Emails, phone calls, tweets, retweets — the Champion staff is delighted to see our readers are reading. We tell the stories of college sports — the people, the purpose and the passion. And when people who work to support college sports discover in our pages a story that ignites their passion and sense of purpose, we know we’ve done our jobs.
Yet our favorite interactions happen in the Champion photo booth. The audience varies depending on the booth’s location, from college presidents and athletics directors at the NCAA Convention to sports information directors at the College Sports Information Directors of America convention. But each time our staff invites readers to pose for a cover, we bond over a shared love of college sports.
At the 2018 NCAA Convention in Indianapolis, the photo booth helped celebrate the magazine’s 10th anniversary. We were happy to see former NCAA postgraduate interns who are now working at member schools, and we even enjoyed a laugh with Kurt Beron, an economics professor at Texas-Dallas. He wanted to know whether we had intended the illustration that accompanied Champion’s story about the Division III Faculty Athletics Representative Engagement Working Group to look like him. (We hadn’t, but the resemblance was uncanny.)
Our next stop: the 2018 College Sports Information Directors of America convention in June — another chance to reconnect with old friends and make some new ones.