By: Eric SanInocencio
Once a week, SEC Digital Media Director Eric SanInocencio will share insights on the inner-workings of the conference office.
Birmingham, Ala. -- Day-to-day life at the SEC offices in downtown Birmingham aren't unlike any other setting in a major corporation in the business world.
You have your individual offices and cubicle areas that comprise the working staff, and everyone is geared toward achieving the same goal. The schedule, however, is much different than your normal 9 to 5, and can make life interesting as certain parts of the year approach.
Working in sports in general revolves around a different time clock, with traditional business hours being replaced with nights and weekends at various events. It is something you get accustomed to as you choose this line of work, a kind of trade off for the fact that your JOB is watching a sporting contest that everyone else can't wait to see for their entertainment.
Where working in college athletics separates itself from life in the professional ranks is the time of year you call the "off-season". Depending on the sport, NFL or MLB off-seasons can range from spring to winter, leaving those coaches, players and staff scrambling to find down time during a period when most of their family and friends are working or at school.
College athletics runs on the university calendar, so when classes are out for the summer, the work flow associated with those sports slows down as well. It is almost like a teacher's schedule, taking a small summer break before the fall classes (or in our case, sports) start the pre-registration process.
One time of the year seems to bring that more into focus than any other. When the fall season rolls around at the SEC offices, there seems to be a heightened sense of immediacy in the daily schedule, an extra tension knowing that the official start of the academic and athletic year is close to beginning.
That's without mentioning that fall brings college football, which dominates the radio airwaves and newspaper headlines for months before the first whistle is ever blown. Perhaps the feeling of returning from a summer abroad and getting back into such a hectic schedule causes the extra excitement, but there is no way of denying that this time of the year is always something special to behold.
This year added the extra element of a new launch of
www.secsports.com, which luckily now allows the forum for me to share these thoughts with our fans today. That coupled with the normal crazed enthusiasm of SEC Media Days and the August calendar made this an even more memorable experience.
I'm glad I get to give a small taste of what this path is like, and in the coming weeks, I hope to do so even more. Thanks for stopping by.