Why I want to work in sports

If you've read the "About Hailey" section on my website, you probably know a little bit about my background and how I got into the sports industry. Basically, I worked for my local MiLB team for a summer, fell in love, and have never looked back. But I was thinking the other day about why I fell in love with it in the first place. Surely there must've been a reason why I got so attached, and so I decided to look deeper in order to find it.

At its core, a sports organization is just like any other business. They have a product or service, and they aim to sell it to consumers in order to profit and make the consumers' lives better.

But a sports organization takes the simplicity of a business model and pushes it to the extremes. They market both a product and a service— their product is a group of world-class athletes on a team together competing against other teams, and their service is an unforgettable experience for the fans.

And then comes the kicker in sports. No, not the Chris Boswell kind of kicker, but the thing that makes sports so special. The fans. The consumers of the business that the sports industry puts out. The life and breath of athletics at every level.

Sports are an incredibly powerful thing that brings different people together. You can take two people, who are completely different in every regard of who they are, but if they are the fans of the same sports team, they can be friends. There isn't a whole lot of things in this world that has the power to do something like that.

The fans that follow sports teams are so connected because the teams they love are so embedded in their lives that their teams define who they are. This is what makes the sports business stand out— the team that they sell literally is a part of who their fans are.

No person gets to know someone on a first date, writes a paragraph introducing themselves to their class at the beginning of the semester, or buys extensive merchandise to show the world that they like to buy their jeans from American Eagle. It doesn't say much about a person, gives no way for a lot of people to connect to him or her, and all around is just not an interesting fact. But people always let the world know what team they're cheering for year-round, and that is a powerful thing that shapes one's life and character.

I believe in the power of the sports industry. There is nothing on this Earth that I would rather spend my time promoting, selling, talking about, experiencing, or connecting people to. And that is why I want to work in sports.

Plus, it's just super freaking cool to work in an office connected to a field or stadium.