Communications veteran Chuck Pool powers Rice sports

By Andersen Pickard     2/18/25 10:47pm

In an office nestled near the elevator on the ground floor of Tudor Fieldhouse, Chuck Pool taps away at his keyboard, vowing to answer a few more emails before fielding questions from the Thresher. This is standard practice for Pool. The assistant athletic director and head of athletic communications has seemingly put Rice’s interests ahead of his own for decades.

Pool was born in Virginia, but as the son of a naval aviator, said he relocated often. His childhood included stops in the Philippines, Hawaii and Midway Island, a coral atoll with 2.4 square miles of land in the Pacific Ocean. He found himself paying more attention to sports than the average fan because of how far he lived from the contiguous United States, he said. 

Playing baseball and swimming gave Pool his sports fix on military bases, and by high school, he added basketball, football and wrestling to his repertoire. Pool lived on the mainland by then, and he became interested in journalism.

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“I was part of a wave of kids enrolling in journalism schools,” Pool said. “Everyone wanted to be an investigative reporter, wanted to be this, wanted to be that. I just wanted to be a sports writer.”

Pool attended the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he played football and dabbled in journalism as a history major. However, upon losing interest in covering non-sports topics, such as government, he joined Nebraska’s sports information department as an intern.

“Being that I had been such a raging fan, I felt like I was stealing money,” Pool said. “I was excited that I got to file mugshot slides of football players – 120 sets of individual shots and we had to do them in team sets to mail out. I was just happy collating those.”

Pool’s time in the sports information department coincided with a historic run for Nebraska that included a Heisman Trophy, two Rotary Lombardi Awards and 10 Consensus All-American selections in football. Upon graduation, he took a job with the Houston Astros, noting that his only connection to the position was its proximity to family in Louisiana.

“[The Astros] were supposed to lose 100 games, move to Washington,” Pool said. “At the end of the year, we were one game away from the World Series.”

Pool met his wife Laura in Houston 

and, after five years with the Astros, was hired as the first public relations director of the Miami Marlins upon their founding in 1991. He came back to Houston near the turn of the century, serving a brief second stint with the Astros before starting his own PR business. The endeavor created more time for his family, but it wasn’t a long-term solution for Pool, who said he dreamed of returning to college sports.

“Working [for] myself is fun, but I’m not exactly making a ton of money, and I’ve got an idiot for a boss,” Pool said, adding that he never felt like he was the entrepreneurial type.

In 2006, Rice had an opening for a sports information director. With his family settled down in Houston, Pool said he jumped at the opportunity, saying that positions in college sports with adequate pay in your hometown don’t come around often, especially for someone 15 years removed from working in an NCAA program. 

Pool was offered the position and started just nine days before the Bayou Bucket against the University of Houston. 

“That was like jumping on a treadmill set at 20 miles an hour with no handrails,” Pool said.

He said the Owls’ 2006 football season – just like the 1986 Astros’ season – is further proof that teams have unexpected success whenever he takes a new job. Rice went 7-6 after finishing 1-10 the year earlier, making its first bowl game in 45 years.

Despite being thrown several curveballs in his first year on South Main, Pool knew he had found the right job after an interaction with linebacker Brian Raines, a standout defender who led Conference USA in tackles and forced fumbles in 2006. Amidst a quick start to the season, Pool said he had trouble recognizing certain players in the locker room. Raines came to his rescue.

“He just smiled at me and said, ‘Who do you need?’” Pool said. “Right away I went, ‘Well, okay, that’s a good sign.’”

Now in his sixties, Pool has come a long way since his initial struggle to match names with faces. He is now the Owls’ go-to resource for Rice Athletics information, keeping tabs on storylines, statistics, records and much more for all athletic programs on campus. He oversees a small staff handling communications for all Rice sports, and Pool himself is the primary contact for baseball and football. 

Pool highlights the proactiveness of his current staff, which is something he said he didn’t see at Nebraska or in Major League Baseball. One of his primary tasks is connecting the press with players or coaches, and he takes proactive measures by offering the media an angle to frame their stories. More often than not, potential storylines fall apart and Pool’s work becomes all for naught. However, when the stars align, he’s responsible for coordinating a quality story that Rice fans enjoy.

No two days as sports information director look the same, so Pool said he’s learned to adapt in his role while continuing to support Rice Athletics staff, coaches and players.

“Every day starts off with a little checklist, and then the checklist usually gets demolished within the first 20 minutes by all the things that come in, the brushfires, and you’re just kind of winging it the best you can,” Pool said.

Pool reflects on the 2006 season when he worked tirelessly to get big names in sports media to talk about Jarett Dillard. Pool wanted to build hype for the Rice wide receiver amidst his campaign for the Biletnikoff Award. 

He generated similar buzz for Rice football in 2015 when running back Luke Turner delivered an emotional statement singing head coach David Bailiff’s praises. A teary Turner thanked Bailiff for his only Division I offer, which allowed him to play collegiate football while receiving a quality education. Pool uploaded the video to YouTube before sending it to ESPN reporter Tom Rinaldi on a whim.

“I said, ‘I don’t know if you can do anything with this, but this is unbelievable,’” Pool said. “[Rinaldi] texted me about two days later and said, ‘We want to come out and talk to [Turner]. It’s a great story with 500,000 hits.’ So they did that story and we’re on GameDay a week after the season ended. Lee Corso and [everyone else] is tearing up, and you’re like, ‘Wow.’”

Pool, who won’t even guess how many hours he works in a week, also attends practice, coordinates media availability and updates his notes repeatedly. And he does it while overseeing a hardworking staff to ensure that all sports are treated equally and given fair coverage, even those that aren’t currently in-season.

With many responsibilities and loads of information, Pool is a popular person in athletics circles. He eventually returns every call he gets, but when the phone is constantly ringing with questions – like last fall, when football fired Mike Bloomgren and hired Scott Abell within one month – he says he gives preference to the media members he trusts to “not put [a story] out ahead of time.” This allows him and his staff to coordinate the best time for making pertinent announcements.

Trust is important to Pool, and not only when working with the media. Whenever a new coach is hired, Pool said he prioritizes developing a rapport and trust with them. He quickly formed that relationship with baseball head coach Jose Cruz Jr., perhaps thanks to Pool’s connection with Jose Cruz Sr. from their shared stints with the Astros. He’s had similar experiences with football head coaches Bailiff, Bloomgren and Abell.

“With Coach Bailiff and Coach Bloomgren, there were moments where it was bumpy patches along the way, but you’re just trying to get used to each other and work through them,” Pool said, adding that Abell has been great so far, too. 

There was once a time when Pool led the communications efforts for men’s and women’s tennis, swimming, baseball and football simultaneously. He remembers one Friday evening when he was live-tweeting tennis conference championships while scoring a baseball game.

“My wife says I’m a stress addict and says I’m really unhappy when I don’t have 15 things banging in my head at the same time because then I start bugging her,” Pool said. 

When asked about the next chapter of his life, Pool avoids the word “retirement.” He fears that leaving his work behind could lead to a sedentary lifestyle that he wants to avoid. But he also knows his time at Rice isn’t unlimited, citing his age, the ever-evolving nature of the position and a growing shift toward enamoring a younger audience with newer forms of media. He also has two grandchildren now, ages 6 and 8, whom he enjoys watching play youth sports.

Pool, who measures success in the amount of publicity that Rice receives and says he would never promote himself over the team, questioned the Thresher’s request to interview him for this story. He expressed doubt about whether a Chuck Pool feature was worth writing. However, as he knows, the press doesn’t always choose to report on the story he suggests.

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