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FGCU’s New Sports Information Director: 26-year-old MacBain from St. Bonaventure University takes over as new SID

Among the incoming freshman, transfer students and new coaches, we have a new Director of Athletics Communications, Jason MacBain. With 623 followers on Twitter, some of you may already know him. But who is he really?
MacBain is from Hamilton, New York, where he was born and raised. Growing up, he was really into sports and played on the high school soccer, basketball, and baseball University in New York, receiving his bachelor’s in journalism and mass communications and master’s in integrated marketing communications.
In 2010, MacBain started working for St. Bonaventure’s athletics department as the Assistant Sports Information Director (SID). Two years later, he received a promotion making him the youngest Division 1 SID in the nation.
MacBain heard about Florida Gulf Coast University through Pat Pierson, the former SID, and was told about the job opening for Director of Communications. MacBain started the job in July and is responsible for all strategic communications for FGCU’s 15 sports, including directing all media, public relations and social networking efforts.
MacBain said he has the following goals this year: “I would really like to incorporate more videos, including game highlights, for recruiting purposes. Another goal is to update the website to create more ad spaces for sponsors and sell more spots.”
At St. Bonaventure, he successfully redesigned the website twice with an emphasis on catering to the visual-and- social-media generation, which is another goal MacBain mentioned. “It’s a way to tell a story from the fan’s perspective and capture a game with one image,” MacBain said. “We had over 100 likes on a photo titled #NestProtected from the women’s soccer team when they defeated Albany 5-0 within hours of posting it.”
MacBain said his dream job would be to become the Director of Communications for a professional team. Being from New York, he said he is a fan of teams from that region, including the Yankees, Devils, Nets and Bills. He said he prefers watching baseball the most because he enjoys guessing the next pitch and focusing on the different aspects of the game that fans don’t usually pay attention to. He said basketball is a close runner up since it is closely involved with his job.
Beyond sports, MacBain loves to travel. He spent two summers in Europe where he visited France, Germany, England, Scotland and Ireland. MacBain said of his impression of Fort Myers: “It’s not as hot as I thought it was going to be, it still is hot though. The area seems nice, young, and up and coming. I haven’t been able to see much since I’ve been busy going back and forth from my hotel room to campus and back.”
MacBain said he expects to see FGCU athletics excelling five years from now: “FGCU will be in a bigger and better conference, and not just winning conference championships, but winning trips to NCAA tournaments and really competing in all sports. Unfortunately though, I still don’t think they will have a football team.”
While MacBain is around, one thing he would like FGCU students to know is: “I like to think as far out of the box as possible and then have those thoughts and visions reigned back in by reality or my superiors,” MacBain said. “I think FGCU will start to see a lot of the work our office puts out to be extremely appealing to them.”

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