October 28, 2012

By Dick Quinn, Sports Information Director

All summer long Associate SID Kris Dufour and I talked about making a trip to ESPN to see two members of the Class of 2010 and take a tour of “The Worldwide Leader in Sports.”

At the end of August we made the trip. We invited College Football Hall of Fame inductee and Eph legend Dick Farley and Mt. Greylock High School freshman Cal Filson. Filson had spent the summer volunteering in sports information.

Thanks to Jamie Horowitz, ESPN’s Vice President of Original Programming and Production, we were given a deluxe two-hour business tour of ESPN’s Bristol, CT, campus.

The tour, which consisted of seeing almost all of the production and staging areas of the massive ESPN layout, was a summer highlight for Eph Sports Information.

Along with touring the ESPN facilities we were most excited to meet up with Dan Pesquera and Rachel Rosten from the Class of 2010 and learn about their jobs at ESPN.

An added bonus for the group was meeting up with two former sports writers from The North Adams [MA] Transcript, Paul Gaeta who is an ESPN news editor and Mike Polikoff who toils in ESPN’s games division, where much of his time is devoted to ESPN’s fantasy leagues. Gaeta and Polikoff worked under Kris Dufour when Kris was the sports editor at the Transcript.

Dan Pesquera & Rachel Rosten

The day in Bristol also found the Ephs sitting in on a taping of the “Sports Nation” show, meeting Josh Krulewitz, VP of Communications, sightings of Herm Edwards, Bob Ley, Trey Wingo, and meeting Howie Schwab (aka “Stump the Schwab”). Schwab was the first statistician hired at ESPN.

The Eph traveling contingent even appeared on the taping of the Sports Nation show that featured an outdoor segment with Colin Cowherd, Charissa Thompson and Marcellus Wiley trying to throw a football into a garbage container from 30 yards. It was during the outside segment that the Ephs ran into the Sports Nation’s producer, Chris Wondolowski, who grew up in nearby North Adams.

Later Colin Cowherd and Charissa Thompson signed autographs for Cal, and yes, Cal was teased because Charissa chatted him up and mentioned she admired his tan.

The best part of the phenomenal trip was catching up with the two former Eph Sports Info superstars from the Class of 2010,

Both Pesquera and Rosten won the coveted Frank Deford Award at Williams as top student sports information assistants. In fact, it was at the 2010 post-Deford Award reception that Dan Pesquera secured a summer internship with Gordon Edes of ESPNBoston, landing Pesquera in Fenway Park for a summer.

Dick Farley (l.) & Cal Filson

ESPN is not an easy place to land a job as the number of applicants is staggering and many openings require multiple written tests and extensive personal interviews.

Pesquera joined ESPN as a production assistant and soon moved up to the News Desk, while Rosten joined Stats & Analysis before moving on to Original Programming and Production.

Rosten, while at Williams served as the Sports Information office’s host of the highly popular ESPN show College Football GameDay, when the show made its 150^th live appearance on a college campus and the first at a Division III school at Weston Field in November of 2007.

Kris and I could not be more proud of Dan and Rachel and what they’ve accomplished to date.

In the accompanying video you will meet Dan and Rachel. Additionally, you will see how a prior Williams-Amherst connection at NBC Sports has morphed into a new Williams-Amherst connection at ESPN when you meet Jamie Horowitz, Amherst ’98.

Rachel Rosten’s interview of her boss Jamie Horowitz will illuminate another side of the long-standing and intense Williams-Amherst rivalry.

CLICK HERE to meet Dan Pesquera and Rachel Rosten.