Much has been made of the withdrawal Canadians are suffering now that the Olympics are over. Our most successful Olympics, in case you hadn’t heard. I got over the (TV) withdrawal pretty quickly, but I had some busy days at work to help me out.
Spring Training has started, which means, at least in my world, time to start throwing out all the crap in my house that I haven’t used over the winter. And now I get to watch baseball for nine months. It makes a nice change for about a month 
.
But part of Spring Training, if you’re a baseball player, is retuning your mind and body to do what it used to. If you’re not an athlete, you can use Spring Training as an excuse to reflect on what you’ve been doing all winter, and what it is that you really want to be doing.
So what do I do? Start checking out university and college courses that I can take in the spare time that I have. And I found that I’m becoming more interested in fine-tuning my event management skills. Or in English, I want to learn how to throw really good parties for my friends. But it’s more than just throwing parties that interests me. I want to understand how sports events work, especially the mega-events like the Olympics were.
I’ve been lucky enough to have seasons tickets to the Toronto Marlies games this year. And I haven’t been to all of the games, but I’ve been to most. And I’ve also been lucky enough to spend time with members of the Game Operations crew. And it’s intriguing work. Yeah, there’s drama. Like at any workplace, there has to be some drama. But behind the drama are some really neat observations to be made. I’m not going to give away ALL the secrets, but each game is treated like a mini-event. There are scripts to follow. There are people (sometimes pint-sized) to direct. There are seats to sell. And there are different dynamics based on who is working that day, and how they feel. From afar, I see how the games run. But I don’t know all the background work that goes into each day, and I’d like to.
See, as fans, we take a lot for granted. Those guys out on the ice, they’re paid to do a job. WE pay them to do their job. Which is why we get upset when our team doesn’t win the game. But we forget that those guys can’t play if the ice isn’t clean. We can’t enjoy the game if the beer keg is empty. We don’t want to use the bathroom if it’s dirty. We can’t go for smoke breaks without our ticket. And someone has to do each of those jobs. And several someones have to coordinate all those jobs being done. When you track back a fans’ experience like that, you get literally hundreds of people working together to give the fan an experience that they take for granted. I think it’s the puzzle pieces being put together like that, and being put together WELL, that interests me.
By the way, kudos to the Marlies’ Game Crew. And I’ve taken my bias away when I say that. You guys do a great job, from an event planners’ perspective. It may feel formulaic, (and it is!) but you do a great job of not showing how formulaic it really is.
