ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ

In the summer of 2021, I had the privilege of being a game day management intern with the Lancaster Barnstormers. The barnstormers is a minor league baseball team right in Lancaster PA. Most of my time at the Barnstormers was taken up by working games. Almost everyday I was working a game, which was so much fun! On game days there are multiple different jobs that I could be assigned to. These jobs included, storm squad, 50/50 raffle, entrance greater/exit gate, ticket taker, Cylo (our mascot) handler, fan service desk, kids park, and a few more. I loved the different variety of jobs because I was never doing the same job two games in a row. I think that my favorite job to do during game was storm squad. Storm squad is what we call our in game promotions team, this means that we got to interact with fans, dress up and find fans to play sponsored games between innings. This also pushed me out of my comfort zone a little bit! Before this summer I never thought I would be dancing on top of the dugout in front of a full crowd but here I am! Non game days looked very different. I loved working in the offices with all of the full time staff. It was so fun for me to see them all hard at work and learn from them. My office days usually consisted of doing small tasks around the stadium, planning theme days and calling vendors if the theme nights needed them. One of the things the Barnstormers is known for is their fun theme nights. A few theme nights we had this summer where princess night, superhero night, harry potter night, farm show night and so many more. I was kind of helping with all of the theme nights but was mostly on the farm show night team. Planning for farm show night was hard! We had to get animals and vendors and tractors. There was even one day we went out to different flee markets to try to find vendors. While it was hard, it was fun and I learned a lot about the process. There were many highlights of the internship, but I think one of my favorite parts was just interacting with fans on a daily basis. I love making sure that fans are getting the best possible experience at a game. I learned that there are so many small things you can do to make the fans have the best day ever! There were many skills that I learned. I think part of sport management is that you learn through experiences like this. There is so much you don’t know about until you are actually working in the industry. I think the top three things I learned this summer were teamwork, time management and decision making. This was my first internship that really connected to my major. Like I said before, a lot of sport management is not knowing until you are doing. I absolutely love working in the sports industry and I truly think it is what I am supposed to do. Overall I felt pretty prepared for my internship. I found that a lot of the business classes helped me understand how the stadium runs. My sport management class projects helped too because now I got to do all of them in ‘real life’. ÃÛÌÒÓ°Ïñ’s sport management and marketing department prepared me well for this internship!