Week 6: June 27-30

This week I continued to work on the summer girls and boys league rosters.  This is very time consuming because players are constantly being added.  On Monday alone I made up a significant amount of rosters for 10 teams both for girls and boys.  On Wednesday I had to add to each team, and make up new rosters for another 3 teams.  Although it is a lot of work to keep up with the summer league basketball league, I think it’s great bringing in 12 to 13 teams both at the varsity and junior varsity levels. 

I was also lucky enough to start the process of contracts.  This is one of the main experiences I want to work with a little more because it is so important.  As of right now we are just receiving contracts and hopefully next week we will be sending out contracts to different schools.  All contracts sent out and received are put on file and kept for a year.  Since we are a community college the contracts are pretty easy because all the schedules are pretty similar.  When I mean similar, I am saying that if Cayuga Community College has a home game against Finger Lakes Community College in 2010, in 2011 Cayuga would have to travel to Finger Lakes.  This tends to make it easier to schedule seasons in advance. 

Week 5: June 20-23

A lot has been going on in the Cayuga Community College Athletics Department, with the new contract between Presto Sports and Cayuga Community College big changes will be made.  As a department we are launching a new athletics website.  This is set up by the AD, 4 other coaches and me.  As the intern I am responsible for all of the coaches getting their teams all straightened out and the other team they were assigned.  It is my responsibility to make sure everything is spelled correctly in articles, all the dates and times for scheduled contests are correct.  I am considered the first line of defense when it comes to spelling and everything being correct.  Just like any new program we have been facing some issues but have since been resolved.  This is not easy for any of us because it really is all about figuring things; we have not had someone come in to help us.

Some of the problems we have faced are the athletic/academic year.  We are a department are starting backwards from last year’s records including press releases, game rosters, pictures, and bios.  This is a nice concept because last year hardly any of the coaches wrote up game recaps simply because some of the games were not worth writing up.  Once this website is up and running it will be a huge attribute to the Athletics Department.  This could be a successful recruiting tool and when potential athletes are looking at Cayuga Community College they can read about their coach, and look up the previous year of how their team did. 

I have also been putting together the college’s annual high school summer league paperwork.  This is something that has a constant upkeep because players are always signing up or teams are consistently coming in.  This is another great way to get the Cayuga community involved by offering the college’s gym to those local high schools.  This also shows the community that the college wants to be involved.  I will soon be working on contracts between the schools this coming season.  Instead of sending contracts out before the beginning of each season, my mentor sends out all of the contracts to each school for each sport at once.  This method seems to be better because the contracts get done all at once. 

Week 4: June 6-9

This past week I have been continually working with the coaches to get the new athletics website for Cayuga Community College.  Some of the coaches are having an extremely hard time due to the lack of organization coaches from other teams.  I have been working with both the men’s and women’s soccer coach, the volleyball coach, and the men’s basketball coach.  I have noticed some coaches are having a harder time than others trying to come up with statistics and articles write ups.  This is not only Cayuga’s fault but the other colleges fault as well.  It has come to my attention that at the junior college level statistics and articles are not a top priority unlike other colleges. 

I also worked with my mentor the past few days trying to update the Mid-State Atlantic Conference Handbook.  The last time this was fully updated was the academic year of 2008-2009 so as you can see they are a bit behind with updating.  The most important part of updating this was the Conference Championships.  These items had not been updated since the academic year 2007-2008, so it was hard for me to look up the information because unlike other conferences there is no conference website.  I found that since Cayuga Community College does not have both baseball and softball, and just recently added volleyball it was harder to find that information because my supervisor was never given the emails stating what team was considered conference champions, who was player of the year, or who was coach of the year for those sports.  Even though he kept everything on file, he was never given the other information because those certain sports are not played here.

Now for the exciting news from the week, there is an excellent chance by the academic year 2012-2013 we will be seeing some drastic changes throughout the campus of Cayuga Community College, especially with the athletic department.  Athletics plans on adding brand new bleachers up in the gym for fans of both volleyball, and basketball games. 


Hopefully in the next week or two I will be working on contracts for other teams.  That really gets down to the nitty gritty of what being an athletic director is all about.  Other than budgeting which I have already worked on because my supervisor wanted a general idea of how much it would cost to start a team.  I realized that although the sport in general may be cheap to run, starting off any sport from scratch is no way shape or form cheap.   I also see how many different types of meetings my supervisor has on a day to day basis and he is always on the go. 

Week 3: May 23-27

This past week I worked on several different projects.  My supervisor is working on a new athletics website for the college and had me working with him on the tutorial so we knew how to make the entire operation run.  The Athletic Department decided to go through a website designer just so there was some type of template.  This gives us an idea as to what we need to follow and in the meeting with both my supervisor who is the Athletic Director and the Assistant Athletic Director I was given the job of helping the coaches work on sports information, and eligibility.  Now that I am into my third week of working I am getting much more comfortable with the system my supervisor has me doing. 

I will be working with four of the 8 college coaches, both men’s and women’s soccer coaches, the men’s basketball coach, and the women’s volleyball coach.  These coaches are not only required to work on their sports but they are also assigned another sport to work with.  Each coach has about 30 student athletes, and each coach is required to make sure their assigned student athletes are eligible.  I will be working with these coaches very closely, not only getting an idea of what the Athletic Director of the college does but the coaches as well. 

Last week I also worked on updating the information for the Mid-State Atlantic Conference (MSAC) website.  This gives the conference the most up to date information about new coaches, new athletic administrators.  This was an easy task because it was all on the internet through a website.  All I had to do was input the coaches email addresses, phone numbers, and extensions to their phones.

Finally I learned something new from the women's basketball coach that was shocking to me.  An incident occurred between a student athlete and another community college.  The student athlete contacted the community college on a Tuesday and went for a visit and tour of the campus on a Wednesday.  This violates an NJCAA rule stating that if a player from a different college makes contact with a coach from a different college, there is to be no contact between the coach and the player for 10 days.  I never knew of such a rule before, and since I hope to pursue coaching one day, this is one rule I will never forget.