Alexander closes the books on 30 years as Saint Rose sports news director – The Daily Gazette

ALBANY — Last spring, David Alexander was exchanging notes with a colleague who holds the same position at the University of Michigan.

You know the place.

Tom Brady played football there, in the largest stadium in the Western Hemisphere.

University endowment: $17 billion.

On a beautiful sunny fall Thursday morning, a few orange and red leaves whispering around, Alexander invited me to a single picnic table just outside his office on campus, because why stay inside ?

Even if you diligently follow the sports section of the Daily Gazette, chances are you have never heard of Alexander, but he is one of the people in the capital region who served as an important link between the media and the college sports programs we cover. .

As assistant athletic director of communications at the College of Saint Rose, a Division II school that plays in the Northeast-10 conference, Alexander didn’t experience some of the challenges you’d see at a big school like Michigan, like pushing a Heisman Trophy campaign or dealing with the media landscape of a national scandal or the firing of a top coach.

But, for the most part, the job is the same, as he discussed with his friend from Ann Arbor.

After more than 30 years at Saint Rose, Alexander is moving downtown to downtown to take up a similar position with the New York State Bar Association, and while there is no doubt that Saint Rose, where athletics is an integral part of the school’s identity, will be able to replace him, he will be missed in the media.

His last day was Friday, so I took the opportunity to ask someone who has worked in sports information in a school for just over 30 years how much the job has changed and how much he hasn’t not changed.

One thing that hasn’t been the long hours. On Saturday, for example, the Golden Knights played volleyball games at noon and 4 p.m., soccer games at noon and 4 p.m., cross-country teams at road invites, and the men’s and women’s golf courses hosted the Saint Rose Invitational at Pinehaven Country Club. .

Nowadays, sports news staff are not only responsible for creating recaps of all these events for their website, but also for broadcasting them live and maintaining a social media presence.

So Alexander, 60, from Portsmouth, Rhode Island, won’t miss this part. Hours.

“We had a volleyball game here at 7 a.m. last Friday, and I walked out of here a little after 9 a.m., and then we had probably the busiest Saturday of the fall, and came back to 9:30 a.m. [a.m.], and it was almost midnight when I was done. So it can get intense.

“My girlfriend is taking care of it,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll say this, when we decided to move in together, she was like, ‘Now David, I’m going to be honest with you. You told me you worked long hours. So that’s on me. .

“However, I never would have imagined that was it.”

When Alexander was hired at Saint Rose in the summer of 1992, he was one of four full-time employees in the entire athletic department.

Men’s basketball, led by Brian Beaury, who was hired in 1986 and would win over 600 games, and baseball are firmly established.

Since then, Saint Rose has grown to 19 intercollegiate sports at the Division II level, winning a women’s soccer national championship in 2011 and nearly repeating that last year when the Golden Knights lost the title game in double extension.

Alexander not only accompanied the entire journey, he was an integral part of it.

“When I started, it was the AD [athletic director], myself, Brian, and there was a coach, and that was it,” Alexander said. “And we played everywhere. We didn’t have the Plumeri sports complex yet and we played football in Guilderland. We played street football here. We played at Clifton Park.

Because everything is streamed live on video and stats are kept digitally in real time these days, it’s easy for a sports news staff to follow teams remotely, wherever they are.

And Alexander said Saint Rose is committed to ensuring that all teams receive the same treatment, although there are times, such as when the women’s soccer team competes in a national championship, when measures additional are required.

“The work is the same now in the way you’re just trying to tell stories about the student-athletes and the coaches and the institution,” he said. “So that, from the macro, it’s the same.

“The pattern on how you do it couldn’t be more different. When I started in the business, before I even got here, I remember we were working on a basketball game, holding stats by hand, filling out a score box by hand, and calling the logs and TV stations and literally dictating a box score over the phone. You remember that, don’t you?

Yes. Yes.

And while the reach may be very different at a school like Saint Rose, with fewer than 2,500 undergraduates and three people on the sports information staff, compared to Michigan (more than 31,000 and 17, respectively) , there are similarities in content and how it is produced.

“We use the same statistics program, we use the same content management system for our website, we produce the same kinds of material,” Alexander said. “But in Michigan, it’s so much wider and wider.

“We can have a press conference and maybe bring in half a dozen reporters. There will be one, and there will be a hundred journalists who will show up.

Alexander wrapped up his long tenure at Saint Rose on Friday after being honored by the school with the Service Excellence Award in 2007, and in 2019 the Eastern Athletic Communications Association presented him with the prestigious Irving T. Marsh Award for excellence in sports communications.

During her time, the Golden Knights won six NCAA Division II basketball regional championships, nine women’s soccer regional championships, the 1997 Northeast Regional Baseball Championship, and cross country regional championships. eastern men’s and women’s 1995.

He also handled the public information end of four NCAA Elite Eight basketball tournament appearances, eight women’s soccer national semifinal appearances, and the baseball team’s berth in the 2000 World Series.

Besides Beaury and his assistant Don Bassett, some of the most memorable coaches and administrators for him over the years include AD Cathy Haker, baseball’s Bob Bellizzi, and women’s soccer coach Laurie Darling Gutheil.

The players are too numerous to single out except for Garth Joseph, the 7-foot-2 center who caught the attention of NBA teams before the 1997 draft. Joseph was undrafted and n ended up playing only four NBA games with two teams.

But stay…

“How many Division II SIDs can the NBA deal with?” said Alexander.

He said leaving would be bittersweet, but it was time for a new chapter.

“I never started my career wanting to work in sports, let alone on a college campus,” he said. “But once I started doing it, I knew it was what I wanted to do, and Sainte Rose gave me the chance to do something I love. I will be forever indebted for that.

“Just being on a college campus day to day. There is no better environment to be around. Really, being around young kids and teachers and administrators here and with everything that’s going on…I mean, look at this. It’s nice.

“And this is where I work.”

Categories: College Sports, Sports, Sports