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Making a Case for the High School S.I.D.
College athletic programs are being run more and more like a business every day. The traditional role of the collegiate athletic director has gone by the wayside, replaced by a complex, multi-faceted position that combines sports knowledge with the abilities to handle topics related to budgeting and finance, public relations, and personnel management. Somewhere near the top of the administrative food chain for college athletic programs is a Sports Information Director, or SID. In many cases, the head of sports information at a college holds the title of Assistant Director of Athletics or Associate AD for Public Relations. This person handles a myriad of media relation and communication duties to keep athletic programs in touch with the outside world. The role of the college SID over the years has evolved, much like that of the AD, to include more than just player statistics and game day programs. SID’s now handle any number of tasks related to the athletic department web site and social media presence. They handle athletic department archives and official publications ranging from media guides to programs for a school’s athletic hall of fame induction. They may also be involved with collegiate admissions from the perspective that they design and maintain print or digital media to assist with the recruitment of prospective student-athletes.
While high schools may have taken longer to adjust to the new demands of the AD position, most athletic departments across the country, especially those in independent and parochial high schools, have begun to mirror the collegiate environment when hiring new athletic directors. There are fewer and fewer examples of the high school football or basketball coach being promoted to an AD position when their days of coaching come to an end. The role of the high school AD is less about sport management and more about maintaining positive relationships with parents, booster clubs, and other school administrators. High school AD’s now emerge not only from the coaching ranks but from college academic programs that support degrees in Athletic Administration. These degrees require proficiency in classes such as accounting, sports law, and marketing.
As high school athletic programs become more complex, high schools are realizing that it takes more than just a “modern-day AD” to handle all of the tasks that are expected of them. The next step for independent high schools to take is the hiring of a sports information director that serves as the point person for athletic news and information for the school, alumni, and the local community. High school SID’s are used to promote positive news or unique individual stories to local newspapers and other media outlets at a time when newspapers have downsized their own staff that used to ferret out these stories on their own.
The job description of the high school SID could include but is certainly not limited to the following:
- Publicize school athletic schedules and game results
- Maintain school rosters and relevant team statistics
- Serve as the athletic department’s first point of contact with the local media
- Maintain the school’s athletic website
- Arrange/ hire photographers for athletic events and maintain archival photos for school publications
- Coordinate data and photos for the school yearbook or newspaper
- Arrange publicity for athletes on National Signing Day
- Serve as the schools manager of crisis management for athletic events
- Create and maintain the athletic department’s social media presence including school accounts for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
- Submit state tournament results to the state high school athletic association
- Oversee athletic archives and historical records
- Coordinate web casting for athletic contests and team banquets
- Organize PR for the school’s athletic hall of fame
- Initiate contact with parents and alumni for special events like Senior Night, Alumni Night, and anniversaries of state or region championships
Chances are, many of these duties are already being handled by someone at most high schools, but they are not always an employee that falls under the direction of the AD. Often these tasks are split up between an AD, an administrative assistant, school communication officers, alumni relations officers, and support staff from a school’s information technology department. Unifying these duties under the domain of one person helps send a more consistent, informed message to the community. It ensures that the vernacular of a sport is used correctly in school communications. It also helps ensure that someone pushes out information that celebrates diversity within an athletic department both among sport programs and genders. When this task is handled by a current coach on staff, it is often easy to notice their program get an advantage in media coverage or web site publicity. Hiring one person that is not directly connected to one school program helps alleviate the potential for bias towards one sport.
For schools that are not currently able to take on a full-time SID, or for smaller schools with only a few varsity sports, many local college sports administration programs offer a pool of potential interns or graduate assistants who could assist in some of the above tasks during the school year. However, larger schools will soon realize that this new position certainly has enough responsibilities to merit its own position. Not only will this person help alleviate some of the strain placed on other staff members to carry out these tasks but they will be able to enhance what is already being done.
The expectations for athletic programs from parents and athletic boosters has never been higher than it is today. Schools are expected to do more than just put competent teams on the field. They must publicize basic information as well as celebrate successful teams and student-athletes. Several decades ago, schools could count on the local newspapers and/ or television stations to come get this information, but now, the information must be provided by the schools themselves. Furthermore, it must be publicized not only in print but in a variety of digital formats to meet the constraints of variety of constituencies. In short, it is time for high schools across the country to give serious thought to the hiring of an SID.
Who’s on the Mic?
One of the often overlooked duties of a high school athletic administrator is the selection of public address announcers for home athletic events. Fans have grown accustomed to the loquacious characters that keep them entertained at professional and collegiate contests, but the role of announcer at high school events is rarely played by someone accustomed to the demands of the task at hand. If a well-trained faculty member is not slotted into the position on a regular basis, the role often falls to a student or parent who may not understand and appreciate the professionalism required for such a “public” role at a sporting event.
The role of a PA announcer is should not involve cheering for the home team, providing color analysis like a TV commentator, or second-guessing the officials. According to the National Association of Sport Public Address Announcers (NASPAA), announcers should “understand that their role is to provide pertinent information in a timely manner and to do so professionally”. They should not attempt to be bigger than the event itself by providing play-by-play or commentary in an effort to entertain or to draw attention to himself or herself.” NASPAA is a great resource for administrators looking to develop training plans for their school announcers or looking to align their procedures with best practices. NASPAA has a Code of Conduct that lists 10 principles and expectations for announcers that should be understood by anyone who undertakes the role. These expectations include guidelines intended to promote good sportsmanship, treating the fans from opposing teams as guests, not enemies. The role of an announcer is not something that can just be done on the spur of the moment. An announcer should be prepared for their role in advance, being familiar with the pronunciation of player names, knowing the basic rules of the sport being played, and understanding the signals for the officials and umpires during play.
In schools where student announcers are used, a well-designed training program is required to ensure that the student handles the role in a manner that is reflective of the institution’s standards and expectations. They should be given clear direction on their pre-game and post-game responsibilities. The announcer should be expected to arrive early to the event to gather rosters for the opposing teams, select any music that is to be played during warm-ups, and practice pronunciation of athlete names. The school may also have announcements that will be read periodically that include direction on concessions or a schedule of upcoming events at the school. In many cases, the school or the local state high school association will have a standard event opening or welcome announcement that will be read before the start of each contest to encourage good sportsmanship from players and fans.
One of the most overlooked and yet crucial roles for the PA announcer at any event is their direction of school risk management procedures and protocols. First, as stated by NASPAA, announcers should understand that they have tremendous influence on the crowd and that “cheerleading or antics designed to incite the crowd for the purpose of gaining an advantage for their team is inappropriate”. The PA announcer should remind the crowd of the host school’s expectations for their behavior before, during, and after the game. Being proactive in this area can prevent unruly fan behavior before it starts. A skilled PA announcer will be able to read the crowd ahead of time to foresee possible issues with rivalry games or games where the result takes on added significance.
Furthermore, it should be noted that the PA announcer will be the first to give direction to the crowd in case of an emergency such as severe weather, fire, or even terroristic threats. They may have to make announcements dealing with everything from an illegally parked vehicle in the fire line outside the gym to a lost child in the stands. In most cases, great discretion must be used by the announcer to avoid panic in the stands and give concise directions to fans who may be in the athletic venue for the first time. Fans will need clear instructions on the locations for emergency exits, lost and found, and first aid personnel. To aid with these higher pressure circumstances, scripts for various emergency situations can be rehearsed ahead of time to give the announcer increased confidence when these announcements must be made.
The selection of an announcer at an event is often one of those last-minute items that can fall through the cracks when planning a home event, especially for sub-varsity contests that may or may not draw the attention of a larger following at the host school. However, adherence to a well-prepared game plan for training anyone in that position is just as important as it is for coaches training their athletes for the contest itself. More than likely, the preparation for crisis management at an event will be needed only on the rarest of occasions. However, no administrator should overlook the value of a well-trained announcer that gives concise information to fans and allows them to enjoy the athletes’ performances on the field rather than be distracted by an overzealous broadcaster in the booth. The announcer may be the only real voice from the home school that is heard by visitors and opposing fans while they are on the host school’s campus. Earlier this year, I wrote that every home event should be treated as an “Open House” for the host school. It is the PA announcer that can ultimately make or break that experience for your guests.
Every Day is Open House
Let me start this article with the statement that I have a bias toward the work of admissions directors in private schools. My wife holds just such a title, and I firmly believe that she is the very best in her profession. (She also is an amazing supporter of the job I do every day, and she makes some of the best chicken pot pie I have ever tasted.) While admissions used to be an interest of mine before I met her, I now can see more and more of what I do through the eyes of someone in her position.
At most private schools around the country, the heart of admissions season is well underway. Along with that comes a litany of tasks that includes but is not limited to admissions testing, open houses, visitation days, campus clean ups, advertisements, video productions, mailings, and other on-campus special events. However, unbeknownst to many, admissions events have been taking place since the start of the school year on every high school campus around the country in the form of home athletic events.
I bring this idea to light as I think back to a basketball game we hosted at our school just over a month ago. We were playing an opponent that we rarely play even though the opposing school is relatively close to ours. As the administrator on duty that day, my job was primarily to oversee traffic flow in the gym and ensure that proper decorum was maintained by the fans in the bleachers. What I ended up doing that day, however, was handling a barrage of questions from multiple families about the facilities at our school, the admissions requirements, and availability for financial aid. While I did nothing to solicit their initial questions, the basketball game had turned into an admissions event as our campus had been exposed to a relatively affluent segment of the metro area’s population that we had not reached in some time.
Let me be clear in saying that there was nothing taking place that day on our campus that could be in any way construed as “recruiting”. We had no admissions brochures out on the table, we made no announcements about our openings over the loudspeaker, and we had no banners or signs that encouraged anyone to apply. Nonetheless, the exposure of our campus to these new visitors opened the eyes of some families that may had never considered our school in the past.
The truth is that any school that welcomes 500 families for admissions open house events in the winter may have five times that many visitors from other schools at their basketball games throughout the winter season. They may have ten times as many fans from opposing schools in the bleachers for football games in the fall. Chances are that athletic events bring more outside families to a school campus than all other school events combined.
For this reason, auxiliary aspects of athletic events need to be approached with the care and preparation of an admissions open house. The facilities need to be clean and well-maintained. Fans need to adhere to proper models of decorum so that parents and fans from the opposing school are not offended. Signage on the walls, videos on the scoreboard, and music played over the PA system need to be free from offending language and/ or images. Lastly, athletic administrators need to be well-versed in the schools admissions policies and procedures.
While schools may offer structured visitation days for prospective families in the winter, savvy applicants will choose to visit the campus for more authentic experiences like volleyball, football, or basketball games. I know that families do this because that amazing admissions director that I mentioned at the start of this article tells families to do this when they are comparing schools. It is safe to assume that at large events, there are families following similar advice and placing more weight on their experience from that day than they may on an open house event.
Furthermore, athletic events allow schools to reach audiences that may never think of their school as an eventual educational destination. In spite of a school’s best efforts to advertise and publicize its programs, athletics will always have a greater reach. More often than not, the visiting schools on the football, soccer, or baseball field are schools similar in size, geographic location, and even programming to the host. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that those athletic events allow a school to showcase itself to real potential applicants down the road. But even when you are playing an opponent with great differences from your own school, there is always the chance that your school will spark a new interest with a family that may have never considered your school in the past.
As if athletic administrators needed another task added to their job description, admissions associate belongs near to top of their focus. Every event held on their campus is just an admissions open house in disguise.
Why Character Must Count in High School Athletics
I sat down to dinner tonight with my son at a local deli just around the corner from our house. There were four TV’s showing three different channels of which I was paying attention to none. We had not been inside for more than a minute, however, when I realized my son had caught the storyline on at least one news program.
“Daddy, what is a hoe-axe?” he asked. It took me no time to go from his distorted pronunciation of hoax to the realization of what story he had seen on one of the screens. As I corrected his pronunciation and then paused to gather my thoughts for a moment, he quickly followed up with another question. “Why do they keep using the word hoax with Manti Te’o?”
My attempt to break down the complexity of the story that has been in the headlines over the last 24 hours to a third grader took some real verbal finesse. Without going into much detail, I attempted to gingerly explain to him that the whole story basically centered around the idea of telling the truth. I thought that this could be a good lesson for my son to see that deceit and bad choices catch up to people no matter how famous they may be. (Hopefully he does not learn too much about national politics in the near future to refute my lesson.)
Not two seconds after I felt like I had put the Te’o scandal to rest and had a chance to enjoy my chicken club sandwich, my son and I both glanced at the screen at the same time while the words “Armstrong Comes Clean” flashed under a video image of a man I once assumed to be one of the greatest athletes of my generation.
“What did Lance Armstrong have to come clean about, Dad?”
As my son volleyed another challenge my way, I again centered my explanation on the importance of honesty. We talked about athletes who choose to use performance enhancing drugs, and then I explained that people often resort to telling lies when they have a need to cover up for other bad behaviors. My basic premise was that living your life in the right way leaves you no reason to hide from the truth.
As most of us realize, for every Manti Te’o or Lance Armstrong in big-time athletics, there are 100 athletes that do little or nothing to sully their reputation. Stories about the good guys in sports like former Atlanta Brave Dale Murphy or Alabama lineman Barrett Jones do get occasional publicity, but more often than not, it is the salacious scandal that sticks the longest with the media. Almost every ESPN Sports Center episode contains stories of athletes being arrested, thrown out of games for poor sportsmanship, or quarreling with their coaches or teammates.
ESPN and other media outlets rarely report on high school athletics, and this is a fact that has often frustrated me at times. Perhaps I should be thankful, however, as their aim is often away from what is truly good about competition and athletics. High school sports allows us to celebrate good news on a local level in a way that would never sell ad space on ESPN. The story of a baseball player that fills his down time with community service at a local soup kitchen may make the back page of the local paper if it is a slow week in other news. The timeline of the career for an athlete who was cut from the JV basketball team but dedicated themselves in school to not only play on the varsity one day but also earn Salutatorian rank in their class probably never garners a mention on the radio. When a standout volleyball player serves her school on the Honor Council and also runs a summer soccer camp for inner city youth, we have to not only appreciate what they accomplish but we must celebrate it. We celebrate because their actions are worthy of praise, and we celebrate it because if we do not, no one else outside of our private circles of teammates and friends may ever know about it.
Television, radio, and social media constantly churn the waters of athletics, fishing through wave after wave of information for the scuttlebutt that will draw our eyes and ears to the screen. High school athletics, for the most part, exist in still waters that never draw their attention, and therefore, we must make a splash, sometimes a series of splashes, to highlight and publicize what we feel is most relevant and most significant. Whether it be in the school yearbook, the student newspaper, the morning announcements, or a post on the school’s Facebook page, our own athletes need to be able to see, hear, and/or read what we deem is important and worthy of praise.
A quote that I often use with my teams as a coach is the John Wooden quote “Character is who you are when no one is watching.” I think of that quote now because, in the big picture, that’s what makes high school athletics such a crucial educational experience for student-athletes. It is an activity that can teach, test, and reinforce good character. Yet, it takes place in an environment that will never be widely seen by a larger population. In order to help our student-athletes become the people we want them to be, as coaches and administrators, it is truly our duty to celebrate and glorify the good in them so that we can counteract the negative images they see on TV and online every day.
Creating and Maintaining an Athletic Web Site 2.0
About a decade ago, I had an article published in Interscholastic Athletic Administration entitled “Creating and Maintaining an Athletic Web Site”. I recently stumbled across the text while cleaning out my office, and I was dumbfounded to think about just how much had changed with this topic in the last 10 years. (I was also amazed that the photo of me in the article looked as if it was taken when I was about 14 years old.) Out of curiosity, I tried to locate the article online today, and it was nowhere to be found. Alas, the piece is to be forgotten forever, perhaps with good reason since a majority of the content would be woefully out of date today.
Ten years ago, high school athletic departments were struggling with the best way to just get online and promote their programs. Coaches and athletic administrators are not always the most current with technology, and they rarely have a professional background in public relations. Nonetheless, today a static web site is a given for an athletic program. The next “new world” for schools to discover involves the use of team blog sites, Twitter, and Facebook to connect with athletes, fans, alums, and the surrounding community. School calendars with athletic schedules can now be downloaded into smart phones allowing parents to stay current with their child’s schedule at the push of a button.
While the main focus of most any high school is academics, it is the athletic web site that attracts the most attention from the outside world. In a recent audit of our own web site here at the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, we discovered that our athletic web pages received more hits from off campus than any other section of our school web site. As a matter of fact, athletics received more hits than academics, the arts, development, and alumni pages combined. Part of the lure of the athletics section of our web site is that it is personal to so many people. Our parents want information about the programs in which their child participates (and parents from other schools want to see the programs against which their child will compete). Another big part of this is due to that fact that our athletic web site has the most amount of content, and the content is constantly changing.
Thanks to a friend of mine, I recently learned how to use an RSS feed to follow updates to a website. I watched a four-minute video and with a few additional minutes of trial and error on Yahoo, I was following my first site, ESPN College Football News. My personal victory suddenly seemed less exciting when I realized that we did not currently have this same capability attached to the athletic web site that I manage during the day.
Now that I have managed our school athletic web site for over a decade, I look back at that article I wrote in 2002 with the thought that I was actually too focused on the details and missed the big picture. With new online programs and applications appearing seemingly every few months, it is easy for a school’s online presence to get overextended. However, regardless of the apps or site(s) being used, there are three simple ideas that I think schools should keep in mind when managing their online and digital program presence.
1. Be Relevant – Provide information that people want in a format that is easy for them to access. Provide content that is unique to your school – current athletic schedules, directions to off-site athletic venues, departmental protocol for inclement weather, and school health forms are just the tip of the iceberg. If you want alumni and fans in the community to check your site for athletic scores and results, then they need to be posted online as soon as a contest is complete. If users can get the information quicker on the web site for your neighborhood newspaper, that is where they will go.
2. Be Authentic – Make sure your content speaks to the target audience. Promote your teams in a way that reflects the goals and missions of your athletic program. Do you over promote a specific program more than others? Are boys teams provided more publicity than the girls? Do you celebrate only big wins or championships or do you find ways to highlight the accomplishments of your teams that may not be reflected on the scoreboard?
3. Be Consistent – An athletic director does not have to worry that their department web site, Twitter feed, and Facebook page all get updated every single day of the year, but you can no go “gung ho” on information for a week and then disappear for the next two. I followed the Twitter feed for a school for a football game two weeks ago to stay current with the score. The manager of the account posted updates of the score at the end of the first, second, and third quarters. Hours passed before I realized that I was not going to get a final update. I just assumed that the team had lost the game (people tend to become less enthusiastic about posting less than positive information about their teams or programs). Nonetheless, the inconsistency in the message I was receiving made me much less likely to want to check their account again in the future.
In the collegiate world, much of this is made easier for athletic departments by the presence of a Sports Information Director. Such a position rarely exists at the high school level although there may be a coach or administrator who assists with some of the functions of that job. The separation of the athletic department from the communications office can lead to greater inconsistencies in the intended message. Relevancy, authenticity, and consistency are made tougher when the person delivering the message is outside of the world of athletics. On the plus side, high school AD’s have supervision of an SID taken off their plate. However, it is the role of the effective athletic administrator to be proactive in seeking out the information “gate keeper” at their school in order to establish standards for information that are consistent with their own departmental goals.
Gameday Every Day 