College Sports Information Directors of America

Scottie Rodgers – Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic Vice President of Communications

CSC Hall of Fame Class of 2025 and Mary Jo Haverbeck Trailblazer Award recipient

by Mike Mahoney, University of Pennsylvania Director of Athletic Communications/Chair, CSC Division I Cabinet
 

"To receive the Haverbeck Trailblazer Award is especially humbling, because it’s named after Mary Jo, who I called a friend. It’s the ultimate honor. The fact that I’ve been able to look back and say ‘oh wow, I didn’t realize I was the first to do this, or that’ — has been humbling. I’ve always seen my career as just wanting to do good things for people because that’s what my parents taught me.

I was like so many other kids growing up. I wanted to score that winning touchdown or make the winning basketball or hit that walk-off home run. But it became apparent early on that those opportunities were not going to present themselves for me. But I look at the experiences I’ve had and the things I’ve gotten to witness, and it’s been an incredible journey. It’s been better than anything I could have imagined growing up. And I’m so humbled and thankful for it."
- Scottie Rodgers, Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic Vice President of Communications, CSC Hall of Fame Class of 2025 and Mary Jo Haverbeck Trailblazer Award recipient

"I can’t tell you how proud and happy I am for Scottie to receive these CSC honors. He is someone who makes everyone around him better. He goes the extra mile to help others and has been such a great ambassador for us. People know Scottie and trust him and he is universally liked. By the way, have you ever walked into a room full of people with Scottie? It’s so fun. He knows everybody!"
- Rick Baker, Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic President & CEO

"I believe Scottie is one of the greatest ambassadors to communications and creative professionals that we have in college sports. He has a deep and genuine care for helping others grow and succeed — whether it be through his personal network or sharing a piece of perspective and advice directly. His passion for creating opportunities for others is a core trait to who he is."
- Matt Panto, Ivy League Associate Executive Director for Strategic Communications and External Relations / CSC Third Vice President

"Scottie is a great example of being a minority in one area but a majority in other areas. He has taken so many of us under his wing and taught us how important it is to network and become allies for one another … If someone at a school tells him ‘hey I’m looking for x, y and z,’ Scottie has taken the time to mentor and get to know people and their short-term and long-term goals. He immediately knows who might be the best fit for that particular position … If Scottie is in your corner, you have a friend for life."
- Jessica Poole, 2022-23 CSC Past President, CSC Mary Jo Haverbeck Trailblazer Award (2021), CSC President’s Award (2021)

Spend just a few minutes with Scottie Rodgers and you quickly learn one thing:

Scottie knows everyone. Like, everyone.

If you’re able to attend the CSC convention in June, take some time to watch Scottie work a room. It’s a master class. He’ll give more hugs, share more laughs, and swap more stories than you can possibly imagine. More importantly, he’ll put more smiles on people’s faces than anyone else in the room — literally everyone is happy to see Scottie Rodgers.

“When Scottie walks into a room,” said the man who brought him into college athletics, retired Alabama SID Larry White, “it’s a good bet he’s going to talk to everyone in that room. He might even have a conversation or two with a few of the walls.” (Let’s take a second to recognize Larry here, as he will also be honored in June with a CSC Lifetime Achievement Award.)

OK, so let’s just call Scottie what he is: a talker. He’ll make a short story long. You never have to wonder what he’s thinking, because he verbalizes his thoughts while he’s having them. And when he starts a sentence with “lemme tell you something”? Strap in. You’re about to go on a ride.

When asked where he got this gift - and his ability to connect is just that, a gift - Scottie is momentarily stumped. 

Momentarily.

But then Scottie starts talking. He meanders through his upbringing as the youngest of five in Atmore, a small town in southern Alabama. He mentions his late father, Aaron who “would talk your ear off about anything” and his mother, Ercell, who was active in the church and “knew everybody.” He talks about being active in a lot of things growing up… sports, band, his high school’s newspaper… and with each passing sentence you get a picture of a young Black man who had the adults in that small town thinking “this is someone who could go places.”
 

He sure did. This June, Scottie Rodgers will receive two prestigious awards. He will be inducted into the College Sports Communicators Hall of Fame — just the 11th Black inductee in the organization’s nearly 70 years of existence “because fellow inductee Lonza Hardy Jr. is the tenth,” Rodgers notes. He also will receive the prestigious Mary Jo Haverbeck Trailblazer Award.

The honors are well deserved. Among the many hats that he wears within the CSC organization, Rodgers is chair of the Inclusion Committee and a member of the Division I Cabinet. He was the first and only Black person to serve as chair of the former FCS management advisory committee. He coordinated and moderated the first panel in CSC convention history that featured all communicators who are Black, then the first to feature five Black men. His advocacy and work have earned him the CSC’s President’s Award twice, as he is one of just two people to receive the prestigious honor more than once. (North Alabama’s Jeff Hodges is a three-time recipient.)

Ultimately, though, Scottie is worthy of these honors because he is a river to his people. 

To use a line Scottie has been known to utter a time or two, this was not part of the plan. In the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at the University of Alabama, Scottie was back at home writing for his local paper, The Atmore Advance, and thinking his future was in journalism. Unbeknownst to him, his academic advisor, Marie Parsons, was giving his name to the athletic department as someone who might be a fit for the sports information office as a student worker. A phone call led to him jumping in his car and making the three-hour drive to Tuscaloosa to interview.

“We interviewed a lot of students each year, but I remember meeting with Scottie,” said White. “I really liked what I heard from him. He was bubbly and outgoing, and I could tell there was some moxie. So we pulled the trigger and hired him, and right from the jump, he was upbeat, attentive, and did things really well.”

As it turned out, Rodgers was also kicking down a door as just the second Black student assistant in that office’s history. Following graduation, he went to the Southeastern Conference offices in Birmingham as the first Black communications intern at the SEC office. The internship lasted until March, when he got hired to a full-time position and became the first Black person to do that.

Kicking down doors would become a theme in Scottie’s life.
 

Following that stint at the SEC and with it, fond memories, the small-town young man left Alabama for Indianapolis to work for the NCAA as the first Black person to serve in an administrator role on the Division I Women’s Basketball Championship staff. Then it was off to New York City, where he was the only Black person to hold a full-time position at CSTV (formerly CBS Sports Network, now CBS Interactive). Scottie then became the first Black person to lead the communications department at the Ivy League in Princeton, New Jersey. Then, it was on to New Orleans as the first Black person to lead the communications department for Tulane Athletics; he then went to the Sun Belt Conference.

Since 2020, he has been in Dallas working on the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association staff — again, as the first Black person to do so. He was recently elevated to Vice President of Communications.

“I can’t tell you how proud and happy I am for Scottie to receive these honors,” said Rick Baker, the Cotton Bowl’s President and CEO. “He is someone who makes everyone around him better. He goes the extra mile to help others and has been such a great ambassador for us. People know him and trust him and he is universally liked.

“By the way, have you ever walked into a room full of people with Scottie? It’s so fun. He knows everybody!”

OK, that’s been well established. The question is, how did he get to know everybody?

Well, Scottie has always been about the social element of the profession. You might remember Young CoSIDA, or YC, which for 20 years was a major part of the social scene at the convention. Scottie was in many ways the face of the franchise—it was he who coined their mantra: “it’s all about enthusiasm!”—and was among the first to recognize the opportunities it presented.
 

“YC started as something fun that had very little seriousness to it, but it turned into a way for people to connect and network,” he recalls. “It became a way for people to meet and get to know each other in a different way. We were really young when we started it in 1999, and we were not so young when we ended it in 2019, but I still think that YC was the single best thing for the young folks in our profession in the organization’s history.

“I’ll tell you this: the YC legacy lives on,” he adds. “People still talk to me about YC and re-hash the stories and tell me how much fun they had at our events.”

A funny thing happened as YC, uh, matured: so did Scottie. (Shh, don’t tell him we said that.) 

All that socializing and networking grew into connecting people … and mentoring those folks who were suddenly younger—in some cases a lot younger—than him. And before you knew it, Scottie became this invaluable resource and mentor for so many people in CSC.

“The YC experience showed me how my friends and I could impact the organization without necessarily being a part of the structure,” he said. “Once I was invited into the diversity and inclusion group, especially, it was the time in my career to make an impact as a part of the structure. Using that committee as a vehicle, it has really helped me help others… not just those who look like me, but those who are in other minorities in our profession.”

Scottie takes his role as a mentor seriously. He especially works at getting to know the minority members of the organization, takes an interest in their movement and growth, and does what he can to help place them in positions where they can thrive as employees and leaders.

Mention Scottie to Jessica Poole - the first Black woman to serve as CSC President - and she doesn’t even know where to start when gushing his praises.
 

“I think Scottie is a great example of being a minority in one area but a majority in other areas,” said Poole recently. “He has taken so many of us under his wing and taught us how important it is to network and become allies for one another.

“One way I have especially seen Scottie evolve is from just placing people to placing the right people in the right places,” she continued. “Asking, what are everyone’s goals? He takes the time and care to understand the needs of both parties. He has done that by actively mentoring folks. If someone at a school tells him ‘hey I’m looking for x, y and z,’ Scottie has taken the time to mentor and get to know people and their short-term and long-term goals. He immediately knows who might be the best fit for that particular position.”

Poole also noted a most important thing about Scottie.

“If Scottie is in your corner, you have a friend for life,” she said. “He’s not getting rid of you - you’re going to have to get rid of him!”

"I believe Scottie is one of the greatest ambassadors to communications and creative professionals that we have in college sports,” said Matt Panto, who came to the Ivy League during Scottie’s tenure and currently serves as CSC’s Third Vice President. “He has a deep and genuine care for helping others grow and succeed — whether it be through his personal network or sharing a piece of perspective and advice directly. Scottie's passion for creating opportunities for others is a core trait to who he is, and that commitment has led to impacting the lives and careers of many in our industry.”

“For me, Scottie is a dear friend for so many reasons and for so long,” Poole noted. “I started the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee for CSC, and when I had to hand it off it was like handing off my son because I knew that we were on the cutting edge of something big. I handed it to Scottie, and the vision and clarity that he has taken to run that group shows we haven’t missed a beat. I never had to worry about my ‘baby’ because I knew it was in great hands.”

Scottie will be the center of attention in June, and he’s never been one to walk away from a spotlight.  Yet, surprise! He also has an introspective side and recognizes the weight of what these recognitions represent.

“To receive the Haverbeck Trailblazer Award is especially humbling, because it’s named after Mary Jo who I called a friend,” Rodgers said. “It’s the ultimate honor. The fact that I’ve been able to look back and say ‘oh wow, I didn’t realize I was the first to do this, or that’ — has been humbling. I’ve always seen my career as just wanting to do good things for people because that’s what my parents taught me.

“I was like so many other kids growing up,” he continued. “I wanted to score that winning touchdown or make the winning basketball or hit that walk-off home run. But it became apparent early on that those opportunities were not going to present themselves for me.

But I look at the experiences I’ve had and the things I’ve gotten to witness, and it’s been an incredible journey. It’s been better than anything I could have imagined growing up. And I’m so humbled and thankful for it.”