The Player's Perspective: Dealing with the media

For this year's training camp, former Pitt offensive lineman Artie Rowell is sharing some of his unique perspective on what life is like for a college football player. Today, Artie turns his attention to dealing with the media, which is something he did quite often as a starting offensive lineman over the last few years.

Media Day
In light of yesterday’s Media Day with the Pitt football team, I thought it would be appropriate to shed some light on college football players interacting with the press from the player’s perspective. Before sharing my thoughts, I would like to share an experience that I had during my career.

Following a knee surgery in the beginning of my redshirt junior year, I decided to fill a small chunk of time that traditionally would have been spent getting ready for a game at Heinz Field. I was asked by Chris Mueller to do, on average, two 15-minute pregame radio segments prior to home games. Mueller would ask me questions related to the practices leading up to the game, critique the prior week’s performance and give a brief introduction to that day’s opponent.

After one of the segments, I was tagged in a tweet that read something to the effect of, “@arowell57 is so boring on the radio, as I was driving I almost swerved into oncoming traffic, and crashed my car from being put to sleep.” Was I really that bad on the radio?

I would assume that it comes as no surprise to the reader that I, myself, actually enjoyed speaking with the media. Sure, some days after a long and grueling practice, the S.I.D (Sports Information Director) and staff would ask for participation in daily interviews where, in my opinion, the questions were so painfully simple to answer. However, as the years progressed, I started to think differently about how I would approach my time spent in front of the cameras. I saw it as an opportunity to grow professionally as a public speaker. More importantly, I viewed it as direct engagement with the Pitt fan base on a variety of topics, including the direction of the program and performance evaluations.

Unfortunately, many of my teammates did not share similar opinions regarding their interaction with the press. Often, players feel a sense of distrust from the members of the press. There is a perceived misconception, which tends to be based upon a prior incident, where the athlete believes his words had been taken out of context and twisted to better fit the author’s story. Due to the fact that starters and contributors only talk to the press, typically in their junior and senior seasons, once the media loses the trust of a player, it is usually very hard to be restored. All of this can be avoided by following this basic strategy when approaching the media:

- Prepare yourself for interviews. As an experienced player you can probably predict 90% of the questions you are going to receive. Take at least five minutes to think about the answers to those questions before walking into the room. Whenever I was asked to do the weekly Monday press conference, I always sat in Coach Narduzzi’s press conference beforehand. I wanted to mirror the approach of the head coach. Chances are if you are stuck on a question, repeating what the head coach said earlier, (we all get the same questions) is always a safe bet.

- Keep it simple. When Chris Peak asks why we had trouble getting the run game going in the last game, he doesn’t need to know that when we ran our inside zone play, the backside guard was getting beat every time on the ‘under’ block, effectively eliminating the running back’s opportunity to take the natural cutback. Keep it simple by saying something to the effect of, “We were unable to execute one of our base plays. You have to be able to execute your base plays in order to have an effective run game.”

- Know your audience and know your place. As a player, you are not just speaking with the dozen or so members of the media in the room. You are effectively speaking with the entire Pitt community. You are representing something much bigger than yourself. You owe it to the fan base to speak insightfully on your performance and the program. With that being said, you are a player, not a coach. Media often asks about updates regarding the performance of your teammates. Unless you have something positive to say, don’t say it.

- Always speak highly of your competition. The most important way to avoid any issues is to always speak highly of your opponent. Whether your opponent is the defense in training camp or the school you are getting ready to play on Saturday. There are way too many occurrences of an athlete adding fuel to the fire. Week after week, coaches, graduate assistants and personnel will print out articles from the opposing team’s media releases as motivational tactics. Let your performance on film speak for you, there is no need to create controversy prior to the game.

Follow these simple tips and everyone becomes a winner. Opponents have nothing to hang up in their locker room, the fans obtain a sense of involvement and you gain invaluable experience speaking a national platform.

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