Rowan DuBois | staff writer

Ronald Dick’s office in Rockwell Hall looks like a private collection. It is packed with sports memorabilia — Pittsburgh Pirates bobbleheads, Duquesne A-10 championship banners, a signed photograph of Charles Barkley, carefully arranged baseball cards, sports novels and a giant painting of Philadelphia 76er George McGinnis.

“It looks like a bomb hit this place,” Dick said. “Sorry.”

Dick is now a sports marketing professor at Duquesne, but the trinkets in the office catalogue his long, diverse career in the sports industry. They also reveal how those years led Dick to a different career.

Initially, Dick wanted to play baseball in the MLB. When that dream didn’t work out, he did the next best thing. It was shortly after attending St. Joseph’s University that his career began.

Dick wrote letters to the four major sports teams in Philadelphia. Quickly, he found himself living another, slightly different dream, when the Philadelphia 76ers offered him an internship.

One of Dick’s most cherished memories came the year he was hired in 1982. The 76ers took home the NBA Championship that year.

“I remember I was 21 years old, riding down Broad Street on a float, and I had a championship ring. It was great,” Dick said.

As fondly as he looks back on those years, not all of his memories before transitioning to education were positive. He felt overworked at many points throughout his career.

“Working in sports seems glamorous,” Dick said, “Day-to-day, you can’t be a clock watcher. Baseball has 81 home games. The NBA has 41. College is even crazier. You’ve got volleyball, basketball, football, concerts, events. You have to be all in, all the time.”

It was while working for the University of Houston as an assistant athletic director that he briefly questioned his career path.

“I slept in the office once,” Dick said. “An overnight concert to gain revenue ended at 8 a.m., and we had a women’s soccer game at noon. I remember I asked myself, ‘Why am I even going home?’”

Despite the workload, however, Dick said he was right where he needed to be. He felt at home in the high-stakes environment of the sports industry.

“There’s a type of person who needs to work in sports,” Dick said. “Every day is different, and no day is ever the same. I was that person.”

Throughout all of his work, which required him to live in places like Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, New Haven, Connecticut and Harrisonburg, Virginia, Dick continued to prioritize his education.

He finished his master’s degree slowly, taking one class per semester, while working for the 76ers. During his collegiate work, he finished his dissertation. In 2006, when Duquesne offered him a job, he once again uprooted his life.

“I’ve always looked at my job like the next job is going to be better than the one I have,” Dick said. “I don’t know why I look at it that way, but many times it is.”

After 20 years in Pittsburgh, it has proven to be one of Dick’s most permanent decisions. He wanted to help students find what he found, right out of college.

“Some people find their career later in life,” Dick said. “I found mine early, and I’ve always tried to help students find theirs before it’s too late.”

Because of his experience, Dick knows what employers in the sports marketing world are looking for, so he uses practical, unconventional methods to help his students prepare.

Kaleb Tkacs, the president of Duquesne’s Sports Marketing Association, and a student of Dick’s, said that his practical lessons are what make him a unique professor.

“There was a day in class where he literally made everyone in the room tie a tie,” Tkacs said. “He is an embodiment of sports. Not only does he have a lot of knowledge in the sports world, but he has a lot of general life advice, too.”

Not all of Dick’s jobs have been his favorite, but he turns his failures into teaching lessons, too.

“I try to take the situations I experienced and share them with students, so they don’t make the same mistakes I made,” Dick said. “Hindsight is always 20/20.”

Robert Healy, founder of the Sports Information and Media program at Duquesne, also sees the value of career-based teaching.

“Dr. Dick and I have the same philosophy,” Healy said. “While [our students] are here for four years, we shouldn’t be training them for grad school, we should be training them for careers.”

Healy, too, had experience in the field before beginning his teaching career.

“We both have worked full-time in college athletics,” Healy said. “When we come back to teach now, it’s entirely based on [what] we’ve seen happen at these jobs and for these teams.”

Dick also understands the importance of remaining close to his field.

“When you sit up in an ivory tower you lose touch with the realities of the industry,” he said. “I make sure my students see both the successes and the grind that comes with working in sports.”

Rowan DuBois can be reached at duboisr1@duq.edu.