Assistant Director - Athletic Communications

Job Summary:

This position plays a key role in publicizing select Varsity sports for the Department of Athletics, which has a 42-sport Division I athletics program.  Handles sports public relations, media relations, and communications and information for assigned sports.  Promotes positive branding, press coverage, strategic communications, social media, multimedia and messaging to various constituents, using a variety of traditional media as well as new media outlets.  Constituents include prospective student-athletes; game-day attendees, alumni/ae, fans, and the entire University community.  Works with select sports to ensure that appropriate Athletics storylines are created and communicated; statistics, schedules, rosters, game recaps and other information is communicated to the proper media outlets. Handles media interview requests.  Assists with archiving historical records. This position greatly enhances both the external and internal image of the Department.

Job-Specific Responsibilities:

1.       Manages media and public relations functions for select sports as well as key Department initiatives.   

• Pro-actively communicates with media about, and solicits media coverage for, events and feature stories on Harvard athletes, teams, and other Department milestones/accomplishments. 

• Conceives and creates content for a dynamic Department website (including web streaming and other multimedia), which serves as a primary source of information regarding Harvard Athletics (www.GoCrimson.com).

• Directly responsible for publicity efforts in assigned sports.  Media point-of-contact for assigned sports.

• Designs, writes and edits printed game programs, special event publications and press releases.

• Informs and educates athletes, coaches, administrators, and other Department of Athletics constituents about effective methods of media interaction.  

• Oversees media relations at home events and travels with varsity teams to cover select competitions.   

2.       Effectively utilizes multimedia, digital, new and social media strategies for promoting the department and select sports.   

• Stays abreast of and proficient with emergent technologies (both hardware and software) and multimedia techniques in order to promote Department programs and maintain multimedia files.  Plays a leadership role in the acquisition, editing, transfer and storage of event video and highlight files.

• Coordinates social media/ networking initiatives among the department with effective strategy and foresight for information delivery protocols.

3.       Manages student employees, volunteers, and game day event staff.

• Recruits, hires, trains, schedules, supervises, and evaluates game-day staff, volunteers, student workers.  Ensures compliance with applicable University, NCAA and Ivy League policies, procedures and regulations. 

• Runs a volunteer intern program among area/ regional colleges specializing in sport management, digital/ new media and TV production to coordinate high-level game-day and office staffing.

• Manages payroll functions for game-day and office staff.  Ensures that appropriate time-keeping and Human Resources procedures are followed. Resolves payroll issues.    

• Develops and maintain positive relationships with students, faculty, staff, and the community.

4.       Actively plans and implements the historical archiving of content for assigned sports and projects.   

• Directly responsible for maintenance of current and historical team information (rosters, statistics, records, photos, videos) in assigned sports including proper naming and meta data assignments.

Working Conditions:

• The position requires extensive evening, weekend and holiday hours and ability to handle last-minute schedule changes.

• Occasional local and regional travel is required, about 20% of the year.

Physical Requirements:

• Job occasionally requires strenuous physical activity, including the climbing of steps and moving of heavy boxes and equipment (~50 lbs); ability to work extended stretches, both within a day and over several consecutive days.