every school.
“In the small colleges, the SID is usually running the game operations – stats, clock, scorekeeping, announcing,” he says. “Helping the student interns learn the different aspects of the game is what I really enjoy. I tried to make it a pleasant environment and let the students select their own hours. They see how the game works behind the scenes and the role they play in it.”
The worst part are the dreadful, endless hours. “Some of it is the demands brought on by technology,” he says. “You have to put up box scores, game stories, photos, for every event.”
He says it was all worth it — and all in a plan forecast decades ago.
"My father saw me devour the sports pages as a kid,” O’Donnell says. “He told me, 'You're going to be a sportswriter!' I thought he was nuts. Turns out, he was a seer.”
THE AUTHOR:
Jim Mandelaro is a former sportswriter for the
Rochester Democrat & Chronicle and now a Communications Officer for the University of Rochester.
Gallery: (3-20-2023) Dennis O'Donnell, Lifetime Achievement