Athletes are back to training and competing this week as Colorado Mesa University kicks off a new school year. However, many wouldn’t know that without the help of the athletics staff. Unfortunately, one member of the athletic department won’t be returning this year, Ian Marks.
Marks, CMU’s sports information director since 2013, left the program this July to become the University of Alaska-Anchorage’s (UAA) next assistant athletic director for media relations. This leaves CMU with David Jahnke as its lone sports information director for the upcoming year. Jahnke and Marks were colleagues for four years, and he talked with Marks about his decision to move to Alaska.
“Hockey was a big drawing point for him,” Jahnke said.
Marks worked at Michigan Tech for six years prior to working for CMU and focused largely on hockey. Hockey is a much bigger sport at UAA, and with less variety of sports, it will allow Marks to cover more of what he enjoys.
With Mark’s departure, Jahnke is responsible for the coverage of all 25 NCAA sports here at CMU. To help him out, the department is planning on hiring a part-time employee who performed the same job at Adams State and CSU Pueblo in years past.
“Between myself and working out the details with him, I think we can get the jobs all accomplished, and the biggest thing is just having one full-time person, and myself being responsible for every sport we have,” Jahnke said.
Jahnke also mentioned that the department is considering having marketing help with the workload. Some of the job responsibilities for Jahnke’s position include being in charge of the different sports’ websites, some social media, talking with the two TV stations in town as well as the local newspaper, taking event statistics and timing for events like swimming and track and field.
Despite Marks’ departure, Jahnke plans to keep improving the CMU sports information sector of the athletic department.
“My biggest goal is I don’t want to go backwards in anything that we’ve done up to this point,” Jahnke said. “I only want to move forward and maintain, if not get better. And so I don’t think people will see a huge change from the two of us to just me and potentially a part-time person,” Jahnke said.
Jahnke does, however, want to focus on more video streaming. In previous years, streaming of games has been average, but Jahnke plans to stream every event, along with incorporating voice overs, play-by-plays and color analysis to raise the bar.
