Barbara Jonas

Associate Sports Information Director
Age: 32
Hometown: Fort Atkinson, Wis.
Time at Georgetown: 6 years

What drew you to your field?
I’ve actually wanted to do this since before college, before I knew that there was actually a job that existed that was this. I grew up with three brothers, and I went to all their games, helped my dad keep stats for all their different teams, so I wanted to be a stat-keeper for a sports team, and then when I got to college I learned that there was a job that actually was that.

What drew you to Georgetown in particular?
I actually went to Marquette, and I’ve also worked at Villanova and Catholic University, so I actually really like the Jesuit or Catholic feel of a university as opposed to a big state university. I just think it’s more of a family atmosphere.

What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of my job is probably working with the student-athletes, because every year we have a new crop of then and get to know them for four years. They all bring different perspectives and experiences and it’s always really fun to get to know them and then to see where they go after Georgetown.

What is the greatest challenge you face in your position?
I think the biggest challenge for us is we’re in a huge media market in D.C. Sometimes people see what’s going on at Notre Dame and they’re getting all this media coverage from their local media but they’re the only game in town. Here, we have so many different teams that we really have to really fight and work hard to get coverage in local papers.

What is it like to work in communications for a program that attracts intense attention at both the local and national level?
It’s really fun to be a part of it. I’ve worked in Division III and it was a fun experience, but I got into this to work with the best, and work with the top media, with ESPN and Fox Sports 1 and other big-time outlets. While it’s awesome when we get a feature in a local blog, it’s also really fun to see our athletes highlighted on ESPN or in the Washington Post. It’s a great feeling to see them on that caliber of a stage.

Are there any aspects of your position that the majority of people might not know about?
I think a lot of people just think we watch games — and we do watch a lot of games — but there are a lot of little things that go into upkeep, like making sure people’s hometowns are spelled right, letting someone know if an athlete won an obscure award. There are just a lot of little things that go into game-day coverage. I get most excited watching a game on television and someone has some crazy stat like so-and-so has made sixteen straight free-throws, and I think, “that’s only being displayed because I told them to say that.” I get excited any time things like that come up because I know that somewhere, there’s a nerd like me feeding that information to the announcer.

You work a lot with media relations. What’s the most shocking thing you’ve ever heard in an interview?
I think every time a reporter asks about the referees, I get very nervous. I will say that our student-athletes and our coaches are very good about knowing how to handle those questions, but every time they get asked about it, my ears perk up. I make sure they’re being very gracious when talking about the refs, because that’s not the sort of problem we want to get into.

How do you balance a discrepancy in popularity among different Georgetown sports?
A lot of people on the outside see that, but we really can’t say that something is more important than another. There may be sports that take up more of our time, like basketball obviously takes up more times because they have games on television, but even though they take up more time, that doesn’t mean that we don’t still have to write about the tennis match that happened last week or cover the swim meet or the regatta that just happened. We can’t really say that something is more popular, even if one thing takes up more time than others. At the end of the day, we still need to have a schedule and roster up and we still need to cover every event.

The Coach Brown conflict earlier this year obviously made life difficult for your department. How did you go about coordinating a response from this department in light of being asked a swath of questions when you didn’t necessarily know the facts?
We’ve always worked really closely with the Office of Communications. When that happened, we were immediately in touch with them. We take a lot of direction from them up on the hill, from Stacy Kerr and some really seasoned people in media relations, and we follow their lead. From there, we’ll reach out to our more specific media, while they reach out to more general media. It’s like that in any communication, both positive and negative, and we work with every office on campus, with legal, with the President’s Office, with the Office of Communications, so that we really have one message coming from Georgetown.

If you weren’t working in sports information, where would you see yourself?
I have a secret dream to be a wedding planner. That’s all I want to do in life. Unfortunately though, I would still work weekends. I planned my own wedding, but that’s about it, but I secretly love helping my friends.

Interview by Alexander Brown