WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Eleven bowl games, including a Rose Bowl, a women's basketball national championship, an unexpected run to the Final Four and a Heisman campaign in the national spotlight ... these are just a few of the job highlights for 25-year award winner Tom Schott. Schott was honored for his quarter century of service by the College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) at its annual convention in Dallas on Wednesday.
Add in direct contact with Purdue's winningest football, volleyball and basketball coaches, all Hall of Famers in their respective sports, stir in the variety of working with six different sports and now oversight of the department, and you have the ingredients of a successful and fulfilling career.
And to think it all started in June 1979 with a 10-year old kid falling asleep listening to a Major League Baseball game on the radio and a passion for writing.
A growing affinity for baseball and love of the written word led 12-year old Schott and school friend Steven Jablon to create a sports magazine covering the St. Louis Cardinals, which granted them more than 150 interviews with their favorite players and earned them notoriety from their journalistic peers in the Gateway City over the publication's four-year existence.
A need to gain more publicity for their high school peers led the pair to become de facto SIDs, doing stats, feature stories, game programs and even a department-wide media guide as prepsters, all while balancing their own athletic endeavors at Country Day School.
"We saw how hard the athletes at Country Day worked," Schott said in an Oct. 31, 1985, article in the St. Louis Globe Democrat. "We thought we'd try to provide some media attention for them."
Enter CoSIDA Hall of Famer Mark Beckenbach, who stoked those embers in a history-loving freshman by taking him under his wing at Ohio Wesleyan University, transforming a would-be journalist into a future SID.
"I had written the football coach, who also was my academic advisor, saying that I had done stats and some other support type stuff for my high school team and I would like to get involved in some of that in college and he never responded," Schott said. "But Mark saw that letter on his desk when he was looking for a depth chart and he wrote my name down, called me and asked if I would be interested in being a student assistant.
"I owe a lot to Mark. He gave me a great opportunity and a lot of responsibility. I got to do so much there. I think I went on every football trip during my four years and I did a lot of basketball travel, and I really enjoyed the entire experience."
"When Tom graduated, it was more like losing an assistant than a student employee," Beckenbach said. "He was very enthusiastic and extremely eager to learn, and we hit it off very well. It wasn't long into his time at Ohio Wesleyan before he had regular hours in the office as well as working at games, and I could give him a list of things to do and know that everything would be completed and done well. His abilities made it possible for us to take on massive projects such as converting all of our publications to desktop publishing, as well as researching, compiling, writing, and publishing a baseball media guide from square one, a project which I thought he really enjoyed. He also did most of the work on a commemorative piece we published after the men's basketball team won the national championship his sophomore year."
Two summer internships with Schott's favorite team, the Cardinals, introduced a love for writing bios and game notes, one that still exists today. A personnel change in the organization's PR department took away a nearly-sure position with the team bringing disappointment and uncertainty.
Enter another CoSIDA Hall of Famer, Jim Vruggink, who was hiring for an internship at Purdue, a school known for giving its interns a lot of sport responsibility.
After a 10-month internship, Schott had a phone interview for a full-time position and the rest is history.
"I have just been lucky in the sense that I have been in the same place for 25 years but have had seven or eight different jobs," Schott said. "I fit here and my family fits here. Not everyone fits here at Purdue. And I wouldn't fit everywhere, but... I would say that constant change combined with the people and the community has kept me fresh. I came here thinking I was going to be here for 10 months, making $640 a month before taxes."
Experiences freelancing and writing media guide and program copy for his favorite professional teams, authoring five books over the years and working at the 2009 MLB All-Star Game, the 2013 World Series and on the host committee media relations staff for Super Bowl XLVI also have added spice to a successful career.
The CoSIDA 25-Year Award is just the most recent accolade for Schott. In 2008, he was honored with the Helping Hand Award by the Indiana Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association. He also was a recipient of the Scoop Hudgins Outstanding SID Award from the All-American Football Foundation in 2007 and was named as one of the nation's top five women's basketball sport information directors by the "Women's Basketball Journal" in 1999.
Not bad for a late-blooming sports fan, who was more of a Star Wars guy, and a big fan of Batman and Robin, and the St. Louis Zoo before baseball gripped him, starting the wheels turning toward a career in athletics.
By Wendy Mayer, associate athletics communications director