The 2024 Eastern Colorado Media Guide

Going through the biggest production an SID has in preseason

Nov 05, 2024

Hello everyone and welcome back to the UEC Bighorns Dynasty!

We’re gearing up for kickoff, so it’s time to get to know the team! For an SID, that means a ton of preseason prep work to compile the end-all, be-all of knowledge and information for anyone covering or watching the team: the media guide!

And now you can view the 2024 UEC Media Guide right here for free! Best keep it handy, because we’ll go section-by-section here to talk about how it’s put together, why certain things are included, and more so you can get a look inside the SID world.

Read the 2024 UEC Media Guide! (PDF)

What is a media guide?

In its simplest terms, a media guide is just that - a guide for the media.

One of the main prongs of an SID’s job is to prepare the media to effectively cover their programs and the media guide is the first step in that. It serves as a compendium of every stitch of information that weaves the fabric of their team. It often times includes things like bios, record books, school information and any and every stat that the commentators, writers, or podcasters want to know about players, staff and the program overall.

Because UEC is in its first season, our media guide is a lot lighter than most teams’. That’s because there is no history at all. Here, our media guide is only about 30 pages total. When I worked at Toledo to design the football media guide, that monster crossed the 250 page mark. We’ll see ours grow as the history of UEC starts to take shape, but right now, it’s pretty meat-and-bones.

How is this made? For most SIDs, it’s written in a word processor like Google Docs or Microsoft Word and then the layout is designed on Adobe InDesign. I’m not paying for a full Adobe subscription, so I used the free open-source Scribus instead and wrote everything in Google Docs. The graphics you see on the cover were designed in Photoshop, which is industry standard.

One tip: if you’re doing anything in a publishing software like InDesign, Scribus or Affinity Publisher, you’ll want to write all your content in a word processor. Most of these publishers do not have spell or grammar checks in them and it can be tedious proofreading through over 300 pages of statistics. Use Docs or Word, you’ll thank me later.

Quick Facts/Stadium Facts

This is often the leading section of a media guide because it’s some of the most pertinent information.

The quick facts section is just that - quick facts. It’s often one page that breaks down things you might need to know about the school and program at a glance. We see a lot of staff listings, social media links, and things like enrollment numbers and all-time records here. Branding questions like official colorways and mascot names are also included here. It’s designed to be a one-stop shop for these quick facts if someone covering the program needs it.

Then, we get onto the stadium section and it starts to beef up. A lot of programs have multiple pages dedicated to their stadium’s history. Since Miller Memorial Stadium, home of the Bighorns, was recently completed and has no history, we just have a quick story I jotted down about our fictional home. We’ll see this section expand as more things happen in Miller to include things like notable wins, attendance levels, and more.

Season Outlook

At their heart, SIDs are often writers. We like spinning a yarn, even if nobody is really going to listen.

Ahead of each season, the SIDs will sit down with the head coach and possibly some position coaches or coordinators to talk about which players they assume will make an impact on the team. Then, the SID writes a “Season Outlook” story to briefly familiarize the media with their main contributors. It often highlights the main players to contribute at each position and some of their accolades from the season before.

Since this is a new program that has no history and no stats, I wrote the story based on how I saw the players fitting into the scheme I want to run in this dynasty. Where normally I would have to sit down with the coach and talk through the roster, I could just make things up because, at the end of the day, I’m the coach and the SID. Funny how that works!

The Coaching Staff

Here’s where a lot of the world building went in.

I wanted to make our head coach, J.J. Williams, as realistic as possible. So I created a whole backstory for him. It involved researching veer and shoot and pistol teams, mostly looking at the Josh Heupel (veer and shoot) and Chris Ault (pistol) coaching trees. I wish I could’ve kept most of his career close to his Wyoming home, but you see a lot of coaches nowadays moving around the country. Especially if they have a specific scheme they run like Williams does.

For a real team, this section would include the entire coaching staff, down to position coaches and graduate assistants. College Football 25 only has a three-man staff with the head coach and offensive and defensive coordinators, so we have a much smaller section than you normally would.

Each coach has what everyone in the industry calls “The [Coach Name] File.” This is the comprehensive record of what the coach has done each season with wins and losses. I’ve built out Coach Williams’ the most here, since he’s the head coach, but coordinators often get some too. I’ve decided against it because College Football 25 doesn’t give me a lot of information on these coordinators. Maybe we’ll flesh it out more in future sections.

Rosters

Believe it or not, the rosters are the easiest sections in a media guide to put together. Mostly because you’re just plugging in information about a player and reordering it. I’ve only done a numerical roster here because that’s what I prefer to look at, but you’ll also see teams use alphabetical and even geographical rosters to show how the players came to the team.

Know anyone interested in working in sports communications? Send them this post so they can learn about the field!

Player Profiles

This section is one of the more interesting in a media guide because it’s an introduction to who is on the team. In a true media guide, you’d see a profile for each and every player on the roster. These are often just a copy and paste with some re-formatting from the website biography on the player, so there’s no additional work that goes in besides formatting.

However, you may notice that the first UEC Media Guide does not include all the players’ bios. That’s because a) I don’t want to make up backstories for 85 players, and b) I’m basing this as a hybrid between a media guide and a spring prospectus.

What’s a Spring Prospectus? Well, that’s a document that’s going out of style, but one that I’ve used a ton in researching this newsletter, so I’ll probably keep it alive if I ever get back into the SID field. A Spring Prospectus is a condensed media guide put out during - you guessed it - spring ball. This includes spring rosters, notes on the coaching staff to acclimate the press to any coaching changes, and bios on the main players. Mostly, that’ll be returning players and some transfers - whoever they assume will make up the starting roster.

Now, you’ll notice the formatting on these bios is…different. That’s one of the two main SID styles for writing bios. Why it’s done that way, I’m not sure. Probably to conserve space compared to the increasingly more common bullet points that translate well to websites. Let’s look at the first entry for Aydawn McTastee:

You see a bio broken up in a few major ways, two of which are on Aydawn’s. The first is their previous stop, in this case, Independence Community College. Here, you’ll see the highlights of their career thus far. Since media guides are produced by a school to market their own players, this won’t be a very robust section. You want to keep the focus on what they’ve done at UEC, not at Indy. The second is his high school highlights. For most prospects, SIDs get this information from a questionnaire the players fill out once the sign their National Letter of Intent. Not shown here are a year-by-year breakdown of their stats at UEC and their personal information. Aydawn is on the inaugural roster, so there’s no stats at UEC to report. As for personal information, I didn’t fill that in for time’s sake. There are a few players on the roster where their backstory from the submission survey included some personal information, so they have that section.

The whole “He did this…Then did that…” format is SID standard. It’s not the best to read, but that’s how the industry does it in media guides. You can sometimes find the same list bulleted on the player bio sections of team’s websites, but it’s a pretty even split from what I’ve seen. All the schools I’ve worked at have used this format, so it’s the most natural for me to write.

Bighorn History

In most media guides, this is the largest section. The one that’s full of season stats, team and individual records, and more.

But we’re a program just starting up, so all we have is a short-lived timeline breaking down when major events leading up to the first game in Bighorn history occurred and a section about the college. Generally, media guides always close with academic information about the university to give the press an idea of what the school is succeeding at in the classroom. After all, athletics are often seen as a front porch to advertising a university.

So there you have it, the 2024 UEC Bighorns Media Guide! It was a lot of fun to write and compile. I hope you all learned something in this write-up and I look forward to sharing more with you as the Bighorns season progresses!

UP NEXT IN THE UEC DYNASTY: Preseason Video and Week 1

What I’m Reading:

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An idea hatched after years of 12-hour days glued to the couch, Tyler Schuster puts his passion for the sport on full display, delivering big-picture ideas, weekly previews and gambling nuggets directly to your inbox.

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