Athletics promoted by sports information duo

Kendyl Wade

Al Weston, sports information director (left), and his assistant, Trevor Kuss, work to generate information for GC athletics on a daily basis. Both are in charge of the program’s social media presence, which has the largest fan base in the Peach Belt Conference.

Press releases, stats, and sporting event promotions; are all in a good day’s work for Director of Sports Information, Al Weston.

“My job is to promote the athletic department and the good things we do in the classroom and in the community,” Weston said.

Weston has attended every home sporting event at Georgia College since spring of 2007, his first year in Milledgeville.

“Hours are tricky, I’ve got a wife and two kids,” Weston said. “I like to see them, and sometimes it’s difficult. I have to be at every home athletic event.”

After recording every point, out, assist, foul, error and injury of each game, Weston posts a game recap to the Georgia College athletics website and uploads the statistics from the games to a network for all of the other universities in the Peach Belt Conference.

Though his office hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., sporting events are not typically scheduled during his hours.

“A basketball game finishes up at 10 (p.m.), and I’m in here ‘till 11 (p.m.), updating the site and getting the information out,” Weston said.

But his job doesn’t stop there.

The goal of the Sports Information Department is to garner support for the university’s athletic programs, and Weston has countless methods of accomplishing that.

Just last week on Aug. 28, Weston and Sports Information Assistant Trevor Kuss hosted their very first sports radio show for GC on the ESPN AM radio station at the local Zaxby’s. A handful of Bobcat athletes signed autographs from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. and talked about their experiences and expectations for upcoming events.

You can catch the live broadcast on the first Tuesday of every month, schedule permitting, on 1450 AM.

GC is now implementing a QR-code based reward points program in which fans who attend games, buy food from concessions or buy merchandise from home sporting events can receive points to get free T-shirts, hats, posters and the like, as well as more prizes to be announced.

Also to come this year, Weston and Kuss will be streaming sporting events live on the Web via http://www.ustream.tv with multiple running cameras as well as sport television grade production.

In previous years, it was difficult to fit work into the busy schedules of Al Weston’s graduate assistants. This year, he decided to hire one full time assistant, Trevor Kuss, rather than several graduate assistants.

“It came down to having two guys sometimes, or one guy all the time.”

Kuss, a University of California Davis graduate, said he was thrilled to start his career somewhere new and is excited to get to work with the sports teams at GC.  Weston stated that on homecoming day, the two of them will have to cover four home games in a day.

“I didn’t know that,” said Kuss, laughing. “Awesome.”

The Bobcats have the biggest online fanbase in the Peach Belt Conference, clocking in at 884 followers on Twitter and 2,796 likes on Facebook.

“But what does that mean?” states Weston. “It’s just a number, unless we turn it into something tangible.”

Upon the creation of a new social media page, the sports information director is expecting greatness.

Tout is a social media site, much like Twitter, where a user “micro-blogs.” The difference is that Tout exclusively uses video clips instead of text or pictures. With only 145,000 worldwide users, Tout is unmistakably new, but it has immense potential, and Weston sees it as an opportunity to start something huge.

“It’s very taxing, but at the end of the day, I’m paid to watch sports, write about sports and talk about sports on the radio,” Weston said.  “So what’s bad about that?”

Posted by Nick Landon on Sep 6 2012. Filed under Lead stories, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.