Sophomore year of college, I was given a tour of the Big Ten Network office located in the Groupon building in River North, downtown Chicago. I met with a Loyola alum who was head of marketing and communications at the time. He gave me a tour of the office and plenty of information on his day-to-day life experience to promote the Big 10. The Big 10 consists of 14 different schools in their conference, each unique and individual within themselves. For the longest time growing up, I had an obsession with the University of Illinois. They weren’t good at sports until last year and are located surrounded by CORNFIELDS. I still don’t understand it and cannot explain it; there was one thing I knew for sure, I loved the Big 10. When I started at Loyola University Chicago and chose to pursue a minor in sports management, I knew I wanted a to get a job with sports for more experience.
I worked for a company called i9sports starting out as an intern and a site manager. After a few months, I was given the opportunity to be the Social Media Marketing Director. Through this, I completely ran socials with my own graphics, in addition to the standard national graphics provided. You wouldn’t believe this, but I was even offered to be the Volleyball Director. I accepted and we launched a volleyball program on the 3rd floor gym at an elementary school and sold out within the first two seasons. Through this, I created a game plan for not only marketing strategies, but created the skeleton of what the volleyball program was to be in the future. This experience could have its own post to itself, so lets move on.
At the same time while working at i9sports, I began to transition to working at Northwestern University in their athletic department with fan services for the fall football season of 2019 and the men’s basketball season 2019-2020. I’m an avid BIG10 fanatic and love supporting Chicago sports, but it ended up becoming more than the love of the game, energy, and atmosphere. I decided to study sports management because I love the business side of sports. The sport industry is complex and never ending, with plenty of room for growth, self discovery, and an ever changing identity.
Through this experience, I met thousands of people (fans, executives, coaches, players, co-workers, etc.) Every day we were presented with a new challenge, and agenda. If something needed to get done that was out of the ordinary, you rolled your sleeves up and did it. Everyone from the executives to the cleaning crew worked together. You never saw someone higher up who walked past a napkin on a counter in the corridor and wouldn’t throw it out themselves.
My boss was well aware of my interest of the industry and had suggested I help her out for the basketball season since there were many sports simultaneously going on at once and her job was impossible to perform at one location when she needed to be at three. One particular women’s game, Nebraska vs. Northwestern, as pictured above, I acted as the liaison between the Director of Operations of the visiting team (Nebraska) and Northwestern. Everything ran smoothly and we hadn’t come across any issues, but it was something I will never forget.
Due to COVID-19, the men’s season had been cut short and the position I held no longer existed. Northwestern Athletics is an organization I couldn’t say enough good things about!
O'Shea Chronicles 