College Sports Information Directors of America

by Erik Christianson – College Sports Communicators, Executive Director

Beth Goetz nailed it.

Serving as a featured speaker at this year’s CSC Unite convention, the University of Iowa’s interim athletics director emphasized that communications has experienced more change than any other part of college sports.

Goetz’s truth bomb underscores all the strategic changes CSC has made over the past several years: streamlining our governance structure, adopting the All-In membership model, and rebranding and changing our name.

These changes continue to bear fruit: record membership growth, greater brand awareness of our organization and, most importantly, an acknowledgement across college sports of the critical importance of communications.

As I start my second year as executive director, I’m focused on how CSC can build on all these elements.

As our new board president John Paquette notes in his column this month, the majority of our membership growth comes from our creative and digital colleagues. We need that to continue, along with adding those professionals serving in more traditional roles. We also want to target communications staff with responsibilities in branding, marketing, fan engagement and even development, academic advising and compliance.

If they haven’t already, schools should choose our All-In membership and add these colleagues to the CSC ranks.

To build on our brand promise, we will deliver cutting-edge programming all year and at convention and recognize the best work happening throughout athletics communications. And to our athletics directors, commissioners and external partners, we will continue to demonstrate how athletics communications is looking forward in new ways and how more resources are needed, not less, to support student-athletes.

In the solutions space, we will emphasize the development of communications leaders, show how communications is central to the success of athletics departments, and identify opportunities to retain staff and recruit new professionals to the field.

I believe we can do this by emphasizing how communications isn’t just a job but critical to supporting student-athletes for a lifetime of success. Indeed, a key potential employee group is current (and future) student-athletes. They already have a keen sense of how our work is part of the amazing human-development business called higher education – and they value the impact of communications across a number of platforms.

Another key solution area of focus for CSC this year is strengthening and advancing the Academic All-America program.

As I’ve told our executive board, the Academic All-America program needs to succeed not just for CSC but for all of college sports. But we need to reimagine, promote and market it in new ways. We are actively working to identify and partner with a new title sponsor who shares our vision and sees the enormous benefit of supporting the top student-athletes at every level of college sports in the U.S. and Canada.

With a new academic year ahead of us, let’s remember Goetz’s encouragement to keep leaning in and focusing on continuous improvement at the campus, conference and national levels. This means identifying how to use fast-changing technology such as artificial intelligence to be more efficient and also pinpointing and eliminating elements of our work that no longer add value.

What might those be? They will vary by department, campus and division throughout college sports. But I’m confident that, together, we can identify these solutions and in the process strengthen our campuses, our student-athletes and all of college sports.

Let’s continue to live our brand.