I never delved that far into manuals.
I did rule books to help me figure out how to cover new sports. I spent nearly all of my 40 years as a sports information director covering field hockey and equestrian, two sports I had little or no exposure to prior to joining the staff at St. Lawrence. Some would argue that reading the rule book wasn’t all that helpful. A lot of the whistles in field hockey went unexplained and the only way I knew a rider made a slight error when competing on the flat was when a parent let out a subtle gasp.
I had a pretty good working knowledge of the other sports coming in. We went from 13 when I was hired to 34 when I retired and I can safely say that I was conversant in all of them. They did add a 35th…Esports…just after my retirement and while I know what it is about, I am just as glad I retired when I did.
I did start out with a manual…manual typewriter that is. It embossed the paper with everything I wrote, but didn’t really slow me down too much. I graduated to an electric after considerable begging and eventually transitioned to a MacInosh computer…which brought more manuals into my life. The first major program I used was Adobe Pagemaker and my prior experiences with newspaper layouts helped a ton with learning that program. I also self-taught myself Adobe Photoshop and eventually Adobe Illustrator, all of which contributed to the design of programs, media guides, posters and the like.
As the Adobe family of programs went cross platform from MacIntosh computers to PCs, I agreed to follow along with the switch, which turned out to be particularly helpful as the StatCrew family of programs came along, making the statistical and play-by-play part of sports information much more streamlined. Again, I was pretty much self-taught and actually helped my friends Mike Ranieri and Alex Grimm, who founded StatCrew, with the introduction of StatCrew for ice hockey. Eventually StatCrew covered every NCAA sport and was the go-to program for the NCAA when it came to national stat reporting.
Statcrew was bought out by CBS and eventually faded, primarily due to increasing costs, but also in big part to the introduction of NCAA Livestats and Genius Sports statistical programs which are now the standard for all NCAA sports. A little more complex than StatCrew, I am not sure I could still do color commentary on hockey and do the in-game stats at the same time under today’s operating system. Fortunately, the press box at Appleton Arena is bigger and can accommodate a bigger crew to record the game stats.
I do, however, go all the way back. I once put a legal pad and a pencil down on a desk as I addressed a group of sports information directors and introduced them to StatCrew Version I…a little slower, but it got there.