Once students – and by proxy, student-athletes – leave for their three-month summer break, the entire campus begins to look like a ghost town. Even after summer classes begin, the Centennial Center, next to the dorms on Georgia College’s main campus, is populated almost exclusively by coaches and other staff. Although coaches have a subjective amount of “time off” before they begin either conditioning with the players or recruiting new ones, one man seems to have nothing to do, Assistant Director of Athletics Al Weston.
During the school year, Weston manages student-employees, helps plan media events for the teams and can often be seen running around the Centennial Center when gameday rolls around, looking for anything from cables to people. Even during the monthlong winter break, in December, he has plenty of tasks to prepare for the basketball season ensuring he has no time for any sort of relaxation. Summer break, however, is a completely different story, as there are no sports events at all, and it will be months before the first athletes return to start practicing for anything.
“I definitely get a lot of my time back,” said Weston. “A 50-hour work week is pretty normal for me during the school year, so I like to take quite a few days off now that I have the time to avoid any kind of burnout because that’s something that can be pretty common in my position.”
With his student-employees out for the summer, the duty of posting on the athletic department’s social media account falls on him, so he decided to create graphics and highlight videos of each team’s best moments during their season and post them every Tuesday to keep the feed fresh. Along with team highlights, he also keeps track of student-athletes who play baseball in one of the many summer leagues, such as Dominic Arienzo who plays for the Macon Bacon of the Coastal Plain League, and other former athletes who might be in the farm system for a professional team.
Weston also uses the downtime to think of ways to improve next year’s production of sports events. After the first year of using a new livestreaming service that allows for much more creativity and seamlessness behind the scenes, he is optimistic about the ability to take the broadcasts to the next level. By the start of the first game of the school year, he hopes to have things like replays, advertisements and communication between employees running as smoothly as possible.
The importance of the behind-the-scenes work Weston does during the year does not go unnoticed, as students employed by him and coaches he works with all praise his kindness and dedication to everyone he interacts with.
“Al is one of the best bosses I have ever had the pleasure of working under,” said former employee Luke Winstel, who is a commentator on ESPN+ and a current student at UGA. “He is incredibly dedicated to his employees and makes sure they are all on the same playing field when it comes to working gamedays or even if they’re just in the office editing stuff for social media.”
Even though the job can be stressful and hectic, especially when there are three sports being played at the same time, Weston said he enjoys the work, as he loves seeing the students he employs get better at what they do as the year progresses, especially when that means the production quality of games increases along with it.