How to Develop Your Student Workers (And Why You Should)

During this year’s NCAA basketball tournament, Fairleigh Dickinson became an instant sensation for knocking off the top-seeded Purdue Boilermakers in the first round, marking only the second time a 16-seed beat a No. 1 seed in the history of the men's tournament.

FDU basketball’s run also created a star behind the scenes in its Director of Media Relations, Jordan Sarnoff. While media relations directors in college sports are frequently embedded with their teams, what sets Sarnoff apart is the fact that he did this during his junior year at FDU.

Getting involved in your school's athletic department is a great way to build experience before you find sports internships. Still, the onus is also on the departments to put aspiring sports professionals to good use and create the next group of workers in the industry. While Sarnoff rising to Director of Media Relations at a Division I program before graduating may be an outlier, his success shows the importance of student workers in sports and how they can thrive if given challenges during their on-the-job training.

During my time at Miami University, I supervised and recruited our student workers, and I came away with the following lessons that should be heeded with students and interns in all sports organizations:

Take Time to Teach

In a competitive industry like sports, having a big-name organization on your resume isn't enough on its own if your student/intern can't add skills and accomplishments with it. The most common excuse for not training students in certain tasks is that it takes more time to teach them how to do something than doing it yourself. While that is typically true initially, it's a short-sighted conclusion that ignores the fact that they can eventually take a task off your plate once they learn how to do it.

When I supervised student workers at Miami, I knew there were game day roles I needed students to fill, such as keeping official statistics on our scoring software that was older than me (seriously, it was a DOS-based computer program). While I had more experience keeping stats, I had more pressing job duties that I could not do simultaneously with statistics. So, to ensure they could handle the quick thinking and knew the software at games, I had students come into the office to recreate box scores based on the statistical play-by-play printouts I gave them to learn the software and remember what keys execute which commands. Doing so allowed me to build a deep pool of students who could fill in on game day, so we weren't overly reliant on one or two students to do a specific task.

Build Their Skills

This goes hand-in-hand with taking the time to teach your students/interns, who should come out of the experience knowing how to do things they didn't know before. Our communications office at Miami wrote press releases, managed social media, ran press conferences, and arranged media interviews and availability. We also documented teams by recording videos and taking photographs at practices, competitions, and community events. Handling all those tasks takes teamwork, and steering students and interns toward their interests, such as taking and editing photos/video, asking questions at press conferences, and running a social media account during a game, was one way we built their skills for their resumes.

Give Them Stretch Assignments

If your organization is committed to building the next group of quality workers in the sports industry, you must give your students something to do that's more meaningful than filing paperwork or other menial tasks that you don't feel like doing. While that work has its place, your student will check out quickly if that is all you provide.

When students showed enough aptitude in our office, we would have them write game recaps, travel with our office to nearby football games, and run our Snapchat and Instagram accounts to create stories from the fans' perspective. Some of them also became communications contacts for some of our sports, responsible for performing the same day-to-day duties as full-time staff members for their selected sports. These assignments kept them engaged and provided samples for their portfolios when they entered the job market upon graduation.

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Allow Them to Learn from Mistakes

I spent 12 years working in athletic media relations at several Division I schools nationwide. When I was a college junior, I made a pretty visible mistake when I ran on the court of a basketball game before the ball was inbounded to give something to the public address announcer. Surprisingly, that was not the end of my internship as I was allowed to learn and gradually take on more assignments and proved my worth in various college athletics jobs during my undergraduate and early years as a full-time employee.

When you give responsibilities outside of anyone's comfort zone, mistakes happen. Those mistakes are a vital, if regrettable, part of the experience and something students can learn from to grow as professionals. For example, I had students forget assignments, publish recaps littered with typos, and push the envelope a little too far on social media. While upset when they happened, I pointed out where they could do better and empowered them to try again. That approach played a role in several students improving their skills and finding full-time college athletics jobs immediately after graduation.

Consider Them for Open Positions

Properly training and empowering student workers will create employees organizations want to hire. When you are in a position to open the door to the sports industry for one of your students or interns, you should strongly consider doing so. Hiring them saves time and money in the recruiting process, brings in someone who is already familiar with the staff, and saves time in onboarding since they already know how the business operates.

Sports organizations are multi-faceted, and the industry's allure garners a lot of interest from aspiring professionals and a lot of work that needs to be done. Empowering your students and interns to become qualified entry-level employees is the right thing to do from an overall standpoint, but also because it frees up full-time employees to engage more in high-level tasks, which helps limit burnout in the industry.

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