03.08.18

Sara Legarsky is OU's only female sports information director, but breaking barriers doesn't faze her

Matt Parker / For The Post

On July 1, 2014, Sara Legarsky sat in her apartment in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and filled out a job application.

It took only two days for Legarsky to get a response back about the opening for a director of media relations position at Ohio. A phone interview led to a flight that brought Legarsky to Athens for the first time. It wouldn’t be her last.

Blake Nissen | PHOTO EDITOR

Ohio Sports Information Director, Sara Legarsky, poses for a portrait in the Convo on March 5.

Legarsky was formally offered the position as a director of media relations at Ohio on July 7, 2014, and in the span of 23 days, she filled her life into a U-Haul and started out on a new journey.

“It was overwhelming,” Legarsky said. “I spent 14 hours in the car and drove from Stillwater to Indianapolis and then to Athens.”

She lived in a Hampton Inn for a week, where she had chips and salsa for her first meal.

Legarsky juggled the stress of both her personal and professional lives with little time to actually do so. No longer in the graduate assistant role, and with departures elsewhere on staff early in her time at Ohio, Legarsky was forced into a professional maturation.

Her first task? To be the main media contact for the Bobcats football team.

“It was a terrible first two months,” Legarsky said. “You’re just like, ‘I’m going to be running a Division I football program.’ ”

As she paved her way into the business, Legarsky never thought of the barriers she was breaking along the way. A retroactive thinker, Legarsky lives life in the moment, and in those quiet hours to herself, she reflects upon the day she had just lived out.

A woman in a male-dominated field, Legarsky has gone through and experienced subtle forms of discrimination or surprised-to-see-you-here moments.

“The struggle I had would be when TV crews would come in and be like, ‘Hey, where’s the (sports information director)?’ ” Legarsky said. “I’d be like, ‘It’s me,’ and they would laugh at me.”

Fellow director of media relations Mike Ashcraft has worked alongside Legarsky since her start at Ohio. He, too, has noticed the struggle that women face.

“I think men sometimes question whether this person is legit or not,” Ashcraft said. “ ‘Can they really do this job?’ I just think that’s unfair to make that assumption just because you’re a woman, you know?”

As Ohio’s lone female SID for the past four years, Legarsky has noticed that over time, her gender became less of the topic, and the athletes — or, as she calls them, “my kids” — became the focus. Legarsky thinks that’s the way it should be.

***

A native of Indiana, Pennsylvania, Legarsky’s life has always centered on sports. She grew up a Pittsburgh sports fan and always found time to watch the local teams.

Legarsky saw the former confines of the Pirates and Penguins, Three Rivers Stadium and Mellon Arena, many times as a Pittsburgh fan. At times in which both franchises were at low points — the Pirates hadn’t made the playoffs since 1992 and the financially plagued Penguins couldn’t sell tickets to their own games — Legarsky still holds those times near and dear.

“Growing up outside of Pittsburgh, sports were always a big part,” Legarsky said. “On Sundays, you were watching football, you were watching the Pirates, you were watching the Penguins.”

With a sports fandom like no other, Legarsky couldn’t abandon one of her life pillars. So, as an undergraduate student at St. Bonaventure, she started to lie down the foundation of her career.

In pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications through a public relations concentration, Legarsky got her start working in the athletic department at St. Bonaventure.

“I wrote my first few recaps about the cross country team and then was handed swimming and diving,” Legarsky said. “That was pretty cool, and I had it for the next three years. I got to run the (Atlantic 10) Championships in Buffalo.”

When the time came to say goodbye to Bonaventure, Legarsky was taken aback by a simple realization: She didn’t have a job.

Scouring the nation for an opportunity, it came 1,206 miles away in Stillwater as a graduate assistant at Oklahoma State.

When she got hired at Oklahoma State, she was told that she was the first woman to be hired from outside of the athletic department and the media relations office in 20 years.

Amid the struggle, Legarsky thrived in her first year at Oklahoma State as the media contact for the Cowboys men’s cross country team, which won a national title that year.

But when her time was nearing an end and with no open positions, she started to look for a new home. She found it in Athens.

***

With time and experience in the workforce building every day, Legarsky is a symbol of the future for women in the sports world.

“One thing I will say is she's a great advocate for the sports that she works with,” Ashcraft said. “She works with soccer or women's basketball, softball and women's golf. She's really passionate about what she does.”

With multiple female graduate assistants and Meagan Hogan, the director of marketing for Ohio, Legarsky is witness to the change of a male-dominated field to a more even playing ground.

“I want to see this field grow with women because there are plenty of women out there who know plenty about sports,” Legarsky said. “... I love my job; waking up on Monday morning is easy.”

Correction: A previous version of the headline on the homepage misspelled Sara Legarsky’s name. The headline has been updated to reflect the most accurate information.

Additionally, the article misstated information about what Legarsky was told when she got hired at Oklahoma State. The article has been updated to reflect the most accurate information.

Development by: Taylor Johnston / Digital Production Editor