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Don Weast is in his 25th year in charge of athletic media relations at Emporia State and 26th year as a full-time employee for the Hornets.
 
Promoted to the title of Assistant Athletic Director for Media Relations in 2003 and Associate Athletic Director in 2017, Weast oversees media relations, game day press row operations, publications, Web site management and social media for the 15 sport intercollegiate athletic program at ESU.

His office has won three Best in Nation awards from CSC for publication excellence.Weast has promoted 63 Hornets to 114 All-American honors across seven different programs with six National Players of the Year in three different sports.  Hornet student-athletes have earned Academic All-American honors 43 times under his tenure, including two Academic All-Americans of the Year.

In his role at Emporia State Weast has handled the media relations duties for three NCAA Division II Outdoor Track & Field National Championships, four NCAA Division II softball regionals, three baseball regionals, two women's tennis regionals, two women's soccer regionals and one volleyball regional. Previous to taking over the lead position he also assisted with three women's basketball regionals, one baseball regional, one softball regional and two outdoor track & field championships at Emporia State and the 1996 NCAA Division II Softball World Series.   He served as the pre and post game press conference moderator at the 2015 and 2016 NCAA Division II Football Championship games at then Children's Mercy Park in Kansas City.

He developed Emporia State Athletics’ social media presence and has grown it to one of the largest followings in the MIAA.  The Hornets are the only program in the conference with at least 17,000 Twitter followers, 11,000 Facebook likes, 5,000 Instagram followers and 900 YouTube subscribers. Weast also worked on the testing group for Genius Sports' NCAA Live Stats football software development.

He began his association with the Hornets as a student athletic trainer in 1986. Weast spent part of the 1989-90 season with the now defunct Topeka Sizzlers of the CBA as an athletic trainer. He spent two seasons as a Rule 10 assistant football coach at Osage City Junior High in 1992-93.

A 1998 graduate of ESU, Weast was a sports supervisor at the Emporia Recreation Commission prior to returning to ESU as a student in the sports information office in 1997.

After a year of graduate work at Central Missouri, he returned to ESU in 1999 as the director of sports promotions.