Bob Lange '94

As a college intern, Bob Lange received advice that he says has sustained him throughout his entire career. “I was an intern at Sports Illustrated and my boss was Dave Mingey ’88,” Lange remembers. “He asked me to get in touch with Gus Frerotte, who was a quarterback in Washington at the time. I was excited to be calling an NFL quarterback but Dave’s advice was ‘if you do this job, you will be in contact with a lot of celebrities and famous athletes, but that’s not the cool thing. Don’t just think it’s cool to work with them, but get to know them and their stories. That’s what’s really special about this job. Everything is about relationships. The better they are, the better you can do your job.’ I have never forgotten it.”

 

Lange has spent the past two decades building relationships as a Communications Director for NFL teams. He spent much of that time in San Francisco, as the 49ers Director of Football Communications and then Vice President for Communications, and just this month he returned to his hometown to become Senior Vice President of Communications for the Philadelphia Eagles, the team that gave him his first job out of college. For Lange, it has been a long road back to Philly.

 

Ironically, Lange’s first two internships, which he found through connections at Fairfield University, both found him working for Prep grads. In addition to Mingey at SI, he also interned at the AHL’s Philadelphia Phantoms for a summer, under the direction of Brian McCloskey ’91, who then worked in the Communications Office for the team and is now the Prep’s Director of Financial Aid. These internships, as well as his time spent working for the Fairfield Athletic Department, left him feeling like he was set for a full-time job in sports, his chosen field.

 

“I applied to dozens of places and didn’t get one offer for a full-time job,” Lange says. “I was really discouraged. Several offered a chance to be an intern but that was going to be tough for me financially.”

 

The Eagles offered Lange the opportunity to be a Training Camp intern in the summer of 1998. Lange accepted, knowing he could live with his mom and get his foot in the door of the NFL. He worked hard during Training Camp and was asked to stay on for the season. Again, no openings materialized, and he took a second year as an intern at the Eagles. “My sister was jokingly calling me a PI, Professional Intern,” he says, laughing. However, Lange was gaining valuable experience. “I realized that in the NFL, where jobs are scarce, internships are really entry level positions. One thing I found was how important it was to pay your dues. They relied on me to do the same things the full time assistants were doing: pitch stories, run press conferences, set up player interviews. It was a tremendous experience.”

 

After a few weeks into the 1999 season, Lange became a Sports Information Director at Temple University, overseeing football and men’s golf while assisting with men’s basketball. After two years at Temple, he went back to the Eagles, staying for eight years which encompassed many of the glory years involving head coach Andy Reid. The team went to five NFC Championship games and one Super Bowl. “It was an era of greatness with sustained success,” he says.

 

During this time, Lange had gotten married, and he and his wife Rachael had one daughter with another on the way when he got a call from the 49ers. “There are 32 jobs in the world doing what I want to do and this was one of them,” he says. “It offered me the opportunity to run my own department and be that go-to person advising the owner, the General Manager, the head coach, the team president, and steering the messaging for the players. Unfortunately, it meant going across the country, but Rachael was on board and we made the move.”

 

Lange spent 12 years with the 49ers. He was a bit starstruck at first, as San Francisco’s head coach was Mike Singletary, a player Lange had idolized as a kid playing football. However, the team struggled for his first two seasons before bringing in Jim Harbaugh and having playoff success. 

 

“I was working with one of the most storied franchises in all of sports and got to work with some of the 49ers greats: Jerry Rice, Ronnie Lott, Joe Montana, Steve Young,” Lange says. “It was a great place to work, and we moved into a new stadium which was a really good experience.” 

 

Still, he and Rachael were “East Coast people,” so the chance to move back was always on their minds. “We always wanted to come back and never knew when the opportunity would present itself,” he says. “I went through the process of interviewing and have always loved the family atmosphere of the Eagles. To have the chance to come back, and work with people like (general manager) Howie Roseman, (team president) Don Smolensky, and (owner) Jeffrey Lurie, it was very familiar. At the core, it was the same family feeling.”

 

Now that Lange is back in Philadelphia, he is excited to connect more closely with the Prep. “I was such a big fan from afar, seeing how well the football team was doing or that Crew went to Henley,” Lange says. “I know that my Prep spirit outweighs my spirit in a lot of other things.
The environment those four years was an absolutely huge part of who I am and that’s not hyperbole. The relationships I built, the education I received, and the life experiences were amazing. The Prep opened up a lot of doors.”

 

He adds that the Prep’s diverse student body has helped him navigate professionally as well. “As a communications professional, I can relate to anyone in that locker room or on that coaching staff, which is a melting pot of different cultures and religions,” he says. “I owe my mother thousands of dollars from driving me all over the area when I was a freshman or a sophomore. I had friends from the Northeast, the suburbs, and New Jersey. I met so many people from all over and I really believe that helped me develop the ability to connect and build relationships with people from all walks of life. Whether I played sports or not, I would have left the Prep with the ability to work as part of a team and knowing the value of being a man for others. I consider myself lucky that my job allows me to use both of those skills.”