24 sports and 700 student-athletes. That’s what Athletic Director (AD), Al King, oversees at Ashland University. But he wasn’t always the AD at Ashland. King was a journalist, runner, reporter and an associate sports information director before he started his time at Ashland.
King was a sportswriter for the Meadville Tribune in Meadville, Pa., for one year before going to write for the Indiana Gazette in Indiana Pa. While at the Indiana Gazette, King wrote about a plethora of sports that included basketball, baseball and football across all levels. He even wrote for the Pittsburgh Steelers for about three years, covering all their home and away games. In 1987, he won a first-place award for sports columns in the Pennsylvania Associated Press Managing Editors contest.
King left the Indiana Gazette after five years and took a job at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) as an associate sports information director (SID). He was on track to be an athletic director based on the way his career was headed, but not at IUP.
“You want to get to where you could be director and I knew at IUP, the guy who was director wasn’t leaving anytime soon,” King said.
He knew he needed to find another path that would get him where he wanted to be. He started to look for other jobs that might be more suitable for what he wanted his career to be. This wasn’t the only thing he had going on in his life though.
During all of this though, King is an avid runner and loves to run any chance he can. He has run 39 marathons all over the country, including eight Boston Marathons. Some of the most notable locations where he’s competed have been in Duluth Minn., running around Lake Superior, Disney World, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Minneapolis, Vermont, and Alabama. King started running for weight control and to stay in shape, but it quickly became one of his favorite activities.
“It gives you time away, where you can go out and clear your mind,” says King. “You can think about a lot of different things and solve a lot of problems.”
Not only does King say that it clears your mind, but he also loves the different crowds that come with running. “It gave me something different, gave me a different perspective to talk to those people, meet people from all around the state, really all around the country. Really met some interesting people at all the places I went.”
King always is looking for the right time to run and his colleague and current Ashland Assistant AD, Elizabeth Hoge, finds “he’s a runner, so he’s always trying to figure out, do you think it’s a good time to run, what’s the weather going to be, like what’s a good rest day or if he’s hurt kind of going to the athletic trainers and being like ‘okay how can I get myself back up and running again?’”
When he was younger, King would take the preparation for his marathons very seriously. He would start to ramp his miles per week up to about 55-60 with Sunday being his long run and he’d start this about 3-4 months before the race that he was preparing for. He would also prepare for the terrain that was going to be at the race. For example, he knew that the hills in Boston were treacherous, so he had to start to incorporate hills into his daily run.
The one thing he couldn’t prepare for was the weather. For Boston, it would be better for him if it was a little chillier and cloudy because those are the type of conditions that are seen in Ohio. When he would show up to Boston and it was 65-70 degrees, then that’s where King would be in trouble because he had hardly run in those conditions in Ohio.
It’s evident that running is a large part of King’s life, but he still hasn’t found the job that suits him best, until he gets a call from Ashland.
“I had interviewed two other places, then I actually got called about this job and they said ‘Hey, they’re looking for an SID at Ashland’…so then I got interviewed and got offered the job and took it,” says King. “This was the chance to really take over my own operation and direct it.”
King has been at Ashland since 1994 and was promoted to the AD in 2014 and has held that position since. His background and experience have aided him in being successful in what he does, and he also knows how to deal with the people that come with the job. He understands that communication is a key component in being a successful department.
“I think in this job, the ability to communicate is key. You’ve got to be able to explain your opinions, you’ve got to be able to explain what you’re doing.”
Because King knows how to communicate and knows how to express his thoughts and ideas, he’s gained the respect of a lot of people along the way. Hoge says, “He’s very respected because he came from sports information and then kind of then went to the athletic director role and that we’ve been successful here.”
King is using his deep background of writing and managing sports information to guide the success of what he does here in Ashland. He still runs every day and looks for a goal of 35 miles a week to stay in shape and keep his mind clear for his ever-busy job as the Ashland Athletic Director.
