College Sports Communicators
College Sports Communicators is the premier membership association for all strategic, creative and digital professionals working in intercollegiate athletics across all levels for colleges, universities and conferences across the United States and Canada.
CSC provides year-round leadership, community, professional development/education, recognition and advocacy for its 4,400 members.
Founded in 1957 as the College Sports Information Directors of America, the organization rebranded in 2022 to position itself as a more inclusive organization for communicators in all types of roles and to lead an industry change where strategic and creative professionals are more aligned.
CSC’s signature work includes the annual CSC Unite convention each June and the administration of the prestigious Academic All-America® program and Hall of Fame. Since 1952, more than 42,000 of the world’s most elite student-athletes have been recognized with Academic All-America status in all sports.
College Sports Communicators
Webinar: Building a Winning Staff: Working With Graduate Assistants and Postgraduate Students
This is the second in a CSC "Athletic Communications Building, Developing and Empowering Your Staff Live Webinar Series" being presented during the 2024-25 academic year. The first session, working with student assistants was done in the fall of 2024 and can be found at CSCommunicators.com.
In this on-demand webinar, the presenters joined us for an important discussion on how to find, work with and empower graduate assistants and postgrad student assistants and interns in your communications office.
In this time of shortened staffs and resources which may be limited, they discussed ways to find and identify- and then bolster your office staff and office content production team - with graduate-level student interns and/or graduate assistants. They discussed techniques and strategies to successfully find, mentor and engage these graduate-level assistants and how to empower and prepare them for their next career steps.
Topics in detail that were covered:
- Helping your students transition from (undergraduate) student workers to (graduate) student interns
- Ways to identify and recruit student assistants with on-campus and off-campus strategies, internal vs. external hires
- How to train and schedule your graduate students for office and in-game work; the importance of meetings with your student staff
- The importance of traveling with teams
- Traits and characteristics of successful student interns/assistants
- Setting parameters for graduate students to accomplish their department work, and focus on their studies
Presenters
- Abbey Curtis, Xavier University Athletic Communications Graduate Assistant
- Adam Ledyard, East Texas Baptist University Assistant Athletic Director for Communications
- Corey McCarthy, North Atlantic Conference Associate Commissioner
Moderator/Presenter
- Alex Gutierrez, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) Assistant Sports Information Director