The College Sports Information Directors of America and the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security have endorsed a plan that encourages schools to include SIDs as part of campus disaster planning and emergency/risk management teams.

The endorsement came after Lou Marciani, director of the NCS4, presented at the CoSIDA convention this summer on the role of communications professionals during  catastrophes. Marciani also met with CoSIDA’s board of directors about the issue.

The NCS4 has been offering sport risk management workshops for colleges and universities for a year. Marciani said the training sessions drew individuals who would typically compose a university command team for intercollegiate athletics events, including athletics administrators, operations personnel, campus police, emergency management, and fire/hazardous material and emergency medical/health personnel.

Marciani said the trainers came to recognize that university public relations directors would not necessarily not be available if an incident occurred in athletics. That’s where sports information directors came into play.

“The communications contact would probably be responsible for the emergency operations center, so the SID has to be involved in this training because he or she is probably going to take over the role of staff liaison for communications for the command team if an incident were to happen,” Marciani said.

In addition to encouraging the CoSIDA membership to discuss these issues with their institutions’ athletics management teams, the NCS4 has issued a formal invitation to SIDs to attend one of the sport risk management workshops scheduled to start up again in April 2010.

The workshops focus on planning, risk assessment, training, exercising plans and business continuity/recovery. Funded by a grant from the Department of Homeland Security, the sessions are free of charge to member institutions across all three divisions, although participants are responsible for lodging, meals and travel.

Marciani said research indicated that campus groups responsible for security and emergency response at college sports events were not collaborating effectively. The workshops are aimed at improving those groups’ abilities to work together and, more broadly, standardizing event risk management practices at athletics events across the NCAA. About 5,000 participants are expected to attend one of the 80 NCS4-led workshops, most of which will be held in NFL facilities.

CoSIDA membership president Justin Doherty, the assistant athletics director for external relations at Wisconsin, stressed that in the event of an incident – catastrophic or otherwise – schools will have to communicate with a number of audiences. Sports information professionals are valuable campus assets who can help fill that need, he said.

“We’re going to need to communicate with our staff, fans and the media, and we’re going to need to know what to say, how to say it, when to say it and to whom,” said Doherty. “It’s hard to say whether you could ever be prepared for something like that, but this is the best effort we can make to train people ahead of time. Communication is essential in those types of situations, and it just makes sense that your sports information people would be in the mix.”

Marciani believes this is one of the first times SIDs have been involved in such planning and emergency-response preparations.

“If you look back on security in this country in athletics, it’s pretty law-enforcement driven,” he said. “They knew the SIDs were in the press box, but I don’t think they had any formal training, so this is going to be great for the country and great for intercollegiate athletics to get the communications piece looped in. This is important.”

For more information about the NCS4 or the sport risk management workshops, click here.