Growing your communications value | Brad Bankston | CSC Voices, Beyond the Scoreboard

CSC Voices, Beyond the Scoreboard host: Trip Durham, 2D Consulting, LLC

Guest: Brad Bankston, Old Dominion Athletic Conference Commissioner

In this podcast with host Trip Durham, Brad Bankston talks about his unorthodox start to his athletic communications career.

In 1997, at the age of 26, he was named Commissioner of the Old Dominion Athletic Conference (ODAC), becoming the second commissioner in the league’s history. The ODAC is one of the nation’s largest Division III conferences with 15 members. The conference office is located in Forest, Virginia.

In 1997, Bankston replaced the only commissioner in ODAC history, Dan Wooldridge. Bankston first met Wooldridge in the summer of 1992, when Bankston, a University of North Carolina graduate, was working a summer job as a painter at Hampden-Sydney College. Knowing Bankston was headed to Virginia Tech the next fall for graduate school, former Hampden-Sydney sports information director Dean Hybl suggested he work part-time for Wooldridge and the Salem-based ODAC. Wooldridge sat down with Bankston for an interview, albeit an informal one, considering the paint caked on Bankston’s arms and face – and offered him the ODAC sports information director position. Three year later, Bankston was named assistant commissioner in 1995 and his elevation into athletic administration started.

Learn about his sports communications roots and his advice and insights on the athletic communications profession today. They include:

• the lessons he learned and insights he still uses from sports information being his entry into college sports administration 
• words of advice for the athletic communicators to reach their next professional position and chase their dreams, professionally
• lessons learned from past professional mistakes 
• what the AD and commissioners need from their Division III communications staffers and how communicators can increase their value and influence today
• accomplishments during his long tenure that he is most proud of
• on a more personal level, how he battles always being “on” and seeks more work-life integration, particularly as his wife faces breast cancer
• in the “get to know Brad Bankston department” he was asked – what remains on his bucket list, what walk up song is, and who inspires him