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"Off The Record"
A Blog by Jill
M. Geer
Adventures in Communicating
Sunday, February 28, 2010
It was only at the end of Saturday's competition at the USA Indoor Track & Field Championships in Albuquerque, watching exciting races in the men's and women's 3,000 played out, that it hit me:
This meet marked my 10th anniversary at USA Track & Field. That's a decade of spokespersoning, crisis managing, strategic communicating, press-release writing, magazine editing, relationship-building, event-managing and trying to figure out how to fit my own running routine into a travel schedule that induced time-zone vertigo.
It has been, I like to joke, the longest commitment of my life.
On the occasion of this 10th anniversary, I have been waxing nostalgic. I wanted to share some random highlights:
2000: The Sydney Olympics were, of course, the focus of that year. At team training camp in Brisbane, I had hosted press events and even managed to drive two athletes and a journalist to the training track without getting in a reportable auto accident. I am pretty sure that Mike Stember's life flashed before his eyes more than a couple of times on that 10-mile drive, but all's well that ends well.
When we got to Sydney, USATF's Melissa Minker and I hunkered down doing our worker bee media services. Before I had left for Australia, family and friends had seen me off with a cheery, "we'll look for you on TV!" My response was simple but true: "I hope you don't, because if you see me on TV, that means something bad has happened."
They saw me on TV. Network news, CNN, you name it.
The news that CJ Hunter had failed three drug tests at European track meets hit the press, and my professional life became a test of physical endurance. I would get 100 phone calls before noon, calls at 2 a.m., calls throwing out increasingly ludicrous rumors. I spent so much time talking to the press I lost my voice. I caught a flu bug that had been circulating through the USOC staff. The day I walked into a press conference to address the Hunter situation, 800 international journalists, all in various states of tizzy, greeted me. The sharks were circling, and it was my job to keep them at bay. Unfortunately I had forgotten to wear my sharkproof suit, and I had left my stun gun at my dorm.
That said, these were the best Games of the four I have been to. Great people, incredible facilities, and incredibly well-run. Watching the sun come up over the Sydney Opera House after the last night of competition is a moment I'll always remember.
2001: The centerpiece of the year was flying from the World Outdoor Championships in Edmonton to the World University Games in Beijing to the Goodwill Games in Brisbane.
The Beijing of 2001 was a completely different place from the Beijing I visited in 2008. I have many memorable moments from that first trip, but one of the weirdest was that it was on Chinese TV that I first heard and saw Destiny's Child classic intellectual pop smash, "Bootylicious." Nearly everything else they played was from Korea. But I guess China loved them some Beyonce.
2003: Ahhh, Paris. We'll always have Paris. The World Outdoor Championships were in the City of Light, and what an experience it was. My colleagues Tom Surber, Susan Hazzard and I never run out of anecdotes from this trip. There was Tom, trying to figure out how to get a Xerox copier from a sales rep who spoke little English, and then to get said copier into a stadium where only Mita products were allowed. Sitting in an office with no air conditioning as the sun relentlessly poured through a window. Scrambling frantically to make the last bus back to the press hotel each and every night, drunk with fatigue. Having dinner each night always, ALWAYS with goat cheese at the restaurants outside the Gare du Nord train station. Me assigning a theme song to every member of the Associated Press' team covering the meet. (I hope Bob Baum and Raf Casert can still remember theirs.) Having a special section in each daily USATF newsletter, called the "French Phrase of the Day." My favorites were "Ou est Bubba?" (To be used when looking for team USA head coach Bubba Thornton) and the most common, extraordinarily helpful answer we got when asking questions of the locals: "It is not possible."
2004: Another Olympic year. Drake University Sports Information overlord Mike Mahon was assisting me with media relations in Athens, and we shared a night and day we will never forget.
Track competition in Athens was to begin with the men's and women's shot put being held at the stadium at Ancient Olympia. To get there, the press were to take one of two buses scheduled to leave at 2:30 a.m. Another USOC media staffer, Cecil Bleiker, was keen to see Olympia, so he volunteered to drive us there, with a more civilized departure time of about 4 a.m. or so.
At 2:27 a.m., my cell phone rang. It was Cecil. He was swamped and couldn't drive us. That gave me 3 minutes to get out of bed, get dressed, gather my stuff and haul my half-asleep carcass to the media bus, which thankfully was only about a block away. Forget personal hygiene.
Breathless, we made the bus and found two empty seats. For the next several hours, we endured the bodily aromas of a busful of journalists and team officials, who like us were offensively unshowered. Included in the motley crew were two coach-looking people from Belarus who refused to stop conversing at any point. And they were not using their indoor voices.
With the aforementioned journalists and officials having spent 7 hours in the Grecian sun, the bus ride back smelled even worse.
2006: In 2006 I returned to Athens for the IAAF World Cup. What I remember from that trip is that I had forgotten about having a meet in Athens: never, ever expect the buses to run on time.
2008: This undoubtedly will go down as one of the key years in the history of USATF, as our second CEO left and our third CEO took the reins. Had Craig Masback never been CEO of USATF, I never would be working here. But Craig had a great opportunity to start a new chapter of his professional life for him and his family, which presented USATF with an opportunity to bring in a new leader. I first "met" Doug Logan a few days before he was hired, exchanging emails as I prepared a possible press release in the event that our Board of Directors approved his hiring. I could tell I was really going to like this guy. I liked him even more when I realized that he wasn't going to make firing me one of his first acts as CEO. Thanks for that, Doug.
In December, Stephanie Hightower became the new President of USATF in a hotly contested election. Everyone was buzzing about it: who was going to win the Clash of the Titans between Doug and Stephanie? Which limb would be the first to be severed? In the epic battle royale between volunteers and staff, who would prevail? Surely this was a recipe for disaster. As it turns out, it has been a recipe for an animated harmony, with occasional strains of Tchaikovsky's Firebird Suite, just to keep things interesting. It's been terrific having both Doug and Stephanie for bosses.
After 10 years, it is my hope that this chapter of my life is far from finished. For all the occasional stress, insanity, crises and 2:27 a.m. phone calls, this remains a job that is never boring. It is a job that enables me to work with a wide variety of endlessly interesting people, from my colleagues to our athletes, journalists, coaches, agents and international leaders. But most important, it remains that challenges and engages me.
Of course, it helps that I now have a closetful of sharkproof suits. And they're black, of course.
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Jill
M. Geer is Chief Public Affairs Officer of USATF. She recently completed her
first marathon at the Bank of America Chicago Marathon, where she qualified for
Boston. Follow her professional exploits as the USATF spokesperson and her
adventures as a mid-pack marathoner -- Off The Record.
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