The son of two University of Kentucky graduates, Ben Slack has always been a Wildcat at heart.
Now, he’s going into his second and final year as an intern with UK’s Athletics Communications and Public Relations office — where he will once again have the production of scores, stories and multimedia of other Wildcats in his hands.
During Wednesday afternoon’s Rotary Club of Elkton meeting, Slack gave Rotarians a glowing update on this last season in Lexington — one in which he had a front-row seat as Wildcat sports combined to finish 18th nationally in the Director’s Cup.
It’s the sixth-straight top-20 finish for Kentucky, something Slack said proved UK was “more than just a basketball school.” Only nine other schools have earned top-20 in the same stretch: Florida, Florida State, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio State, Southern California, Stanford, Texas and UCLA.
Slack said he first realized he wanted to be a part of the collegiate sports information fabric during a visit to Indianapolis and the 2010 NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four: Duke, Butler, West Virginia and Michigan State.
Staying closer to home, he added, then became the next priority for this career choice — spurning a strong score on the LSAT and a life in law along the way.
Charged with many different duties, Slack said he “wanted to be everywhere” and “never said no,” and so leadership obliged.
He was allowed to do some direct sports information work with secondary sports for home and away events. This typically includes, but is never limited to, sending updates on Twitter, operating live statistics feeds, inputting play-by-play data, creating and organizing informational graphics, compiling quotes and facts for compelling game recaps, and more.
There were times, he said, where he was the only person from UK’s department on site — which, in turn, gave him the experience and ultimate responsibility of coordinating all efforts needed to tell the event’s story.
Having experienced a successful TikTok feed of his own, Slack said he orchestrated a minor role in UK Athletics starting to work through this medium — which includes video shorts that are often comedic, informative, or both.
Of all the sports UK had success in this past year, it was rifle, men’s tennis, women’s outdoor track and field, gymnastics, baseball, volleyball and men’s soccer in which Slack got to see shine in the limelight. And he recently spent the entire week working through the 2023 SEC Baseball Tournament in Hoover, Alabama.
Press boxes, he closed, are “eerily quiet” spaces, in which many don’t like it when you talk or cheer.
Slack’s father, Glenn, recently took the gavel from Tiffany Groves as Elkton’s Rotary President.
