Today was the Senior Day Softball game. The game was originally supposed to be yesterday but it was rained out and rescheduled to today. We had the campus food pantry out to have a canned food drive also. The senior’s had their festivities before the game, walking out with their loved one and receiving their gifts from the coach. I was in charge of overseeing the all of our marketing materials at our table. I also had social media duties that includes getting footage of the senior day festivities before and after the game. The senior heads that we cut out prior to the game came out very well and all of the seniors and the fans enjoyed having them at the game.
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Senior day is coming up for our softball team! Today we were getting ideas together for our seniors. We decided that we would blow up their headshots, cut them out and place them on sticks so the fans, family and friends could hold them up in the stands while they are playing. The photos had to be created using photoshop. We took pictures of the seniors and cropped their heads out and then we made them as large as possible on regular sized paper. It is very time consuming cutting those heads out. You start off trying to be as precise as possible but in the end you end up not being as perfect as when you started. Although it was a tiresome process I believe the senior heads came out to look very good and I really think that the fans and players will enjoy them.
Today my mentor gave me a task to research something called eCal. eCal is a company that has worked with numerous professional sports teams and big time Division I Athletics. The company uses events an organization has and created an e-calendar. The purpose of the calendar is to be able to link it to someone’s smartphone or for example if you use outlook for email, it can link the team’s schedule to the calendar. This is something the University is looking to use mainly for basketball season, our biggest sport. I think it would be great for the university and how fans can be made aware of upcoming events and if there are any changes to those events.
The services uses links to put in the event that is in ones calendar. The links can be radio broadcasts, team rosters, team stats, smartphone apps, etc. One thing I though would be a good idea is having a link that has each games promotions on there. So a person would get an alert that says to come to a “Free Hotdog giveaway” at the next home game. This idea was quickly shot down. Although I was told it was a good idea, I was told we needed to focus on things we already have links for and things that are already created. It would take too much to create something new like that. I understood this and was ok with find links that were already created that I would like to see in an alert on my calendar. So today I was given the task to man the table athletics has for the Senior Fair in the campus bookstore. The fair is where seniors come to pick up their caps and gowns as well as purchase frame for diplomas, amongst other things. One of the main reasons we were there is to try and get those graduating to come back to our Basketball season. One cool thing Athletics does is gives recent graduates two free season tickets to next year’s basketball season. This is an attempt to possibly get reoccurring season ticket holders and it is always good for them to be alumni.
Today was also the first day of the NCAA Tournament. I was able to watch some of the games in between speaking with people and telling them about the season tickets. It was a nice little perk for it being my last day at the internship for a while.. I have one baseball game to work and then my wife is scheduled to get induced with our second child, Maverick. I plan on taking a few weeks off to spend with my wife and help with our oldest son Major who is 2. Today was the first home softball game against Ohio University and it happened to be a double header. I only had to work the first game of the double header however. Today is also St. Patrick’s Day! What the odds of two teams with green as their main colors play on this day? We did not expect too many fans to show up to this game. We did have St. Patrick’s Day theme promotions and prizes. We had our “pot of gold” that fans could guess to see how many gumballs were in the tub and the person with the closet guess won the “pot of gold” and other prizes. Didn’t have any specific responsibilities this game but I did track our attendance for the first game. Started off slow but eventually got close to 100 fans.
One thing we did talk about was how to track attendance a little bit and how we include a “working number” which is the amount if people that are working the game and people that are on both teams. For softball the number is 89. I initially thought it to be a random number the athletic department came up with but the number is pretty accurate. The Associate Athletic Director of Marketing Mark Gazdik says he has to sit down and determine the “working number” with a few people each season and that is how it is determined. This was good information to have. Today started off with a text from Brandon saying that I needed to bring some boots or old schools to help with the tarp that was covering the softball field. Never had to pull a softball field tarp before and it was very heavy. Also the baseball game that was scheduled for 2:00PM but it was changed into a double header with the first game starting at 1:00PM. Not much to do today during the game. I manned the marketing table the whole game. In a previous post I mentioned how we have prizes for people who bring foul balls to the marketing table. I can tell you I did not expect so many kids coming to the table to return those balls. There were kids sprinting to get those balls. It was interesting watching baseball from a working aspect instead of a fan view. One thing I did have to do as well was keep having the announcer repeat the PA’s we had for him to say. He was a student and I hate to say he was not that good.
Well today started off with our Baseball game being cancelled yet again. Mother natural does not want the baseball team to play a home game yet. So instead of working the baseball game I got to pass out flyers across campus promoting the women’s Horizon League tournament game that we are hosting tomorrow 03/11/2015. If I would have known I was going to be doing this much walking I would have worn more comfortable shoes! Even though I didn’t have the proper shoes for extended walking I enjoy visiting campus. There are so many major changes that have occurred since I roamed the campus in undergrad. I also sometimes get to see people that were going to school there when I did.
When I got back to the office, there was not much to do. Brandon and others in the marketing office talked about how no one is buying presale tickets to the women’s game tomorrow. The person who sales the tickets said there were only 22 tickets that have been sold so far. The terrible thing is our women’s team is pretty good this year having the Horizon Player of the Year. Brandon has reached out to groups on campus and has done multiple things to try and promote the game but to no avail. So I ended the day with putting together a spreadsheet of people who entered to win a Bluetooth player and I had to pick a person to win. So that was somewhat cool! Today was the final home game and senior day for our Women’s Basketball team. There are five seniors on this year’s team and they are truly the heart of soul of the team. Something special that went on during the game is we had a troop of girl scouts come out to the game to sell Girl Scout cookies. This was done to try and get more people to the game. We were advertising the cookies for $1 and it was just added on to the ticket to get into the game which is only $5. Not too busy at this game everything was done pretty much beforehand.
Today was a light day in the office. I was put to work on a simple project, putting together prizes for our home baseball games. Brandon bought about 3 grocery bags full of little toys and party favors at the dollar store and it was my duty to take them out of their packaging and distribute them. At our baseball games when a kid catches a foul ball we offer them to trade them in for one of these toys/party favors. This is done to try to make getting the foul balls back fun. It is not a cheap thing to replace baseballs so this is something that is done in an effort to save as many baseballs as possible.
Another thing I worked on is a fun thing for our women’s basketball team. When we have youth teams come to the games they usually are able to stay after the game and get autographs from the team. The marketing team is in charge of bringing posters and sharpies for the women to sign and they always say they want to keep the sharpies! So we thought it was a good idea for the last home game of the season to buy new sharpies and put labels and put them on the sharpies. Each label has each member of the women’s basketball team on them. I was in charge of making the labels. This is something that is simple and corny but something we thought would be fun to do. Today was the final home game for our Men’s basketball team. What a disappointing season for them. They started the season off with a lot of promise but ended winning just 2 out of their last 15 with a 10 game losing streak to end the season. Nothing special going on during the game but we did have to coordinate the senior festivities for after the game. We had to make sure their framed pictures where there and help line up each players families. After the game each player got a moment to speak about their time at Wright State. This was something that took a loooooooong time. The game was over around 9 and the final person stopped speaking a little after 10! It was cool to watch those players speak about their experiences at Wright State and how they bonded with one another. This reminded me of playing football my first couple years of college and how I bonded with my teammates.
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AuthorRyan L. J. Johnson Archives
April 2015
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