Matt Sayre ‘01, ’97

Degree: MA English, SOU, ‘01; BA English, SOU, ‘97
Hometown: Ashland, OR
Current Occupation: SOU Athletic Director

“I have always believed in the potential of this place.  There’s huge potential for SOU to be such a great institution.  Great community and great people are what matter.”

Matt’s Story:

Matt never planned to be an athletic director.  “I specialized in English for both my bachelors and masters degrees, so I didn’t see this course for me.  I thought I would be writing screenplays.”

For Matt, football was a means to employment during his time as a student.  Little did he know that coaching would lead to a long term career. “I was just using football, but football kept me here.  They hired me as an assistant football coach here in ’96.  I was getting a stipend for assistant coaching and then also a graduate assistantship, which provided tuition remission or fund raised scholarship dollars toward my master’s degree.  I earned it while I was coaching.  Then I got a full time job coaching and teaching.”

What keeps him here is the interaction with the students. “Just getting to see the effect that we have on the lives of student-athletes has been the most rewarding part of being on the staff of SOU.  A great thing about our athletic programs doing better is that we’re getting more alumni coming back to us and contacting us,” Matt explained.

The athletic program’s increased quality is helping to increase SOU pride.  Last year, SOU’s athletic program was ranked first in the Director’s Cup for all sports from fall through winter and ended up ranked sixth for the entire school year. It was the highest ranking in school history and the highest ever for the Cascade Collegiate Conference.  “One special thing for me is in our early days here on campus, we used to walk around and you’d see more Oregon Ducks and Oregon State Beavers t-shirts than you would Raiders’ stuff,” Matt commented. “Now, you walk around campus anywhere and everybody is wearing the Hawk and SOU Raider gear.  It’s cool to be a Raider now.”

Matt met his wife at SOU.  They have two children.  Matt serves on the board of the YMCA and the Southern Oregon Sports Commission (SOSC), which promotes sports tourism to the Rogue valley. He is also an avid fly fisherman and loves to float the Rogue and Klamath Rivers.