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My mom took a job this fall as the softball coach at Clarion University, which is a small Division II school about 20 minutes from my hometown. A kid who graduated from my high school is getting a minor in sports management at Clarion and for one of his classes he has to interview someone in the sports management field. He couldn't find anyone apparently, because he asked about the sports information business. Below is the transcript, thought you might be interested.

Why did you choose to get into this position?
Growing up with both of my parents coaching, I've been around sports all my life and I also like to write so really it's the perfect job. I thought I was going to be a sports writer, but when I decided that journalism wasn't the job for me, I found out about the sports information office while I was working with the school paper at Ohio University. The job is the perfect combination of sports and writing, plus you get the interaction with coaches and student-athletes that you don't find working at a newspaper.

How long have you been in your present position?
I been full-time at Florida State since August 1, but I've been at FSU since July of 2003. I worked in the office as a graduate assistant for three years while working on my MBA and then recently a full-time position in the office became available.

How did you perpare yourself to work in this field?
Luckily I had taken a few journalism classes to hone my writing skills and working at the school newspaper helped a lot as well. The best thing I did was do my practicum in the sports information office because it showed me a lot of the ins and outs of the job that I didn't know existed.

What were the particular job requirements?
The number one skill you have to have to succeed in sports information is the ability to write. Not a day goes by that I don't write something, whether it's a press release, a PA script, feature story, etc. If you can't write well, you can learn everything else about the job as you go along. As far as other tangible skills, it helps if you know a few things about desktop publishing, Photoshop and web publishing applications. Writing fast doesn't hurt either because many times you're trying to get your release in before the newspaper deadline, tv goes on the air or, more importantly, they leave you behind at the gym or field.

There are other, maybe more important, intangible attributes you need to be successful in sports information. It may sound like a cliché, but you have to be a hard worker. Like most jobs in athletics, you work nights, weekends, holidays and every time in between so if you're not a hard worker, this isn't the job for you.

Another thing you need to be able to do is work well with people and be able to read people. The sports information director (SID), is the liaison between the athletic department and the media and this means balancing a number of different personalities and egos and they don't always get along, but it's your job to make everyone happy so if you have to be able to find that balance.
I couldn't continue to list attributes for days, but the final one I'd say is that you have to inquisitive. To be good at this job, you can't just look at box score or results and write your release. You have to think to yourself "Is that a record?" or "When was the last time we did that?" Those are the things that get your sport or athletes attention from the media. Along those same lines you have to be creative, especially when working with sports besides football and basketball, because there is only so much space in the newspaper or during the news so you have to come up with interesting angles or storylines to draw the media in. The media should be doing a story about a tennis player who is one of the best players in the conference, but you'll give them more incentive if they know she's classically trained in piano, speaks three languages and volunteers to read to elementary school kids.

What are your greatest challenges in this position?
Time is always a factor, you never seem to have enough hours in the day to get everything done, which is usually why you work nights and weekends. There always seems to be one more project or one more release you can write, but sometimes you have to decide what's important and what's not. That's where good time management skills come in as well as delegation. If you're lucky, you have a good group of students working in your office and they can make your life much easier, even if it's through little things like sorting pictures or clipping articles out of the newspaper.

Going back to an earlier question, it's always a challenge to make both the media and the coaches/student-athletes happy. With sports like football and basketball, the media wants all the access they can get, while most coaches don't want to talk to the media beyond the minimum. Some coaches are better than others, but most try to avoid the media as much as possible and this of course, upsets the media. With student-athletes, you have to watch them more than coaches when it comes to dealing with the media. Most student-athletes like talking to the media, but there are some who are stubborn about it and will do everything they can to get out of it. You also have to watch what they say and work with them. Coaches are pretty good at not giving out information that is no for public consumption, but student-athletes are more prone letting things like that out. The student-athlete's day is filled everyday with classes, practice, lifting weights, study halls, meetings, going to the training room, and oh yeah, trying to be a regular 18-22 college student so you have to remind them more about interviews and keep them on task, whereas you pretty much know you can find a coach in their office or on the field/court.

What have been you greatest accomplishments?
I'd like to say that I've won numerous awards for my media guides, features, etc., but I haven't. Most of the rewards you get in sports information stem from working to get a student-athlete an award or get a feature story written about them. When I was at Northern Illinois University I worked to get the school its first Freshman All-American as well as its first First-Team All-MAC basketball selection in about 20 years. At Florida State I worked with one of our men's tennis players to get him the National Arthur Ashe Leadership and Sportsmanship award. The athletes do most of the work, but the flyers, emails and release we put together bring light to their efforts and it brings you a sense of accomplishment and that your works isn't going unnoticed. It's also very rewarding to hear one of the television announcers or studio hosts use a note that you've written. If you ever want to know how Lee Corso knows that Florida State has never lost when scoring 40 or more points, in the month of October, at home, when it's 70 degrees or warmer? It came from the sports information office.

What have been your biggest problems?
Losing. The worse day on the job is when you lose and it's even worse when you lose in the postseason because your season is over and for the seniors, perhaps the last games, meet or match of they're every going to play at this level. Losing affects everyone, but it makes our job much harder to do. After a loss, an athletic trainer makes sure everyone is okay, hands out some ice then is done or the marketing person packs up their table and goes home. The SID has to make the coaches or student-athlete do the one thing they don't want to do, talk. No one is happy after a loss and it brings a lot of pain and my job is to make coaches and student-athletes relive that pain. Losing sucks.

What advice would you offer individuals wanting to get into this profession?
Learn how to write, if you can write then you've got about half the job cover and the rest of it you can learn as you go, but if you can't write you'll struggle with the job early on and you'll be out before you know it. After that, I would suggest doing an internship, practicum or volunteer in sports information before you decide to do it for a career. Sports information is one of the toughest, but most rewarding, jobs in athletics. At most schools you have more than one sport so there really isn't much of an off season and even if your sport(s) are not in season, you trying to get ahead for next year, catch-up from the last or you're helping out with another sport so it helps to get a taste of the job before you dive into it as a career. On the flip side of the hard work are the rewards. I've seen most of this country, including Hawaii, on someone else's dime thanks to athletics. I've met people and done things, like play golf with Bobby Bowden, I wouldn't normally get to do because of athletics. There's no better feeling then being on the field during the Florida State-Florida football game or being at center court when Duke comes to town for basketball. People pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to come to my office, and it seats 85,000.