Losing Interim Tag, Williamson Becomes Permanent Director of Athletic Communications

Timothy Williamson was named Harvard’s permanent Director of Athletic Communications on Thursday after serving in the role on an interim basis for three months. Williamson succeeds previous director Kurt K. Svoboda, who became the Senior Assistant Athletic Director at Stanford University in February.

“I’m very happy to be in this role,” Williamson said. “We have a great staff in our office, and I’m happy to continue to be a member of the Athletic Department.”

Williamson has been with Harvard since 2007, when he came to Cambridge after serving as an assistant director of media relations for Columbia University. He has overseen the social media outreach of the Athletic Department and currently serves on the Social Media and Student-Athlete Development committees in the department.

Senior Associate Director of Athletics Patricia Henry, who headed the search committee for the position, said that she was impressed with how Williamson handled his transition into the interim position in the middle of the winter sports season.“He had to balance a lot of things, some things he had never dealt with before,” Henry said. “He did a terrific job.”

Henry also noted Williamson’s work on the national level, particularly as the media coordinator for the men’s lacrosse and fencing NCAA championships and as the sports information director for men’s basketball during its NCAA Tournament appearances. She said that the search committee reviewed between 50 and 60 applications for the position.

“We had a lot of interest, a fair amount of experience in the candidate pool, so it was an opportunity for us to look at a number of different candidates from different backgrounds [and] experiences, and to compare them against one another,” Henry said. “Tim did very well with his competition and really in the end showed that he could definitely handle this.”

Williamson said that he will focus on Harvard’s role in helping the Ivy League create a conference-wide sports network. The conference announced plans on April 26 to consolidate the online streaming of Ancient Eight games onto a single website.

“That’s going to be the first big order of business, maintaining that and growing that going forward,” Williamson said.

—Staff writer David P. Freed can be reached at davidfreed@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.

—Staff writer Michael D. Ledecky can be reached at mledecky@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @mdledecky.