By Roscoe Nance


It has been such a long time since Florida A&M Assistant Sports Information Director Alvin Hollins last attended the MEAC Basketball Tournament, he has a hard time remembering. He would like to have gone every year, but the Rattlers have always had a home athletic event that he needed to cover, so he stayed home.
 
It’s the nature of his job.
 
It’ll be a different story this year. Hollins will be center stage at the tournament as a member of the 2019 MEAC Hall of Fame Class that will be enshrined during activities at the tournament, which will be held in at the Norfolk Scope Arena in Norfolk, Va., March 11-16.
 
“They finally figured out a way to get me to the tournament,” Hollins said.
 
The Class of 2019 also includes football All-Americans Dwayne Harper of South Carolina State, Jerome Mathis of Hampton; basketball standout Kyle O’Quinn, a two-time MEAC Defensive Player of the Year for at Norfolk State and a current member of the NBA Indiana Pacers, and Jessica Worley of Maryland Eastern Shore, the first bowler to be inducted into the Hall.
 
The class will be enshrined during an awards brunch on Thursday, March 14, starting with a welcome gathering at 9:30 a.m. at the Sheraton Norfolk Waterside Hotel in Norfolk, Va. The Hall of Fame class will also be recognized before the 6 p.m. men’s tournament game at the Norfolk Scope Arena that same day.
 
Hollins will be the fourth sports information director inducted into the MEAC Hall of Fame. He joins Joe McIver of Morgan State, Bill Hamilton of South Carolina State and Ed Hill of Howard.
 
“I was kind of surprised,” Hollins said. “It wasn’t something I was campaigning for. It’s a great honor to be recognized with the great athletes, coaches and administrators who have worked in this conference. You feel like you put in the work and tried to be dedicated to FAMU and athletics. From that standpoint, it’s gratifying to be recognized for your hard work. You’re just doing your job, doing something you enjoy.”
 
Hollins is in his second tour of duty at Florida A&M. He has served in a variety of roles in the athletics department, including 30 years as Sports Information Director since coming to the Rattlers in 1979. He arrived a year after the Rattlers won the inaugural NCAA Div. I-AA (now Football Championship Subdivision) national championship and has been an eyewitness to a number of magic moments.
 
He was there when the Rattlers upset the University of Miami, which was quarterbacked by future Pro Football Hall of Famer Jim Kelly, in 1979 – and 20 years later for a postseason run that saw them reach the semifinals of the 1999 I-AA playoffs.
 
He chronicled the Rattlers’ resurgence in football under head coach Billy Joe and his Gulf Coast offense, as well as Terrence Woods’ 3-point shooting exploits while leading Florida A&M to its first NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament victory in 2004.
 
However, he says the relationships that he has formed with coaches, athletes, administrators and fellow SIDs are what he cherishes most.
 
“In this business the games and teams can be big,” he said. “But it’s the people that you deal with, the coaches, the athletes. To see a Vince Coleman or Marquis Grissom – that’s the fascinating thing about the business, the athletes and the coaches that you get to rub elbows with and work with.”
 
The seeds for Hollins’ career were planted his junior year at Southern Laboratory High in Baton Rouge, La. The statistician for the football team had graduated and gone off to college and the football coach needed to replace him. Hollins got the position, and he ended up writing preview stories in addition to keeping stats.
 
When he enrolled at Southern University, Sports Information Director Fred Hearns took him on as a student worker in his office. Hollins blossomed in the role. The Louisiana Sportswriters Association twice named him Top Student Assistant SID in Louisiana.
 
Hollins had an opportunity to see any number of future professional stars perform while they were still finding their way during his years at Southern – Walter Payton and Robert Brazile at Jackson State, Doug Williams at Grambling State, Purvis and Eugene Short, and he was around some of the biggest names in coaching – Eddie Robinson, Marino Casem, W. C. Gorden, Davey Whitney.
 
“Just being in the same room with some of those people, you just say ‘Wow’,” Hollins said.
 
Hollins marvels at how sports information departments have changed over the years with the impact technology has made. When he began, computers were way in the future; Facebook, Twitter and Instagram didn’t exist. He wrote stories using a manual typewriter and filed them with a telecopier or telegram when he traveled. When those failed, he would dictate stories, and he kept stats by hand.
 
“When I got a Texas Instruments calculator to do percentage, I didn’t think it got any better than that,” Hollins said. “Facebook and social media make it much easier to get the news out. That has revolutionized our business for the good for the most part.
It’s been interesting to see how the business has changed.”
 
Nowadays, with the internet and live stats, he is able to file stories from Tallahassee even though the team he is writing about is playing on the road.
 
Despite the technological advances, Hollins still finds it a challenge to do his job at the high standard that he sets for himself. Florida A&M has 16 sports and only two full-time staffers in Sports Information.
 
“It’s interesting to see how the business has changed,” he said. “You really can’t give all these different sports the coverage they need. You have to budget your time. You put in a lot of hours to even try to get it done. Sometimes, I don’t know if we’ve done a Hall of Fame job. It’s some things, if you have pride in your work, you know slip through the cracks. We don’t travel with the teams. There are certain things we simply don’t do because of time.  Sports overlap. Schedules overlap and you have to choose, ‘Which one do I cover?’, because you don’t have enough people. With the internet, there’s a greater expectation. People want to see this stuff up. You have to adjust your game to be able to survive and thrive.”
 
Hollins has done just that for the better part of three decades and is the dean of Black College Sports Information Directors (BCSIDA). He sees no reason for stepping aside.
 
“I still enjoy covering the games, dealing with the coaches, dealing with the players, putting together the material, writing stories,” he said. “To me, that’s the basic part of the business. That hasn’t changed. Even though social media and technology are there and your stuff can get greater distribution, it can’t take away from how you used to do it. I still enjoy the challenge of getting it done. I still love to write and cover games. The business is basically still the same. Technology makes it easier. If you can write and you understand the sport, there is still room for people like us. Writing is nothing but communicating. It’s never going to go out of style.