NOTE: Concordia Athletics gives special thanks to Brent Royuk, Beth Pester and Curt Nierman on their combined roughly 72 years of service as Concordia football statisticians.
“I’m behind!” are two words Brent Royuk can sometimes be heard exclaiming from his perch inside the Bulldog Stadium press box on a typical Concordia Football Saturday. It’s likely a unique play has just unfolded, challenging the experienced and well-tested wits of a three-person crew of statisticians led by Royuk. It’s at this point that the small talk ceases and Brent and his team, including sister Beth Pester and good friend Curt Nierman (all Concordia alums), must heighten their focus.
There’s time to catch up later. For now, they must get it right – and they will. Their track record speaks for itself. For nearly three decades, the process has played out in similar fashion. Behind the scenes and out of the spotlight, Brent, Beth and Curt have worked to meticulously document the football program’s history.
“We just love it so much,” Brent says as he looks forward to year 29 as leader of the crew. “Having done it so long with Beth and Curt, we have our routines established. We talk a lot. It’s like going through a McDonald’s drive-thru. You want the person to say back to you what you just said. ‘Oh you want a double cheeseburger with extra onions?’ You have to know the details. If you’re thinking it, say it. Sometimes Beth will tell me something and I’ll say it back to her wrong. There’s some correction that goes on. That’s why you have that paper record. Sometimes we need it.”
In Concordia’s history, there’s never been a longer running team of statisticians. As the 2001 Bulldogs captured a GPAC championship and hosted the program’s first and only home football playoff game, Brent and Beth enjoyed a bird’s eye view. In 2017 when Tarence Roby picked off a pass, stutter-stepped and raced 100 yards for a touchdown, Brent, Beth and Curt were there to call it out, enter the keystrokes and cheer, of course. Brent began this venture in 1995, first with paper stats, before being joined by Beth in 1996 and then by Curt around 2005. Other than the 1998 year spent in Indiana, Beth has been along for the ride every season since ’96.
Brent and Beth, both Concordia professors, are unapologetic nerds when it comes to the game of football. Naturally, Brent wanted to get involved in the mid-1990s and lend his services to the athletic department, specifically the football program. In the middle of Head Coach Courtney Meyer’s tenure, Brent volunteered to bring greater organization to the way statistics were kept. Initially, Brent and Beth even traveled to road games to do stats.
“Sometimes the opposing team would give us space in the press box and sometimes they wouldn’t,” Beth said. “If they didn’t give us space, we would sit in the top row of the bleachers. He would bounce a laptop on his knees and I would bounce a clipboard on my knees. We would sit up there and do stats like that.”
In the days of hand-written paper stats, Brent would take the stats he scrawled out from the games and enter them into an Excel spreadsheet while tabulating totals for the season as a whole. As technology improved, Brent began to seek a better way. After some research, Brent discovered a program that would allow the crew to move past the days of pen and paper. A revolution had begun to take place. Eventually, Brent would use programs such as Stat Crew and PrestoStats.
“It started with me buying something with football money,” Brent said. “It was designed for MAC, which meant it was going to be more of a graphical and rich user interface. It wasn’t DOS software. We were surprised then when the conference adopted its first package and it felt like a step backwards in usability. It was all text-based DOS. At first we were on paper with Excel. I kind of asked around and found a program. There was a little picture of a field on the interface and it would update as you entered plays.”
Born eight years apart and raised in Tennessee, Brent and Beth have been able to connect in ways they weren’t able to as children. Football Saturdays mean just a little bit more than what happens on the football field. As Beth recalls, there was even the time she revealed to Brent that she was pregnant. Beth broke the news by plopping a photo of her ultrasound on top of the stats laptop. This was child No. 1 for Beth and her husband Harold, a football alum and Bulldog assistant coach for several years.
Says Beth of the sibling bond, “We lived apart for so long. This has been the most constant time we spend together and we both look forward to it. We spend three or four hours together on home game Saturday afternoons. It’s a really good time.”
In between plays, Brent, Beth and Curt usually find time to talk about family life and current events. At halftime, one of the three will typically go fetch complimentary hot dogs and drinks from the concessions stands while getting a mental break from the mental concentration required of each play. As kickoff approaches, Brent returns the computer, Beth readies her pencil and Curt trains the binoculars upon the kicker lining up to boot the ball away. Once the game goes final and printed box scores are handed off to coaches and media members, the crew packs up and then looks forward to the next Saturday at home.
“It's been a fun brother-sister activity,” Brent says. “We always end up having family conversations and get caught up with what our kids are doing and stuff like that. It’s part of the enjoyment. I love the flow-state you get into. That’s so fun. It requires a little bit of concentration to not miss anything and do a good job. It comes at you pretty fast. When we occasionally have that new spotter come in, they usually have the reaction sometime around the third quarter and say – ‘wow, this is really fun. It’s like the thrill of the chase kind of thing. Contributing to the program has been in the front of my mind over the years.”
With 26 seasons of college football statistics experience (in addition to previously recording high school football stats for her husband), Beth can’t help but see the game in any other way. Brent and Beth are always quick to point it out when the officials routinely spot the ball right on the yard line, rather than somewhere in the middle. Even after all these years, they still find themselves faced with new situations and unique plays that challenge them on the fly.
They each have different personalities and preferences for how to operate. Brent and Beth tell everyone they are very different people, but it works. The chemistry between stat crew members has strengthened over time. Not many in the country (or perhaps any?) have been doing this longer, and most stat crews would be hard-pressed to duplicate the same accuracy.
“We really nerd out about it,” Brent said. “We like to think we are pretty accurate. We’ve always felt appreciated by the coaches. We always enjoy any interactions we have with the media in the press box. You end up talking to the radio crews as things are happening. They’ll be calling the play and I’ll say, ‘that was a rush,’ and they’ll hear that. Or I’ll tell them what the punt yardage was and I know they’re hearing me with part of their brain.”
The labor of love for the three-person crew has helped track the history of Concordia Football. The likes of DJ McGarvie and Korrell Koehlmoos broke school records in 2022, rewriting record books that have accumulated from nearly a century of Bulldog football. Brent and Beth in particular have been around for more than a quarter of all seasons in the program’s history. The run began during Meyer’s tenure (1990-2008) and has continued with head coaches Vance Winter (2009-16) and Patrick Daberkow (2017-present).
“I love, love doing football stats,” Beth said. “When we need a sub, one thing I always tell people is you can’t watch the game. You have to watch the stats. Sometimes it’s easier to get someone who doesn’t love football so much because they get so caught up in watching the game that you miss the stats. Those are totally different things to watch. You can’t watch the game so much. It’s a different way to watch football, which is how I watch football anymore.”