“I want to make sure that what we’re doing is making a difference,” said Sarah (Pickens) Joseph, ’84, director of community relations for the Houston Rockets and Houston Comets.
From her first meeting with team owner Leslie Alexander nearly a dozen years ago, she knew that there was a real desire on the part of management to help the city’s disadvantaged. Through the years, that desire, and the effort it takes to live it out, hasn’t waned. Instead, the role has grown even larger.
“We’ve learned that our responsibility is not only to those who are disadvantaged, but it really is to connect with the entire community,” Joseph said.
The organization does this best by partnering with organizations that are “really impacting the community.” She serves on the board of directors for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Houston and gives the organization as a ready example of a successful partnership. “Every day, they’re in the trenches out there working with these kids and families,” Joseph said. “We’re able to partner with them and become a part of what they are doing.”
“We really want people to see our players as the corporate citizens they are,” Joseph said. “We’ve been blessed. As long as I’ve been with the organization, we’ve had some of the most upstanding players on our team, players who see it as their responsibility to give back.”
Joseph directs the players in a very organized effort. “We receive hundreds of requests for our players to visit various organizations,” she said, “but because of the team’s travel and game schedule, that’s just not feasible.” However, to ensure that the players are directly involved, they make appearances throughout the season as a part of each team’s community initiatives, Joseph said.
Joseph’s own journey has not been so well scripted. After graduating from South Park High School, she found herself at Lamar. Her brothers ventured farther afield in pursuit of their college educations, but Joseph “just went across the street,” she said. “I never dreamed of going anywhere else.”
“I always asked a lot of questions, and some people called me nosey,” she said. “I really thought I’d be a reporter.”
While majoring in mass communication at Lamar, Joseph honed her writing skills and interned at a local television station, getting a behind-the-scenes look at how stories were put together. She got more hands-on experience in the college’s newly opened television studio.
As soon as she graduated, she segued her off-campus job experience as a teller to a similar position in Houston because she felt that she’d find better opportunity to land a television news job there. It was a slight miscalculation. “Houston is really not the place to start in TV,” Joseph said. “You are better off to start in smaller markets.” However, she did get a position at Houston’s KTRK, working as news secretary.
In her seven years there, she did little that was secretarial. Instead, she “had an opportunity to do everything, working in all areas of the newsroom.” She also ran the station’s intern program, making sure the students got hands-on experience in a real newsroom.
“I learned everything I could,” Joseph said. She worked on special projects, answered viewer correspondence and complaints, worked with talent, joined reporters on special stories and organized community meetings. “I got to work a lot with the community and get a feel for it,” she said. Along the way, she “learned news and how it all worked.”
When she took the job, it was an ideal position. “I’d been married a little over a year and had a 6-week-old baby when the position came open,” Joseph said. The position offered reasonable hours and plenty of flexibility. “I call it the favor of God,” she said, “because I had carte blanc to do a lot of what I wanted to do, as much or as little as I wanted.”
While she learned a great deal about the news business, she also began to grow a little disenchanted with it. “I had figured out that I did not want to be a reporter chasing news every day,” Joseph said. Still, she loved the “story-telling element of it and the connection to the community.”
It was about then that a friend and colleague at the station asked a probing question about what she wanted to do with her future. That led to a meeting with Houston public relations notable Barry Silverman, who offered her sage advice on making the transition from the world of media to public relations.
“Everything he told me to do I did,” Joseph said. “ I went home and rewrote my resume, sat down and made a detailed list of what I wanted.” She then visited the “one lady on the top of his list” who ran the public relations department for Foley’s in Houston. They had a great conversation, but there was no job opening.
“I really didn’t pursue it further than that,” Joseph said. “I just prayed and said, ‘God, you know exactly what you want me to do.’ I had my list of what I wanted, but I just felt peace about sitting still for a while.”
A year later, she learned that her new acquaintance at Foley’s had taken the head position at the Houston Rockets and was ready to build a staff. “This was right after Les Alexander had bought the team, the year after the first championship under him,” Joseph said.
It was Silverman who first thought of her for the community relations manager job. “I’d only spent an hour with him (Silverman) a year before, and that job comes up and he thinks of me,” Joseph said. “I think God put me on his mind.” Today, with nearly a dozen years on the staff, she is one of its most senior members.
“It was an absolute learning experience,” she said of the first year spent learning about the NBA and its views of the role of community relations. “In the beginning, the hours were long,” Joseph said. “I was determined to succeed. I had a lot to learn and there was a lot to do.”
At first, she filled a role as the liaison for the team in the community, but that role has changed. “Now, we view everyone in the organization as a community liaison. It is so important that we all figure out how to connect with the community.”
Her staff has grown from a one-person operation. She now has “really talented people” on staff who manage a number of community programs from their offices in the Toyota Center on the edge of downtown Houston. Two of the organization’s major philanthropy events require extra staff support – the “Tux & Tennies” Charity Gala and the Comets Charity Luncheon — so temporary hires are made.
She enjoys organizing major events and writing emcee scripts but it is scripting and helping create community features for the Rockets and Comets TV broadcasts that she likes best. “I love doing that,” Joseph said. “That’s where my news background comes into play. I really like the story-telling.”
As she looks back on her own life’s story, Joseph sees how the twists and turns gave her the knowledge, experience and desire that have helped her guide the community relations efforts of Houston’s NBA and WNBA teams.
As she watches the shot clock of life, what will her future hold? “What I’d like to do is be able to focus on documentaries,” she said. “I have a passion for dealing with real-life stories.”
For someone who has worked closely with such recognized names as Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olajuwon, Tracy McGrady and Clyde Drexler — as well as today’s all-star lineup with the Rockets and Comets — she finds pleasure in helping guide Houston’s own in helping make the life stories of the Space City’s less fortunate a little bit better everyday.
