A Feeling of Accomplishment

So even though I officially started August 8th, I really have on been "on the job" as a full-time SID for about three weeks and needless to say I've been killin'em.

In the last two weeks, I've been able to get two of our student-athletes (both freshmen) into their hometown newspapers one of which included my first interaction with the outside media. And no I do not mean blogs I mean an actual newspaper called and wanted to interview one of our first year volleyball players. I was pretty stoked about that. And a week before that one of my golfers' hometown paper published part of the release I wrote about him earning co-medalist honors.

But it is only just the beginning. There is more to come.

A while back I watched the late Randy Pausch's lecture on "Time Management" but it is not a video you can watch just one time. Every time I re-watch it I learn something new. It's not like it changes but there are just many subtle things he says that you don't get the first or second time.

Today I felt like the "real deal." I had a long laundry list of things to do but yet got everything that needed to get done today done and I did it because I watched Randy's lecture.

My to-do list for September 19th:
1. Send/Request Rosters to opposing SIDs
Even though we have a lot of games this week, the majority of them are away and this item on my to-do list did not take much time at all so I completed this with relative ease and within a couple of minutes.
2. Update/input volleyball statistics from this weekend's tournament
The next thing I tackled was inputting the volleyball statistics from the past weekend's tournament at Stevens Tech. They had four games in two days and Stevens Tech did not do in-game stats. In addition to getting our stats from our coach I had to get the opponents' stats so we could have a completed boxscore to send to the NCAA. It was the most time consuming thing on my to-do list of the day. But yet I managed to get it done before 11.
3. 11-12 Student-Athlete Newspapers
This item on the to-do list is a work-in-progress. It is a spread sheet with all the student-athletes and their hometown newspaper contacts broken down by sport. I started working on it in mid-August and the idea was that I was going to use it when I needed an email contact of an athlete's hometown paper if they had an amazing game, match or something noteworthy around campus. If you were to put it into Stephen Covey's four-quadrants, it would go into the "not important and not due soon" box. It was a great work study project that I was able to delegate to a few work-study who came up and after I told them what I was doing it for they completely understood. Maybe they wanted to do it because it will benefit them in the long run. When people see you are set to do things for them, they will be more willing to help you.
4. Update student-athlete headshots on website
Yay! We finally got the headshots in! It is a double-edged sword though. Sure it's great that we got them in to put up on the website, but the kicker is that I'm the one that has to update the website and put about 50 student-athletes headshots on their bio page. But with the help of two student workers, we were able to get this task accomplished in less than an hour. Ben and Chris did an awesome job at getting the headshots up for soccer, x-country, tennis and volleyball. Hurray for delegation! It allowed me to contact Presto and get the cropping tool fixed so we don't have to crop in a separate program. We can upload original size of photos to the back end of the website and crop from there. Awesomeness!
5. Update women's tennis match file
While Chris and Ben were helping with the headshots, I was able to re-upload the Lesley tennis file that Ryan sent me.
6. Volleyball student-athlete phone interview
Last Friday David Drew (no not J.D. - even though David is his real first name) of the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette called me asking to set up an interview with one of our volleyball players. Unfortunately the team had just left for New Jersey so I set it up for this afternoon at 3:30. She came up at three and we were able to get the interview done by 3:30 so I could meet the rest of the golf team at Stone Meadow for practice.

Despite a very hectic day it was a very productive day when you really look back on it. Sure I still have things left on my to-do list but it is the little things that matter. No one operates in a vacuum and when you learn how to delegate it makes you're life so much easier and a lot less stressful.