Auburn Game Face

Written by: Neal Reid

Francis Sanda has seen a lot in his days at Auburn University.

The Albany, Georgia, native has worked on Auburn’s statistics crew since 1970 and is just one of three men to hold the title of official scorer since 1951. Sanda, 81, is the only official clad in the traditional black and white stripes who doesn’t blow a whistle at Auburn home men’s basketball games, but his role is crucial to the overall operation.

Armed with a No. 2 pencil, Sanda marks every statistic into an official scorebook, a volume that holds every made basket, free throw, foul and a litany of other stats that tell the story of a game. He has a seat on the front row to history, centered at the scorer’s table, and his role is one he relishes dearly.

“Man, I love it,” said Sanda, winner of the 2020 David Housel Auburn Spirit Award. “I’ve been very fortunate, and I’ve seen the best and the worst. I’ve been part of every SEC championship Auburn’s had during that period of time.

“I have a good seat.”

As the official scorer, Sanda is tasked with keeping the “book” that serves as the approved and authorized record recognized by the NCAA. He works with the game officials to get the calls, statistics and game events correct in the scorebook, which he tediously and meticulously maintains all season.

“There’s a lot of ins and outs of the job that people don’t really realize and a lot of work behind the scenes,” Sanda said. “It’s a team effort, and you sometimes make some decisions [with the scoring] that maybe everybody in the stands doesn’t like. Sometimes you’re really following the instructions of the officials, and honestly, they try to do the best they can. It’s a fast game, and it’s only gotten faster.”

In the black-and-white world of sports statistics, Sanda’s prime objective is accuracy. It’s a constant aim that he and his team work toward each game.

“On game day, our goal is to get everything right and do it in a timely and orderly manner,” he said. “We work as a team, and it’s a great group of people. You want to get it right for everybody involved, and some nights are better than others.

“I think we are a part of history, and so we want to get it right.”

A longtime sports fan, Sanda arrives to games early and stays late, and he says the current atmosphere at Auburn men’s basketball games at Neville Arena is as electric as he’s ever experienced.

“I get here about an hour-and-a-half ahead of time, and you look across the court at The Jungle and wonder how long it’s going to take to fill up [with students],” he said. “It’s usually two or three minutes, and it’s amazing, it really is. The people come in, they’re loud and into it, and it’s unbelievable.

“You see how Coach Bruce Pearl reacts to the crowd and when he thinks it needs to be a little louder, and it’s just tremendous.”

Quite the career

Conservative estimates say that Sanda has worked more than 900 Auburn men’s basketball games since he joined the stats crew in 1970. Couple that with more than 300 football games in Jordan-Hare Stadium and at the SEC Championship, and there isn’t much major Tigers sports history he has not witnessed firsthand the last 50-plus years.

A heart attack kept Sanda away from the second half of Auburn basketball’s SEC schedule in 1992, but he returned strong the next season and has been a mainstay at the court ever since.

“I’ve been very fortunate to be able to work the conference tournament a number of years, and that’s been very interesting,” Sanda said. “It’s an honor to do that, and it’s an honor to be able to do all the home games, too.”

He has seen the ups and downs of Auburn sports, and on the basketball front has seen the likes of Pete Maravich during his LSU days in the late 1960s—when students would sneak into the sports arena to watch the future National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Famer and five-time NBA All-Star play—as well as powerhouse Kentucky teams from the 1990s that would go on to win national titles.

“I have really seen how basketball and the SEC have grown,” Sanda said. “It used to be more like a one- or two-team sport, and now everybody can win.”

Sanda and Auburn’s statistics crew were selected to work basketball at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Summer Games, an honor he says is among the best experiences of his sports career.

“That was really amazing,” Sanda said. “We did the very first game at Morehouse [College], and we alternated between there and the Georgia Dome. We did the first game, and we did the last game, and the [U.S.] women won the Olympic championship. I thought it was quite an honor, and I still have a copy of that score sheet.”

A true Auburn man

Sanda arrived on the Plains in 1959, worked as a student manager for the football and baseball teams and graduated with a business degree in 1963. He then went to work in the Auburn Ticket Office in 1964 and believes he was the office’s first male ticket manager. After a five-year stint there, Sanda went to work for a group of doctors in Opelika, where he stayed for 43 years.

When he wasn’t doing his daytime job, Sanda was at Auburn sporting events, penciling away. He kept stats at Auburn football games for nearly 40 years before computers replaced the job in the press box three years ago, but he remains a fixture at the scorer’s table at Neville Arena.

“I’m afraid to give it up, to be honest with you,” said Sanda, who cut his teeth as a scorekeeper and stat crew member for his high school teams. “I’ve been very fortunate. It’s a job I think a lot of people would really like to have, and I’m fortunate to be the one who’s had it.”

Sanda and his wife, Paula, married in 1968, and they have three children—Mike, Michelle and Mark—who have given them four grandchildren. Fate brought him to the Plains in 1959, and he’s been here ever since.

“I was getting ready to go to school over in Atlanta, and an opportunity came up [at Auburn],” he said. “I didn’t have to think twice. Auburn means everything, it really does.”