The University of South Carolina has been selected as a 2025 Super 11 Award winner, which recognizes the best performing College Sports Communicators departments in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, the Football Writers Association of America announced today.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the fourth time in the past five years that the South Carolina football communications staff have been recognized with this prestigious award.<\/p>\n
Gamecock football communications efforts are led by Senior Associate Athletics Director Steve Fink and assisted by secondary contacts David Fox and Kent Reichert.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a tremendous honor for our staff to be recognized by the FWAA with this award,\u201d said Fink.\u00a0 \u201cIt is a testament to the hard work of our staff and the importance that Coach Beamer puts on building relationships with the media.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 11 Awards for the 2025 season with their CSC directors and their staffs went to Clemson \u2013 13th time (Ross Taylor), Nebraska \u2013 12th time (Keith Mann), Navy \u2013 ninth time (Scott Strasemeier); Iowa (Matt Weitzel), South Carolina (Steve Fink), Tennessee (Bill Martin) and West Virginia (Mike Montoro) each a fourth time;\u00a0 Texas Tech (Matt Dowdy) a third time, and Ohio State (Jerry Emig) and San Jose State (Sky Kerstein) a second time. The first-time recipient school in the 2025 Super 11 was Kansas (Andrew Eisch). The Super 11 began with the 2009 season.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s winners were deemed to have had excellent accessibility during the week of their games and after the game with a program\u2019s players, coaches and coordinators\/assistant coaches. Other criteria regarding beat reporter access, interview requests, and decorum and protocols in the press box and locker room are listed in the 2025-26 FWAA Directory.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re so excited to again honor the best and brightest communication staffs in college football,\u201d said FWAA 2026 President Shehan Jeyarajah of CBS Sports. \u201cI\u2019ve been fortunate enough to directly work with many of the staffers on this list and we greatly appreciate their service to our profession.\u00a0I\u2019d like to give a special recognition to the retiring Jerry Emig at Ohio State, a legend in the industry who has been a wonderful partner to the FWAA over the years. We commend him for his years of service.\u201d<\/p>\n
FWAA members provided input during the season when press boxes were judged on how well they were run and maintained in terms of neutrality, pool reporters, noise level and accessibility to the press box that could affect a media person\u2019s ability to do his or her job.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe once again honor some programs who\u00a0have provided great assistance to writers for many\u00a0years and have demonstrated a culture of excellence in what they do in their pressbox and in terms of accessibility to players and coaches,\u201d said FWAA Executive Director Steve Richardson. \u201cWe applaud those programs as well as the newcomer program. These are the best of the best of several\u00a0communications staff we honor. There are others which are excellent and some on the cusp of making Super 11\u00a0next year perhaps.\u00a0 We have a number of hard-working communications staff\u00a0who make our\u00a0jobs easier. We appreciate that on an annual basis.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is the second national award for the Gamecocks\u2019 Communications and Public Relations staff in the past month.\u00a0 In March, Associate Athletics Director Diana Koval was named the recipient of the Mary Jo Haverbeck Award for 2026 by the U.S. Basketball Writers Association (USBWA).\u00a0 The honor is given to someone for distinguished service to women\u2019s collegiate basketball.<\/p>\n
In January of 2009, the FWAA released the first Super 11 Awards \u2013 a concept supported by the College Sports Communicators (formerly CoSIDA). The FWAA has now awarded at least one Super 11 Award to 83 FBS different programs.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1941, the Football Writers Association of America consists of journalists, broadcasters, publicists, photographers and key executives in all areas of college football. The FWAA works to govern media access and game-day operations while presenting awards and honors, including an annual FWAA All-America Team.<\/p>\n
2025 FWAA Super 11 Honorees
(with all-time award count in parenthesis)<\/p>\n
Clemson (13)
Iowa (4)
Kansas (1)
Navy (9)
Nebraska (12)
Ohio State (2)
San Jose State (2)
South Carolina (4)
Tennessee (4)
Texas Tech (3)
West Virginia (4)<\/p>\n
2025 Super 11 Coach of the Year
Rhett Lashlee, SMU<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The University of South Carolina has been selected as a 2025 Super 11 Award winner, which recognizes the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":862443,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2026],"tags":[235,9544,37060,37058,7,8352,781,37059,4278,1686,9653],"class_list":{"0":"post-862442","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-football","8":"tag-carolina","9":"tag-columbia","10":"tag-featured-articles-home-page","11":"tag-fighting-gamecocks","12":"tag-football","13":"tag-gamecocks","14":"tag-general","15":"tag-headlines-home-page","16":"tag-south-carolina-gamecocks","17":"tag-south-carolina","18":"tag-usc"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116375763243313338","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=862442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/862442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/862443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=862442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=862442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=862442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}