By: Carleigh Colley
For this job shadowing assignment I attended the women’s basketball game against Murray State on Thursday November 15th where I observed Assistant Director of Athletics Communications, Milla Sue Wisecarver, who is in charge of Men’s & Women’s Soccer, Women’s Basketball, and Lacrosse. I arrived to the Convocation Center about 15 minutes prior to the game and everything was already set up. There were nameplates on press row so that people would know where to sit and there were stat monitors set up randomly throughout it.
Sitting in the row from what I could tell was the announcer, and people who were taking official stats. They would input the stats into the computer. Milla Sue also had student workers and practicums working on twitter and keeping track of other stats and such. Milla Sue would also run stats to all the media periodically throughout the game. After the game there was a press conference upstairs in one of the rooms on the main level of the Convocation Center.
Through this experience I learned about what happens behind the scenes at athletic events and saw how much there actually is that goes on. I also learned that you need to have a very thorough understanding of the sport you’re working for. Working as a student worker in the Athletics Communications office I have seen a lot of games but I don’t often work with Milla Sue so it was interesting to see how she does things and how directors can do things. They all can put their own spin on things even though the job is pretty similar for all of them. I don’t think it’s something that I want to do in the future because it is very time consuming. Although I think it would be a great job, I would like to have a family and that is hard to balance with a job like this that goes on during all hours.