College Sports Information Directors of America

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Dave Blanchard – Luther College, Sports Information Director (retired)

CSC Lifetime Achievement Award

by Larry Happel – Central College, Athletics Communications Director

During his 35 years as a sports information director, including 30 years of providing a calm, steadying presence for Luther College athletics, CSC Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Dave Blanchard mastered countless skills.
 
But as Moran Lonning’s mind wanders back to the time she spent on the school’s Regents Center basketball floor as a high-energy fourth-grader with the youth team Blanchard coached, it’s not his mastery of Photoshop that she values.
 
“He taught me my crossover,” Lonning said with a smile.
 
Lonning later used her crossover to become a two-time conference women’s basketball MVP at Luther and now serves as head coach at American Rivers Conference foe Central College. Yet back then, Lonning and Blanchard’s daughter Emma regularly scampered throughout the Decorah, Iowa, campus, tucked amid the scenic bluffs along the Upper Iowa River. Like so many, she appreciated all that Blanchard did for others beyond punching in golf stats on a laptop.
 
“Everybody loved him,” Lonning said. “Students really wanted to work for him. He had great relationships with so many different students.”
 
 
For Renae Hartl, in her eighth year as Luther athletics director and 22nd as head softball coach, Blanchard was a trusted sounding board. And, he often served as a counselor as she delicately navigated her sometimes lonely, high-pressure responsibilities.
 
 “Dave having been here as long as he had and working for so many different people over the years, his perspective was so valuable for me,” Hartl said.
 
For Hannah Halverson, a former Luther student worker and now the American Rivers deputy commissioner, Blanchard was her “Decorah dad.”
 
“My dad’s still around, but being three-and-a-half hours away from home, Dave was the go-to man,” she said. “You could talk to him about anything and visit whenever you needed.”
 
Halverson spent a summer helping Blanchard transition Luther to a new athletics website platform. He all but adopted her.
 
“That was the COVID summer,” she said. “The campus was closed so I was actually working in their basement. They opened their house to me. They let me do laundry there. They went and got food for me every week.”
 
Halverson even watered the house plants during the family’s vacation.
 
Blanchard, a star Bethel University (Minn.) basketball player now in the school’s hall of fame, later served at Bethel as assistant coach, and then added sports information duties in 1987. While searching for a better-paying coaching position in 1992, he stumbled onto an opening for an SID at Luther.
 
“I had never heard of Luther College but I thought, what the heck?,” Blanchard said. “I had a young family and I thought as SID I was going to be home more than I would as a coach.”
 
(Pause for laughter.)
 
Technology evolved. Job responsibilities mushroomed. Yet Blanchard remained a one-person shop throughout his career.
 
“As I got older and came back and played at Luther, I saw that he did everything himself,” Lonning said. “There was only him and he did an awesome job. It’s kind of incredible now, looking back not that long ago. He was doing probably a three-person job.”
 
To Blanchard, that job included whatever needed to be done.
 
“If the shot clock wasn’t working, the dude would go get a ladder,” Hartl said with a laugh. “I wouldn’t get up on that ladder. And he wouldn’t even know what he was doing but he would figure it out once he got up there. He did a lot of different things that I think typically people in facilities would have managed or maybe an event administrator. But he just took care of it because he didn’t want to bother people.
 
“Dave just wanted to make people’s lives better,” Hartl noted. “He wanted to make student-athletes’ lives better. He wanted to create the best environment he could.”
 
And, the dedication came at a price.
 
“He made a ton of sacrifices,” Halverson said. “It was super obvious when I stayed there over the summer.”
 
Yet his loyalty to Luther and the school’s student-athletes never wavered, even when that meant wearily tugging on his Minnesota Twins cap over matted hair and heading to the office at 6 a.m. on the Sunday morning following daughter Emma’s wedding. Or surviving on stale gas station food while snowed in during a Minnesota road trip.

But Blanchard typically greeted each new assignment with a shrug, not a complaint. Hartl marveled at that each softball season, as games were postponed, added and moved seemingly by the hour during what masquerades as spring in northeast Iowa.
 
“I know most SIDs really love their jobs,” Hartl said. “However, when it’s month eight of the school year and you’re taking away maybe the last Sunday or only Sunday he had for the spring, Dave just went with the flow and never made it seem like a problem. He was always like, ‘OK, you know, we’ll just figure it out.’ And I just appreciated those moments, more than he probably ever knew.”
 
The hardest task Blanchard ever tackled was saying good-bye.
 
“He got emotional when he told the staff and when he told me,” Hartl said. “But when I got to see him bring in his students and tell them, it was like another level because he was telling those kids as if he was telling the hundreds of kids that had worked for him. I lost it.”
 
Yet the lure of savoring his new role as Grandpa finally triggered Blanchard’s retirement. That, and a part-time gig working at a local golf course.
 
His Luther paychecks have ended, but his eagerness to help has not. When Hartl ran into Blanchard at a local sports bar, she mentioned Luther was hosting a softball tournament that weekend at an indoor facility 72 miles away. She didn’t have to say anything else.
 
“He goes, ‘I’ll just come up and get her all set up — what time are you leaving?’,” Hartl recalls. “And I said, 7 a.m. And he goes, ‘All right, I’ll meet you in the circle drive.’”
 
Hartl could only shake her head and chuckle.
 
“It’s cool that he’s still definitely a part of who I am and who we are in Luther athletics,” she said.