· REMEMBER- Always, refer to our Academic All-America® program and its respective Academic All-District  teams, Academic All-America® teams and Academic All-America® Hall of Fame, with our sponsor Capital One placed prior to all "Academic All-America" mention. 

· The master schedule for nomination deadlines/ team announcements for the 2011-12 Capital One Academic All-America® program  is now available, along with the 2011-12 Academic All-America Committee list and the list of newly-aligned districts. Find this important planning information here: http://cosida.com/Awards/allamerica.aspx

We are excited that the much anticipated expansion of the Academic All-America program from a two-division selection process (University and College Division) to a four-division  selection process (NCAA Division I, NCAA Division II, NCAA Division III and College Division (NAIA, Canada and Two-Year) is ready to kick off.  We remind everyone that you must be a 2011-12 member of CoSIDA to nominate your deserving student-athletes and we strongly encourage you to not wait until the last moment to do that.  Please note also that there is a new district alignment in place this year for the AAA program and the district alignment is different for each of the four divisional programs (NCAA DI, DII, DIII, and College Division- NAIA/Canadian/Two -Year). Please review those district alignments as they relate to your specific division at the "2011-12 Academic All-America Committee and District Alignment" link HERE.  Final nomination deadlines for our fall programs are as follows:  Men's and Women's Soccer (close at 6 pm ET on Oct. 18), Women's Volleyball (6pm ET on Oct. 25 ) and Football (6pm ET on Oct.  25).   

 · Nominations for the Capital One Academic All-America Hall of Fame (Class of 2012) will run through through Friday, Nov. 4. Find detailed information on nomination policies, nomination materials, etc., HERE.

 · The Board and AAA Committee remind CoSIDA members that CoSIDA's "Academic All-America®" mark is federally registered. As such, CoSIDA members must help the Board and AAA Committee monitor the wrongful use of this registered trademark. If you see any other organizations, including coaching associations, using this registered trademark, immediately contact CoSIDA Executive Director John Humenik (jhumenik@bellsouth.net) and AAA Committee chair emeritus Dick Lipe (Bentley University) at rlipe@bentley.edu. We will have our legal counsel, Collegiate Images, follow up w ith a letter regarding infringement of our federally registered mark and they will be asked to "cease and desist" from future use of that mark.  

· Many times during the year we find that our own membership is using "Academic All-America®" in releases that they prepare for student-athletes receiving academic achievement awards from other organizations - when in fact those organizations refer to their awards as "All-Academic," "Scholar-Athlete," "Academic All-Star," etc.  We remind  CoSIDA members be cognizant of only using "Academic All-America®" in relation to CoSIDA's program. There are NO exceptions and you should make sure your administrative staff and coaches understand that they do not have the right to take another award that is being presented for combined academic/athletic excellence by coaches' associations/organizations and change it to "Academic All-America®" instead of its appropriate title as determined by that awarding organization.   

 · CoSIDA Executive Director John Humenik attended a meeting in Dallas on Sept. 15th that ncluded Executive Directors of several management and coaches associations in intercollegiate athletics.  The event was hosted by Dutch Baughman, Executive Director of the Division 1A Athletic Directors Association (Division 1-A ADA) and included Grant Teaff (AFCA-American Football Coaches Association), Reggie Minton (NABC-National Association of Basketball Coaches), Beth Bass (WBCA-Women's Basketball Coaches Association), Patti Phillips (NACWAA-National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators) and Amy Perko (Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics) in addition to Baughman and Humenik.   

· John Humenik and Director of Internal Operations Will Roleson represented CoSIDA on Sept. 19 at the NCAA Inclusion Summit entitled "Challenges, Champions, and Collaborative Strategies - Moving Toward a More Inclusive Culture."   

· CoSIDA President Tom Di Camillo (Pac West Conference) represent the organization at the Rural Community College Alliance on Sept. 27-28 in Oklahoma City.  He talked about two-year school involvement in CoSIDA's Capital One Academic All-America® program.  

· Director of External Affairs Barb Kowal plans to represent CoSIDA at the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators (NACWAA) Convention in Pittsburgh from Oct. 9-11.

· Di Camillo will also represent CoSIDA at the NCAA Division II Conference Commissioners meetings in Indianapolis on Oct. 12-13.   

· Executive Director John Humenik received an invitation from Amy Perko, Executive Director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and a 2008 inductee into the Capital One Academic All-America Hall of Fame, to attend the Knight Commission's annual meeting in Washington D.C. on Oct. 24.  

· John Humenik, Director of External Affairs Barb Kowal and Will Roleson will hold meetings at the NACDA headquarters in Cleveland on Nov 1-2 with the NACDA leadership group.  Various details and transition matters will be discussed as they relate to the final pieces of the CoSIDA/NACDA partnership. That partnership was approved by the CoSIDA Board in December of 2008 and will combine the annual CoSIDA Convention within the NACDA Convention in Orlando in June of 2013.    

· Third Vice President Eric McDowell  (Union- N.Y.) will coordinate our continuing education inititiatives this year.  If you have ideas or want to coordinate a session, please contact him at mcdowele@union.edu.

 · The first continuing education session for the membership took place on Thursday, Sept. 29 entitled "Your Complete Guide to Using Mobile Location-Based Apps." It was presented by New Media/Tech Committee members Cassie Gage (Oklahoma) and Jay Stancil (Union College-Ky.) who were joined by  SCVNGR Universities and Schools Specialist Jeff Kirchick. Moderator was 3rd VP Eric McDowell (Union-NY). The basics of using the fast-growing mobile location-based applications, from controlling privacy settings to setting up exciting promotions and contests at all price points, were discussed in detail.  

All information on this session is archived. CoSIDA members who were not able to listen - or who wish to review the information presented - can listen to the audio playback and view the full transcript here: http://cosida.com/news.aspx?id=3385. The audio stream/on-demand audio is  provided by TRZ Sports/TEAMLINE (CoSIDA's official conference call provider) while Fastscripts is courtesy of ASAP Sports, CoSIDA's official instant transcripts provider.  

 · NewTek, CoSIDA's official continuing education video archive  provider, is making available this fall/early winter  several  taped sessions from the Marco Island CoSIDA Convention held this past June.  These convention sessions are being provided to our membership as a prominent piece of our fall/early winter continuing education initiatives for the 2011-12 year. The CoSIDA Board would like to thank NewTek for its support of this continuing education initiative.  Access the schedule for when these sessions will be posted HERE in the CoSIDA calendar of events.  The first taped session from the CoSIDA convention will be posted on Oct. 6 at www.cosida.com and features the outstanding motivational presentation by Lou Holtz.

· Barb Kowal continues to work with the Membership Services Committee (chaired by Blake Timm of Pacific- Ore.) and the New Media/Technology Committee (chaired by Chris Syme) the newly established CoSIDA Online Reference and Research Library.  This is an online continuing education/ professional development membership reference tool which we feel will be helpful to our membership, as well as others in the athletics community.  

     The group held an August 12 conference call and decided to divide the Resource Library content collection. Kowal will oversee collecting and organizing all crisis and strategic communications/professional development/continuing education articles and resources for the Library. Volunteers from the Membership Services and New Media committees will work on gathering and organizing articles, links and videos on all other Resource Library topics to assist Kowal in building the site (topics such as how-to's, office development, website management, social/digital media, etc.).  The goal is to have the RL framework built by the end of December and ready for membership use at that time, knowing that this will be a continual work in progress. Once the RL is available, volunteers from the committees will monitor the RL and advise on new articles, resources to be placed and information to be cycled out.  

NACDA   

· Once again this year CoSIDA's leadership, as part of the partnership agreement signed with NACDA in the spring of 2009, has the opportunity to  provide a "CoSIDA Corner"  for each issue of NACDA's Athletics Administration Magazine.  You can read this year's first column for the October issue, penned by CoSIDA President Tom Di Camillo (Pac West Conference).  

      Each issue of the NACDA magazine  (which is published in October, November, December, February, Mary, April, June and August, is sent to more than 10,000 university and athletics administrators with CoSIDA's voice, thoughts, and expertise being shared with these key constituents.  This column, along with the NACDA daily email blast, provides CoSIDA incredible and valued exposure with all of the other management groups in intercollegiate athletics. 

·  On September 19 while at the "NCAA Inclusion Summit" in Indianapolis, NACDA Executive Director Bob Vecchione and John Humenik visited with regard to CoSIDA/NACDA matters including finalizing the agenda for the November 2 meeting that will deal with CoSIDA's transition into the NACDA Convention in 2013.

 Division III  

Strategic Branding/Marketing & Communications Based

· At the Marco Island Convention the Strategic Branding Committee, chaired by then-1st VP Tom Di Camillo, made a recommendation to the Board that CoSIDA's organizational title be reviewed and analyzed as part of an ongoing strategic branding  review process. First VP Joe Hornstein (UCF) was then appointed by President-elect Tom Di Camillo to chair the Strategic Branding Committee for the 2011-12 year.   

· Executive Director John Humenik is in the process of providing the CoSIDA Board of Directors and divisional leadership a three-year update/progress report on various initiatives established for action in the CoSIDA Strategic Master Plan that the Board adopted in June of 2008.  Starting with the first week of August, Humenik is taking one of the established initiative each week and providing a update on progress with regard to that initiative after three years and focus points for the remaining two years of the plan.

· During the month of September, 25 CoSIDA-based stories appeared on NACDA's Daily Review email blast.  There were 21 Daily Review emails sent during the month. Due to this effort, that primarily came about due to CoSIDA's decision in Dec. of 2008 to become an affiliated partner within the NACDA  organizational umbrella, several thousands of university and athletics administrators are being exposed to professional and organizational news that primarily only appeared on the CoSIDA website in the past and was thus only viewed by our membership.

· Also in September, three CoSIDA-based features/stories were posted on NCAA.com and/or NCAA.org and circulated a total of 11 times on the NCAA Daily News Direct email blast.  

· During September, 32 articles were posted on our organizational website (CoSIDA.com). In addition, the CoSIDA Twitter page (www.twitter.com/CoSIDAnews) had 264 tweets/postings during the month, all of them informative nature with breaking news, timely topics and comments for athletic communication professionals.

FAME (Female Athletics Media Relations Executives) News  

· FAME has been a subset group of CoSIDA since the 1990's and there is new leadership in place for this academic year. FAME held its third steering committee conference call of the academic year on September 28. The group discussed St. Louis Convention programming, CoSIDA Special Award nominations, the new monthly e-newsletter (first issue sent out in September) and discussed a re-design of the FAME logo to be completed by the target date of January 31, 2012. Those interested in reading the newsletter and/or joining FAME can contact Co-chairs Natalia Ciccone (Pac-12 Conference, nciccone@Pac-12.org) and Diane Nordstrom of Wisconsin (dkn@athletics.wisc.edu).  

       The group will work closely with Director of External Affairs Barb Kowal on any outreach/

survey/publicity/ website information, while Cindy Fotti from Columbia College (Mo.) is the CoSIDA Board liaison to the group and CoSIDA 2nd Vice President Shelly Poe (Ohio State) is an advisor as well. 

Miscellaneous   

Eclaro Sports    

· John Humenik worked with Jay Williams, VP of Eclaro Sports, CoSIDA's official professional development partner,  and CoSIDA's various divisional leadership Presidents/Chairs to have each of them send a letter to their respective membership groups regarding the confidential Eclaro resume bank that is being developed for our membership.  This resume bank, which now has more than 400 personal resumes from CoSIDA members,  can then be made available - in a confidential manner- to schools/AD's when a communications-based opening occurs.    

Survey/Research Based 

· Joe Moore, a former SID at Central Missouri who is now a professor in that school's Communications Department, continues to work with John Humenik/Barb Kowal regarding his dissertation on "Earned Influence in Collegiate Sports PR: Why Some Have It and Others Don't" which has been endorsed by the CoSIDA Board and its divisional leadership groups.  The Board feels that Joe's work, perhaps the most extensive ever conducted on this particular subject matter, can assist CoSIDA in the future with regard to possible strategic initiatives. Moore indicated in mid-June that more than 350 CoSIDA members participated in  a survey that was conducted during the month of May. In early July Moore provided an executive summary of that survey data to Humenik and the 2011-12 CoSIDA Board.  Moore indicated he will now be seeking AD input/thoughts via a survey and he will then be providing the final data/report at the 2012 CoSIDA Convention in St. Louis.