By Allison Zwarka
In the beginning of last year I was lucky enough to be placed at an internship with USA Hockey NTDP through my high school. We had an internship class where throughout the semester we would work at least 4 hours a week. Before we started working we had a project to research a little more information about what field we were interested in. I was pretty set on sports marketing and focused my research on that. From the information I found I was able to learn a lot about the field and what it entails, however, all that information would never have prepared me enough for what sports marketing actually asks of you.
Being with USA Hockey gave me the hands on opportunity that is necessary to fully understand what a sports marketer does. With my internship I was only required to work during games and help out with game day operations. I assisted with season ticket holder experiences, in game promotions, stats, ticket sales, and exclusive club packages. Having a hands on experience is a lot more beneficially, for me at least, because I'm a very visual learner. Being able to see what to do and then executing it was more rewarding for my learning. From the pie chart shown below we can see that majority of people are visual learners as well.
http://www.personal.psu.edu/bxb11/LSI/LSI.htm
Being able to actually work in the sports marketing environment revealed to me the truth about how demanding and stressful the job can be. When working in sports or entertainment you hear that you will be working many nights and weekends because that is when the events occur. What you don't realize, though, is that in order to prepare for the events you work all day as well. This job is not for someone wanting a family. The hours are long and a lot of the time you will even have to bring your work home. Ultimately, this experience was able to open my eyes to the realities of the requirements for this type of job.
That sounds like a truly amazing experience! Sports marketing is one of the options that I am looking at for a possible future career. What were some of the specific things you did with marketing for the team? Were you able to suggest and use any of your ideas while working with them?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment and interest in my post. During my time with USA I mainly observed how to put together promotions and how to work with sponsors. I was able to suggest different ways to do certain promotions or processes, while they did take my ideas into account,I didn't really have a say in how anything was ultimately done.
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