On Sept. 18, Mississippi State was “thrown a curveball” — during a football game.
The Bulldogs’ athletics communications staff found out midway through the contest at Memphis that the host Tigers weren’t going to transcribe MSU coach Mike Leach’s postgame interview, something the visitors had expected.
So assistant director of communications Brian Ogden put out a call in the GroupMe of student assistants, hoping for someone to step in.
Gregor Ramskogler was the only one who responded.
A native Austrian, English is Ramskogler’s second language. Still, he transcribed Leach’s interview, flagging any words he didn’t recognize for Ogden to note and clean up.
“It’s harder for him, but he’s the first one to volunteer to do it,” Ogden said.
Since he began working with the athletic department in spring 2020, Ramskogler has been game for anything. He’s pored over box scores, slaved over spreadsheets and spent long hours in the Bryan Building.
Oh, right, and he’s also a Mississippi State tennis player, fitting in work with MSU athletics whenever he can find the time. And there’s not always a lot of it.
“I’m very tired every single day when I get home, not going to lie,” Ramskogler said. “I’m very tired, but it’s a happy tired. Everything I do here with tennis and school and the internship here, I love doing it.”
Changing course on college
When Ramskogler was 16, he traveled with his mother Sylvia to the neighboring Czech Republic for a tournament. A college coach was in attendance to recruit, but Ramskogler had his heart set elsewhere.
“No, I’m never going to go to college,” he told himself. “I’m never going to study anywhere, not even my home. I’m not gonna study. After school, I’m done.”
But a friend on his club team back home in Austria who played at the University of Washington told Ramskogler about college. The more he heard, the more he liked — and he realized he wasn’t ready to turn professional just yet.
“I probably have a level of 800-900 in the world, but that’s not gonna get you anywhere, because you don’t make any money and you just struggle from one tournament to another and lose money,” Ramskogler said. “It doesn’t really make sense.”
Mississippi State assistant coach Matt Walters saw Ramskogler’s results at a tournament in Europe and reached out through social media, the premier way to contact international athletes. Ramskogler came to the U.S. on his first overseas trip to visit MSU, Oregon and South Florida. He chose the Bulldogs, and he’s glad he did.
“I absolutely love Mississippi State,” Ramskogler said. “I love the university.”
But for his first two and a half years, Ramskogler’s involvement with MSU athletics started and ended on the tennis court. He was part of 23 doubles wins as a freshman and won a Southeastern Conference player of the week award as a sophomore.
That information comes from Ramskogler’s bio on the MSU athletics site. He’s the one who wrote it, along with his teammates’ bios.
“You’ve got to treat it like any other,” Ramskogler said. “I mean, obviously, it’s cool to see in a summary. You look at that sheet, and you get images in your head. You see a name and wherever the game was played, and something pops up — pictures of whatever, maybe a shot that I remember or the facility we played at.”
Since German is Ramskogler’s first language, assistant coordinator for athletics communications Logan Lowery went over his writing, checking it for grammar and spelling. Ramskogler said it can be tough adapting to English — he found slang terms particularly hard when he arrived — but he’s done admirably.
“I have the same duties as any other student,” he said. “Here and there, transcribing is probably a little more challenging. I probably need five or 10 minutes longer than someone else, but I feel like it’s getting so much better.”
‘I love doing it’
Ramskogler enrolled in an internship class with the athletics department in spring 2020, but he ended up dropping the course.
“I was pretty busy, and I just couldn’t do 100 hours next to school and in season,” he said.
But he talked to Lauren Miller of the women’s golf team, who was in the class, and decided to return in the fall. Former assistant director of communications Greg Campbell welcomed Ramskogler aboard. This fall, Ramskogler’s internship requires 300 hours of work.
He and Miller aren’t the only MSU athletes to work with the athletic department. With plenty of friends on the softball team, track and field athlete Caroline Standley wanted to help get the word out about both sports.
Ogden said that although football can be the “big show in town,” athletes like Ramskogler, Standley and Miller want to promote the sports they play that don’t always receive the same recognition.
“When you bring in a student-athlete, I think they take it a little more personally,” he said. “Gregor wants to see tennis treated with that level of seriousness and concern and attention to detail.”
Attention to detail is Ramskogler to a T. The senior doesn’t have a car and bikes everywhere, so when he’s carrying important documents from old contests, he places the sheets of paper inside a waterproof ice bag so they won’t get wet if it rains through his backpack.
“He realizes he might be carrying the only file of that game or box score, and he’s going to make sure it stays in good condition,” Ogden said.
And Ramskogler is dealing with plenty of files. On the upper floor of the Bryan Building, six huge white boxes — Ramskogler calls them “my babies” — are filled with every file from every Mississippi State football game, dating back decades.
After Lideatrick Griffin’s 100-yard kick return touchdown against NC State on Sept. 11, Ramskogler consulted the files to find the Bulldogs’ previous kickoff return touchdown of 100 or more yards, stacking page upon page as he went through each game to nail down the correct date.
“I took that, went to these boxes, took that specific game and was like, OK, ‘Was this really a 100-yard kickoff return?’ to confirm it actually was,” he said. “Once it was, I knew ‘OK, this was one,’ so I checked every year to the present. That took me two or three hours.”
Ramskogler comes by whenever he has a free hour, working on whatever projects he can. His current assignment is scheduling — using his student login to SIDEARM Sports to update MSU’s website with basketball games from as far back as 1908.
He finds the information in old media guides, which often reveal fun facts. Long ago MSU played the likes of Columbus Air Force Base and several YMCA clubs.
“That’s history history,” Ramskogler said. “That’s like a long time ago.”
Ramskogler said it’s interesting to see which schools have changed their names since the Bulldogs faced them, which can make for a challenge when trying to match names and logos.
“Sometimes we just leave him up here doing his research,” Lowery said. “Ram will do research until 10:30, 11 o’clock. Sometimes he’s the last person to leave the building.”
Indeed, Ramskogler sometimes comes in as early as 6:30 a.m. or stays until late at night. But he never seems to mind.
“It does not feel like work at all,” he said. “That’s why I stay ‘til 11 or come in here at 7 — because I love doing it.”
‘We fight over Ram’
Ramskogler said he didn’t expect to enjoy the work so much when he first signed up to do it.
He thought he could get class credit, and that would be it.
But maybe he shouldn’t be surprised by his affinity for the work.
When he played in tennis tournaments growing up, he was always the one who memorized the entire draw and gave his friends information on their opponents. Of course, he never committed any of that research to paper.
“I’ve never put it to an Excel sheet or something like this like I’m doing here,” Ramskogler said.
He created a series of spreadsheets with various football statistics — games of 100 yards or more per player, rushing, passing or receiving; players with 200, 300 or more yards in a season; and other helpful statistics. It’s easy for Ogden to sort and search when he needs to pull a statistic quickly.
“That database has been huge for us,” Ogden said.
When Ogden received an email asking for total opponent field goal attempts against the Bulldogs from the 1989-91 season — the statistics only showed made kicks — he texted Ramskogler. Thirty minutes later, Ogden had the number from each season; Ramskogler had accessed the files for each game, kept a running tally of field goal attempts on a notepad and sent back the total numbers.
“As (sports information directors), we fight over Ram,” Lowery said. “We all want Ram to help us with our projects.”
That’s a good sign for Ramskogler, who said he just might make a career out of his newfound passion — when his tennis career is over.
“Depending on how I develop tennis-wise, I maybe want to play a year or two professionally because I’ve worked 15-16 years toward that goal to play professionally,” he said. “So if I feel ready for it, I just want to see how far I can go.”
Once he graduates, he’ll have to return to Austria for six months of compulsory military service, which is required of every male 18 or older in the country.
Then, who knows?
“I really like it, and I could really see myself working in a setting like this,” Ramskogler said.
He said it’s been fun to give back to an athletics department who did the same for him in the two and a half years he spent “on the other side” of things as a student-athlete.
“It’s kind of cool to now get more insight, and I feel like it’s kind of a little bit of giving back to them as well, because they do so much for us,” Ramskogler said. “And I’m just very happy that I can be part of it and can help them.”
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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