Media Guides...The Fond Farewell

It is curious that one of the big things that drew me to this business is the thing that could have driven me away from it.

From the time I started at Pacific in 1999, I have thrived on the media guide. I have loved the concept of taking a program’s history, rebuilding it, shaping it into a tangible form and producing a publication that is nothing short of an advanced placement history book for Boxer athletics.

But there is some truth to the saying that if you love something, you have to let it go. And I have reached that point. For the 2009-10 year, I will not produce a single media guide. A bittersweet decision, certainly.

From the view of our coaches, the media guides are great pieces; something that not many other schools at our level do now. But the fact of the matter is that eight of our 20 teams (cross country, track and field, tennis and golf) didn’t have one. Those coaches made their displeasure heard, but also agreed that the time isn’t there for me to add four more publications.

For me, the decision not to do them is partly a matter of relevance. The printed media guide is quickly becoming a dinosaur. Fewer and fewer small colleges (non Division I) are producing guides. While some had reduced their guides to high profile sports like football and basketball, many more have stopped producing them altogether. It’s just as easy to get all of the information of the ever-growing World Wide Web.

A number of Division I schools have stopped print guides altogether. There is potential NCAA legislation that would eliminate all media guides at the Division I level. So, in a way, we’re keeping up with the Joneses.

There’s also the question of purpose. Media guides are meant to be for serving the media that cover our teams on a regular basis. However, I can count on one hand how many members of the media have been around to cover Pacific athletics. The bulk of the guides are used by our coaches as another item to help lure the prospective player to choose Pacific over another school.

The upside of that is the opportunity to hand an impressionable 17-year-old a glossy, high quality publication focused on a specific program. The down side is that the guide tells the whole story, good, bad or indifferent. Not the best piece of recruiting swag if you are coming off a 5-20 season.

So the guides are gone, replaced by a series of tri-fold, full color recruiting brochures that will serve all of our sports and show the brighter, positive side of Pacific athletics.

The challenge of designing and developing these recruiting brochures will be exciting, but it won’t be same as the challenge and thrill of developing a strong, high quality, award winning media guide. And believe me, I will miss it.

The media guide challenge that put all of my skills to the test, and one that I passed with flying colors. It was a self challenge of doing something better than Pacific had ever had before.

As an athlete at Pacific, the “media guide” was nothing more than a four-page game program whose layout was basic at best. Head shots, name, hometown, previous school, position. If there was room, maybe a season preview. Oh, you run cross country or play tennis? Forget it…only teams with true home events and home crowds.

My direct predecessor as sports information director at Pacific (who lasted all of six months) raised the bar, creating the first true media guides for Pacific in nearly a decade. There was the combined fall sports piece that tied together men’s & women’s soccer, volleyball and cross country. Men’s basketball, women’s basketball and wrestling all had their own pieces, as did baseball and softball in the spring.

The guides were basic at best. No more than 12 pages for any one sport (which was all that the budget would allow) and 20 pages for the combined fall piece.

In my first year, the guides expanded to allow for records for specific sports where they were already compiled. The largest guide – 24 pages for the combined fall sports piece.

Fast forward to 2008-09. The Pacific sports information office (also known as me) produced a total of 10 media guides, all with full color covers. The smallest guide, women’s lacrosse, spans 32 pages. The largest, the two soccer guides and the wrestling guide, ran 40 pages each.

It has been a labor of love me and one that has paid dividends. In the last five years, my guides have won 28 CoSIDA Publication Contest awards. That includes eight guides deemed “Best In The Nation,” the gold standard when it comes to media guides. Three of those awards have come this year alone for women’s lacrosse, softball and wrestling. In addition, my guides have also received awards from USA Volleyball, Swimming World Magazine and Amateur Wrestling News.

There is nothing like awards to drive you to raise the bar and strive and do more and better work. But it comes at a price, and that is when push came to shove.

To put together a quality media guide, it takes me 30-40 hours per guide. That includes the typesetting, sizing and manipulating photos, compiling biographies, updating records and developing cover concepts.

Add that up….30 to 40 hours per week adds up to almost three work months spent exclusively on media guides. That much dedication meant that other things suffered to make sure that the guides not only came close to meeting deadline, but lived up the quality that others expected and that I expected of myself.

In the past, I would take some of that work home. That was before I had two wonderful daughters that deserved my attention and a wonderful wife that not only deserved my attention, but also a break. For the first time ever, media guide work didn’t go home. And to be honest, quality suffered a bit.

I love the media guides, but I love my family more.

Parts of the media guides will live on as the records section of the guides move online as purely a record book. The update process will take much shorter amount of time, but there will be no printed version. There will be no awards to be earned, no books to hand out to media, parents and prospectives. Just a tri-fold brochure and a PDF.

Will media guides return? Perhaps. Outside of a football guide, we won’t be bringing the guides back unless I get some full-time help in the office. Its too much to put on the shoulders of just one person. And as much as I love earning the honors and accolades and like the idea of that ever expanding AP history book, its time to change with our digital, short attention span theater times.

To view some of my media guide work, visit the individual pages at www.goboxers.com.