Joe Kepler

Joe Kepler joined the University of South Carolina communications/public relations staff in November 2014. His current duties include working with the indoor and beach volleyball teams, coordinating the department’s student assistants and compiling the department’s year-end annual reports.

Kepler started as the primary contact for track and field from 2014 to 2016, added volleyball in 2015 and beach volleyball in 2017. Duties for primary sports include – but were not limited to – writing recaps, designing and updating game notes for broadcaster and media consumption, writing press releases, game recaps and feature stories on athletes and coaches, maintaining season statistics and updating record books, managing the day-to-day content for all social media channels and shooting and editing photos and video for social media and website content.

Along with main sport duties, Kepler was also a secondary contact for men’s basketball from 2014 through 2017 and for women’s basketball for the 2021-22 national-championship-winning season. Duties for secondary sports included maintaining game notes and record books, creating and updating fan and media flip cards, completing research projects and management of social media channels.

Outside of sport responsibilities, Kepler took over the department’s student-assistant program in Spring of 2021, hiring, on-boarding and training the communications department’s staff of almost a dozen students currently working in the department.

Kepler also serves as a primary Media Coordinator for major postseason events the department assumes, primarily the women’s NCAA basketball tournament. He has served as media coordinator for the 2016, 2017, 2018, 2022, 2023 and 2024 women’s tournament’s first and second rounds, the 2019 men’s NCAA first and second rounds and the SEC Track and Field Championships in 2017. The role requires personnel management of tournament staff and volunteers, on-site support for visiting teams and media covering the events, and ensuring the design and completion of pregame, in-game and postgame materials for distribution to attending media.

Prior to South Carolina, Kepler spent four years as a media relations director in the athletics department of the University at Buffalo. Over the four years, he assumed primary sport contact duties for women’s basketball, baseball, wrestling, men’s and women’s tennis, men’s and women’s soccer, while also worked as a secondary contact for men’s basketball and football.

Kepler is a 2010 graduate of St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y., earning a degree in Journalism and Mass Communications. He and is wife, Caitlin, are the proud parents of Coleman.