Sports – CA Work Experience Program

Day 8- NCFC

Day 8 at NCFC started out the same, as I got into the office around 10, but was greeted by fresh Krispy Kreme donuts from our Creative Services director, Luis. Luis is leaving soon, and these were his thank you gift to the organization for giving him such a valuable and enjoyable experience. I have only known him for a short time, but he has helped me learn the ropes in Adobe Spark on the first day, so thank you Luis!

Moving on to the actual work of the day, I mostly did the same things I had been assigned all week, which was calling the clients on my call lists and seeing how they were doing. While it does not seem like that much work, this developing of relationships with your clients and selling them tickets is a vital opportunity for the club, as it packs the stands, and then down the road, these buyers can potentially become season ticket holders, do a group event, or another package to boost attendance. What’s great about this for me, is that I have been invited back to work the whole summer in the office! The clients I have worked with over the past two weeks will still work with me over the whole summer.

Thanks to Brad, Fred, and the rest of the NCFC organization providing with a great two weeks to learn the ropes of a ticket sales office, and work with the best women’s soccer team in the world!

Day 7- NCFC

My day started bright and early, but I was actually late to work due to holdups at the DMV (what a wonderful place). I ended up getting in about 45 minutes late, but I was still waiting on Angela to log me in to Archtics, the software used to actually complete sales so I could fully sell tickets. While I waited, I got set up at my desk, made sure I had my notes ready, and got prepared for a call I had scheduled yesterday with a potential buyer. Angela quickly logged me in and gave me the basic tour of the system, and I was off. However this tour wasn’t comprehensive, so I had to figure out a few things myself, namely finding the seats and then putting in payment information.

At 1130, I got on my call with my client, and I completed my first ticket sale! There were technical difficulties that almost stopped me, but Angela graciously helped me work through them. It was a great feeling getting to write the number 1 on the board, showing that I had really progressed during my time here, getting to do all the big responsibilities and tasks others do.

Cool event of the day, Nazmi Albadawi, club favorite and recent signee, stopped by our offices to say hello to the people he knew and meet the new employees since he left, including me. He’s a very cool guy, and seems to be a model member of the team.

Day 6- NCFC

NCFC got much quieter today, with most of the other part timers coming in during the afternoon, and one of my bosses taking care of work with the players at the stadium. This meant I was put on default duty, taking and making calls. Brad extended our Starbucks competition by another day, so it was important that I made some contacts if I could. Indeed I did, getting to interact with a few people from both the new call sheets we had been handed, and the old ones. On my older sheets, I called back people I had heard from in the past, to confirm their interest and try and push the sale along. I also did some calls to groups or organizations to see whether they were interested in getting a party package or suite package together.

It is really interesting to see from a different perspective of a sales call, as when you’re on the receiving end of one, you usually think it is stupid and a waste of time. However, when you’re doing the calls, each call matters and you want the customer to really be engaged and not think it’s annoying or a waste.

Our fun moment of the day was when the NCFC U23s stopped by outside our office, to pick up some materials for their match tonight against the NC Fusion U23s. They all seemed like a general bunch of nice guys, including the head coach, who was interested in what we do.

a rotated view of the order forms for groups.

NCFC- Day 5

Today was almost another normal day in the ticket sales office here at NCFC. However, when I came in, I realized that all the desks were taken with part-time workers like I, who had been recently put in the office due to their school getting out. That meant I got shuffled to the corner. I was not there for long when we had our MMM (Monday Morning Meeting), with Fred, another one of my bosses, going over the key takeaways for this week, including upcoming matches and what we needed to focus on. This meant I was back with a sheet of names to call, and the most amount of contacts between me and the part timers got free Starbucks from my boss! I did pretty well, but I will only know the results of my efforts tomorrow when see the board. Among the interesting aspects of my day was when one of my coworkers leaned over and said, “can you speak Spanish?” She had multiple people that could only speak Spanish, as they were exclusively Spanish speaking. This led me to staying a bit longer, calling back people from lots of other client lists that only spoke Spanish. A pretty normal day in the office, but a fun and interesting one putting my skills to work nontheless.

Day 4- NCFC

When I arrived at NCFC this morning, all seemed to be normal. Everyone was working away, even though it was a bit quieter, due to the men and the women not playing at home this week. I sat down to make a few calls as I previously did yesterday, but about an hour after I started, my boss Brad came in yelling “Victor, come outside and help me with the grill!” This started my wild adventure with being a helper for the office cookout.

I only grill occasionally, so I was shocked when I was told by Brad that he wanted me to help him grill the burgers and hot dogs for the lunch. However, as the intern, I’m here to do everything, so I got started right away. I didn’t actually end up grilling anything, but I helped carry everything out, get stuff set up, and by about noon, we had food on the table, and the whole office staff, from operations to media to ticket sales out in the parking lot. We shot hoops, kicked the soccer ball around, talked about the upcoming matches this weekend, and club captain Austin Da Luz even stopped by to say hello!

After getting my fill of burgers, hot dogs, chips, and cake for lunch, I trickled back in with the rest of the office to complete a little more work before heading home for the weekend. I spent a little more time doing more sales calls, before Brad told me I could go ahead and go home. It’s been a really fun first week at NCFC, and I’ve learned a lot about how a pro sports organization works, and how much effort it takes to get the fans in the stands for each match.

Day 3- NCFC

When I arrived today, the office was in a festive mood. We had won our US Open Cup match tonight and were awaiting the draw of the next round. However, there was still a lot of work to be done, especially for selling people on the potential opportunity to watch an MLS team here at home. Fred, one of my bosses, asked me “are you ready to make some warm calls?” and with that, I was experiencing my first sales work. I was handed many spreadsheets and instructed to follow up on these ticket buyers experiences, and whether they might be interested in coming again.

Many of these calls were not fruitful, either leading to voicemails or disinterest, but I still was able to connect with a few people that had a great time and were very interested in purchasing more tickets. I could not do the actual process of getting them tickets, so I handed them off to my colleague Tyler to finish the process. However, I got to write my numbers down on the board the department uses to track sales!

As I was calling, we all took a break to track the US Open cup draw, which could make a huge impact in the NCFC season, bringing an MLS opponent to town. Sadly, we were drawn away, and the office was angry. However, we went right back to work, checking in with more customers and seeing whether they were interested in our upcoming doubleheader.

After calling the people listed, I was told by my boss to go home a bit early! It has been a great couple days at NCFC so far, and I have learned a lot.

Day 2- NCFC

Today, as I arrived at the office, was a much busier day than yesterday, largely in part due to the teams US Open Cup match against the Florida Soccer Soldiers, a semi-pro team from Miami. This meant that I helped out cutting and trimming ingress and egress flyers, which are passed out to fans before and after games with the rosters and next matchups on the cards. We have an expected attendance of about 1,500 people for tonight’s game, low by normal team standards, but high enough to where the cutting and trimming of these were pretty demanding.

While waiting on those to print, I took part in some research for an upcoming program that NCFC is about to unveil. I took notes on similar experiences provided by other clubs in the USL, and then actually participated in a discussion about the merits of each one, and the potential experience the club itself would provide.

With the majority of the activities prepped out for tonight’s game, we had a final briefing for the staff, most of which are working at tonight’s game, and then we were let go for the day.

Over the first two days, I have observed even more how the Ticket Sales and Operations departments work, since this is my first time being at the office, instead of working at the park. Every employee works hard on their own facet of the organization, which means the team runs smoothly.

Day 1- NCFC

To start out my first day at NCFC, I got together with my boss to discuss what I could start with while he put together a bigger project for me. He tasked me with creating “Know Before You Go” guides for each company that was attending our next match on June 15th. These guides had general specifics for parking, tickets, and acted as general FAQs that would help people that had never attended a match before. We set up the master copies in Adobe Spark and then got to work customizing each one for the specific companies.

This actually took up the time I had for today, as it was about 6/7 companies for both the men’s and women’s matches, and each had to be done almost from scratch.

Last day!

Today, we wrapped up our work experience program by meeting with Mr. Smith again to go over our findings. We met him at Carolina Cafe at 9:30 and presented him with our project results over the past couple of days. We showed him our i️information and explained to him the patterns and what surprised us about the data we collected. Mr Smith said that the i️nformation we collected would be very helpful for him going forward as well! After presenting him with our i️nformation, he explained to us how in recent years there is a notable increase in athletes coming out of North Carolina, something that was also very apparent in our data. This was very interesting to hear about as it’s something that i️ didn’t know about before. Also, we did another question and answer process which was very helpful in learning more about the sports agency process. I learned that being a sports agent is a lot more than just the money, and so much of it comes from the relationships you make with people. Mr. Smith was very helpful in answering Jonathan and Is questions about sports in general and also more about sports agents and what jobs they actually do. He stated the pros and cons of his job and stated that he liked his job 80 percent of the time, but there are cons just like there are cons of everything. The particular cons of this job come from people who fall apart while becoming a professional athlete. Altogether, i️t was a really good experience and i️m glad we had the opportunity to meet with him!

This is a picture of something that is stated on Vanguards website

Day 7!

Today was a day to work on the project that Mr. Smith assigned us yesterday. This project included two different parts, both of which to get us thinking more along the lines of sports management. We had time to work on this project alone, so Jonathan and I split up the work and then got started. The first step of what Mr. Smith assigned us to do had to do with general questions about the role of a sports agent. He asked us to pretend we were an athlete that was getting signed out of high school and to determine the factors and questions we would have for an agency through this process. This exercise gave us the opportunity to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes to gain more knowledge for the actual work that a sports agent does. It was interesting to do research about different sports agencies and read some of the main factors of why certain ones are more liked than others. This comes down to a lot of factors, some being truthfulness and honesty. The second part of the project had to do with athletes from North Carolina in the past multiple drafts for baseball, basketball, and football. We made a spreadsheet that consisted of the players from the first couple of rounds of these drafts and found their salary after 4 years and what amount of this salary would go to the agent. Mr. Smith told us that this information would be very useful to him and that it is something that he has always wanted to collect. We are very excited to meet with him again tomorrow and tell him about our findings!