What does a Sports Information Director (SID) as they are commonly referred to as do? Well in the most basic explanation they provide sports information. But what does that really mean and what do they really do?
My title is actually Coordinator of Sports Information (union thing) and while I mostly provide information on Mercer’s athletic teams there’s a lot that goes into the job. Since I started back to this position in July I have been mostly working remote though going in some more frequently this month. Because I’m not in person often I don’t think people including some of my coworkers realize all I do or all that goes into what I do.
So here’s what I do. I write articles for our website featuring our athletes. I created an Alumni Athlete feature and have gotten to share the success of several former athletes. This has been one of my favorite things to write about.
I work closely with Marketing and Communications and have been trying to come up with ways to “market” all that we offer in athletics. I have been working on ways to highlight academics and athletics. I am churning out a lot of articles so are website can be updated frequently. I have been working with our college videographer and photographer and gone over things to film and take pictures of.
I write game recaps for all our sports teams. I can look at a box score and essentially interpret that into text that people can understand. So I’ll write the score, who scored goals, how many saves the goalie had, hits a batter had, strikeouts a pitcher had, points or rebounds a basketball player had. You get the idea. I pull out what to highlight in a recap from the box scores I look at.
And my recaps include the records of our opponents as well as the upcoming opponent as I always end each recap with who we play in the next game so I’ll look up records. I look up rankings of our opponents so I can include if we are playing a very good team. And within each recap I “tag” the hometown and high school of each athlete. This isn’t too bad with some teams but with our soccer teams which are mostly international athletes, the school names and hometowns can be very long to write and hard to remember so it’s a lot of going back and forth to rosters as I write the recaps.
I use the box scores and recaps to select players to nominate for conference players of the week. Some weeks it’s easy to pick a nominee, other times it’s hard. Some weeks I can figure out a nominee and other weeks I ask for input from the team’s coach to select one.
I do a lot with stats. Any articles I write on former athletes involve looking up their stats at Mercer and then their stats at the four year school they may have moved onto and played at.
For any articles I write I have to find pictures to go with the article which is one of the more time consuming pieces of my job. I sometimes have to go through a file of a hundred plus action shots and find what I need that looks good too.
I do a lot of research. What are some of our former athletes up to? What is of interest with our teams that I can write about? What don’t we share or have on our website that we should?
So I spend a ton of time on my laptop doing all this and can do majority of my work from home. But I do like going to games when I can so I can gain a better sense of the team and athletes I write about. All of our home games are streamed so I can watch at home if I can’t make it there and many away games are also streamed. So I often end up watching sports games (which I love to do anyway).
While I’m not on campus much I’m busy. I have notebooks full of notes and spend hours scouring websites for the information I need. I’ve always been a sports stat geek which is a good thing as I spend a lot of time looking at stats.
There’s more I could get into but this is the nuts and bolts of what I do. While you may not see me much in the athletic office I’m working and doing a lot, just a lot behind the scenes and a lot people may not be aware of.
It was an adjustment to this new position when I started but I grew to really enjoy it and I’m loving what I do. I enjoy sharing the success of our student athletes and following how our teams do.
And that’s what a Sports Information Director does or in my case a Sports Information Coordinator does.
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