STARKVILLE – Jay Logan has had two revelations about his career.
The first came when he was in college, and the second came a little more than eight years ago.
The Mississippi State Associate Athletic Director of Event and Facility Management ran with those revelations and they have allowed him to work with two different aspects of college athletics. He has been an athletic trainer and is currently working on the administrative side of sports in game operations.
“My career in athletics has taken a lot of different turns from sports medicine to event and facility management, but I still feel like that they’re a lot of the same things,” Logan said.
After graduating from Starkville Academy, Logan followed in the footsteps of his father and attended Mississippi State. His father was a captain on the 1958 MSU football team.
Logan understood at an early age that he wasn’t going to be able to play college sports, but he wanted to be involved. During high school, he attended sporting events at MSU and developed a relationship with Straton Karatassos. Karatassos was the head trainer and saw a good work ethic in Logan as a high schooler and that led to Logan becoming a student athletic trainer.
“When the opportunity came, there was no question Jay was going to have an opportunity to be a student trainer,” Karatassos said. “I knew his work ethic, I knew how he was raised, I just knew him. It wasn’t taking somebody in that you weren’t sure about.”
Midway through his sophomore year at MSU, Logan came to the conclusion that he wanted to be an athletic trainer – his first revelation.
That revelation came while interning for a professional team during the summer.
“I didn’t really know I wanted to be an athletic trainer,” Logan said. “I had an opportunity through (Karatassos) again to go work for the Miami Dolphins during training camp in the summer. I went down there, never really having been away from Starkville for any length of time, and exposed to pro football. Just being around that and seeing how important the trainers were to the team, that really got my interest. That’s something I wanted to do.”
Logan spent three summers in total with the Dolphins, but liked college athletics better and decided to pursue that path.
Upon graduating from MSU in 1985, Logan attended Florida State where he worked as a graduate assistant athletic trainer with the football team while completing his master’s degree in athletic administration.
He then took his first full-time job at the United States Naval Academy. He worked as an athletic trainer for the Midshipmen football, basketball, and baseball teams.
He was happy in Annapolis, Maryland, but one day his alma mater came calling and he couldn’t pass up on the opportunity to return home.
“I think everybody has the dream of coming back and working at their alma mater,” Logan said. “I think deep down I wanted to come back home and work at Mississippi State.”
In 1993, Karatassos moved from the training room to the Bulldog Club and Paul Mock was promoted to head athletic trainer. That opened a position and Logan took it. He worked with the men’s basketball and baseball teams. He was with men’s basketball until 2002 and baseball until 2007.
He saw the basketball team go to the 1996 Final Four and the baseball team make three trips to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska.
While he worked with the basketball and baseball teams, he was heavily involved in the administrative side of sports. He was setting up the travel arrangements for each team, and his interests began to gradually turn – his second revelation.
“My interests really began to turn into those more administrative things,” Logan said. “Administratively, I felt like I enjoyed doing those things.”
Logan was presented with an opportunity in 2007 by then-Director of Athletics Larry Templeton. He was moved to game operations before the 2007 fall sports season started.
Logan worked as the Facilities and Game Management Director for baseball and men’s basketball until 2010 when he was named the Director of Humphrey Coliseum and Basketball Game Management. His main duty was to make sure all athletic events and non-athletic events taking place in the Hump ran smoothly. He was also heavily involved in the day-to-day operations of the basketball practice facially Mize Pavilion.
Logan was promoted to his current position this summer and he oversees the event and facility management staff for all sporting events within the department. He is still heavily involved in the comings and goings of the Hump.
“I feel very fortunate and very honored that (Director of Athletics) Scott Stricklin and (Executive Associate Athletic Director) Duncan McKenzie would give me this opportunity,” Logan said. “It’s a privilege for me to work at Mississippi State, where I went to school and in my hometown where I grew up.”
Logan’s journey through college athletics has taken him all over the country and in some instances to other parts of the world. However, it’s the people he’s worked with that have touched him the most, changed his life, and his view of college sports.
“There are a lot of great people who work here who do a lot of things to support the university and our athletic program that I get to work with,” Logan said. “Those are assets that you can’t find everywhere because I think Mississippi State has that close knit family feel that I enjoy being a part of.”
Ben Wait is a sports writer for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter @bcwait
Ben Wait reports on Mississippi State University sports for The Dispatch.
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