Coasters: The OCC challenge
Steve Virgen
The prestige of the respected athletics department of Orange Coast
College is being challenged.
Sounds too bold of a statement?
Ponder this: OCC is the only school out of the eight colleges in the
Orange Empire Conference without a sports information director.
OCC’s former S.I.D., Sam Felsenfeld, left for greener pastures, so to
speak, after accepting a job to create and maintain a website for a local
company. Now Orange Coast has two sports running, men’s and women’s
basketball, and the spring sports coming soon, and no one to manage
statistics, update the school’s athletic website or report signees and
transfer news.
When is OCC going to take care of the problem?
“I have no idea on what we’re going to do with replacement,” OCC
Athletic Director Fred Hokanson said. “If we are able to replace, we will
(put out an advertisement for hiring). We will try to cover the position
for now, with a couple of people in-house, is what I’ve heard. We need
that position. I hope we can go and get another person, but I don’t
know.”
Hokanson said that he must petition to the school’s planning and
budget committee so that an opening for an S.I.D. can be created again.
The absence of the S.I.D. has created, to put it nicely, bothersome
busy-work for the coaches. Fortunately, for OCC women’s basketball coach
Mike Thornton, he had Felsenfeld train one of his redshirts to manage the
statistics.
“We’ll be OK,” Thornton said. “It’s not a great situation. It’s us
(coaches) that have to pay. I don’t think the men’s basketball media
guide has been done. Fortunately, for us that was done. We had sold ads.
(Felsenfeld) got that done right before he left.
“(OCC has) always had a class program,” he continued. “We’ve been on
top of the conference. I hate to see this happen. It’s a negative thing
for all of us. We’ll be able to survive. Fortunately, I have somebody
that will take care of it.”
Pirates’ men’s basketball coach Steve Spencer hasn’t been so lucky. In
his first year, Spencer, rather than fully concentrate on building a
winner, he must also add stat-taking to his long list of duties. He
sometimes depends on the opponent’s stats to report results to the
newspapers.
Furthermore, the lack of, or inaccuracy of the statistics, might
negatively affect the coaches’ strategy of recruiting. The OCC athletics
website, which has not been updated in more than two months, is
definitely a recruiting tool. But that, too, is in danger. And without
media guides, the sports are failing to advertise themselves.
OCC baseball coach John Altobelli will do his best that his program
will not take a hit.
“I’ll have to do my own stats,” said Altobelli, whose team will be in
serious contention for an OEC title this spring. “I don’t know what we’re
going to do with the media guides. But I’ll use my pocket palm pilot to
keep track of stats as the game progresses. It’s an unfortunate
situation. The coaches just have to suck it up.”
So what went wrong at OCC? Felsenfeld left the school because he
wanted to earn more money and he has a strong desire to work in the
private sector, mainly with marketing or website advertisement.
His ability to do both for OCC, proved tiresome for Felsenfeld, a
27-year-old with a wife and a baby son.
“I really loved Orange Coast, but it was a dead end for me,” said
Felsenfeld, who used the OCC athletics website as a visual reference for
his new job. “It just didn’t work out for me. I had to work too many
hours for the job. For a guy with a wife and a young child that was just
too much. During the school year, I worked 70-80 hours a week.”
Altobelli has a suggestion for future instances of such a workload.
“(OCC) should separate the two, S.I.D. and website (maintenance),”
Altobelli said. “(Sam) created another job. Sam created a monster between
working the two. It’s unfortunate. He did an awesome job. He really did a
super job. People, recruits, have told me, ‘We looked on your web page,’
and had the nicest things to say. Sometimes, I think it was a little too
much because it was like a scouting report for other teams.”
OCC should listen to Altobelli’s suggestion or hire a new S.I.D. soon,
perhaps a part-timer to maintain the website or the stats. OCC sports and
the prestige of the program could take a hit. Winning definitely brings
success, but who will know about the wins if no one is there to spread
the news.
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