Student work team relieved by full-time assistance in covering athletics
Mary Harrison, Campus Carrier sports editor
athletics website last week during her third day on the job. Student worker leadership said they were thankful to have a staff leader after a hectic two-month interim managing fall sports on their own. Mary Harrison | Campus Carrier
Last weekend was full of competitions for Viking athletics, as usual. Student Sports Information Director, senior Adele Gammill, told her new boss which sports she planned to cover – and then she was told to take the weekend off. Gammill was taken aback.
“I was like, ‘I’m what?’” Gammill said. “Having the person in that chair makes all the difference.”
Paige Ward, Berry’s new Director of Sports Information and Promotions (SID) has been occupying her office in the Cage Athletic Center for a little over a week. Student leadership in sports information said that while they managed to run the department during the two-month hiring process, having full-time staff officially at the helm has already improved the department and added necessary structure.
Ward began work as SID on Oct. 30, two days after finishing her last day as assistant women’s basketball coach and sports information director at fellow NCAA Division III institution Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama. Ward graduated from Alabama’s University of Montevallo in 2020 with a degree in accounting.
Ward said she had never planned to pursue a career in sports until the pandemic cancelled her accounting internship and she applied to be an assistant coach at Huntingdon. Soon after, the college offered her an additional role as assistant SID, before asking her to take over the department one year ago.
Ward said she looks forward to applying the skills that she learned on the job at Huntingdon in a new environment and with new technologies, as well as investing time in the student work staff.
“When you hear the name Berry College, it’s just like a step up no matter where you’re at,” Ward said. “Academically, athletically, all across the board, Berry is a place that everybody wants to go to.”
Coming from a school with maximum 4-5 work study students and an assistant SID that only helped in a limited capacity, Ward said the most difficult choice about leaving Huntingdon was leaving the players and the sport she loved.
“I’ve played basketball, coached basketball for majority of my life, and I just felt like it was time to let that go and try to figure out myself outside of basketball,” Ward said.
For Berry, Ward was the perfect candidate. Berry Athletic Director Angel Mason said Ward was on her short list of four industry professionals she invited to apply for the job. Ward’s self-taught media skills make her relatable to the staff of 27 sports information student workers, the second largest student work team in the athletic department, because she has also learned on the go.
So far, Ward has worked well with the department’s student leadership and has expressed a commitment to delegating tasks, according to Gammill. Gammill and Ward both expect that learning the new methods Ward implements will be tricky for the student workers at first, but Gammill believes that they, and the department, will benefit in the end.
Ward said her biggest goals are to bring consistency, organization and professionalism to how the department is run and to the content it creates publishes. She hopes to push out more content, specifically videography and helping coaches manage team social media accounts as requested.
“It all needs to look cohesive, everything that we do,” Ward said. “Nothing needs to get lost. Swim and dive doesn’t need to be less important than football.”
The Vikings athletic department now has four female senior staffers, more than all but one of Mason’s previous workplaces. Mason said sometimes students on search committees, including females, assign certain traits by gender. Mason said she tries to break those stereotypes by finding candidates with varying backgrounds.
“What was a determining factor was making sure that there were women in the [hiring] pool,” Mason said. “It’s important to me [to] have diversity of the pool, and you let your people see a range of folks that could do the job.”
According to Gammill, the hiring process was at least three-times faster than the previous process. Everyone on the search committee also agreed that Ward was the woman for the job, which was not the case during the previous SID hiring process.
“She’s only been here [a few] days, and she’s already really impressed me,” Gammill said. “I already have a lot of respect for [Ward]. I’m extremely excited to see where she takes this department.”
Since the previous SID left at the beginning of September, Gammill and SID graduate assistant Will Davis ran the department under the supervision of Athletic Director Angel Mason.
In addition to Gammill taking on a larger role in running the department, Davis said he had been in constant contact with student workers answering questions and making sure all the necessary roles were filled. Davis said that while Hanes left all of the necessary components for success, it was a challenge to pull things together so they fit into the right spot, like puzzle pieces. He also tried to ensure students could do tasks they preferred to do when possible.
“SID work doesn’t really stop, it just keeps going,” Davis said.
A major challenge they faced was the limitations of both skills and availability for student workers. Gammill said that finding workers to manage game statistics was no problem. However, it was difficult to find writers for website stories, typically the most-time consuming job, to cover all 10 Fall season sports in a timely manner. Stories sometimes went unwritten due to prioritized tasks and Gammill maxing out on hours.
“That’s just how the world works, and as the school year goes on, people get busier,” Gammill said.
On the other hand, Davis said sometimes students would proactively volunteer to write a certain story and work with him to make sure it was covered well. Davis said that in the end, he cared more about quality than quantity in the interim period, and the department hopes to use final season reports to make up for missed fanfare on dropped stories such as conference players of the week.
“I thought we might face some times where things were going to be a disaster, and we’ve kept things to where, instead of it being a tsunami, it’s just a light rainy day,” Davis said.
Gammill will be leaving the SID office on Nov. 12 and devote her attention to being social media manager for the Vikings softball team this Spring. She said this has been her plan since last semester, before the previous SID left. However, Gammill said she is confident in the department’s direction because of the youth, structure, and new ideas that Ward brings.
“Paige’s future is very bright, so the department’s future is [also],” Gammill said.