With the arrival of March Madness, many sports fans have found themselves wondering how they could possibly involve sports in their lives even more. A select few have mixed business with pleasure with their on-campus, yet off-the-beaten-path, BYU athletics-related jobs and internships.
Global supply chain major Trevor Woodfield is getting his schooling paid for thanks to an athletic scholarship — despite having hung up the cleats back in high school. Woodfield shoots and edits video from football practice and games.
“I work directly for BYU’s football team,” Woodfield said. “What I film is used by the coaches and players to review the practices and help them get better when it comes to the games.”
Woodfield and his co-workers were hired despite having no experience.
“Neither myself nor any of my co-workers are film majors; we all do other things,” he said.
Unlike previous jobs he’s had, Woodfield enjoys getting paid to mix his hobby with his work.
“Other jobs I’ve had, it’s work. You go there and get paid, but don’t really care. This, I love,” Woodfield said.
Interacting with the team has increased Woodfield’s respect for the players’ dedication and discipline.
“When people on campus talk about the team or a certain player, I feel protective,” Woodfield said. “It amazes me to see what they dedicate to playing the sport.”
Finance major Freeman Butler joined the BYU Athletics video team a year and a half ago. He gets paid hourly and works up to 20 hours a week but is involved with all of the NCAA teams.
“I go to probably about half the home sporting events and all the home football games,” he said. “I film and edit highlight videos for each event as well as editing pieces for the video boards at basketball and football games.”
Butler said his involvement with the different teams opened his eyes to the success many different BYU teams achieve.
“Before I had this job I didn’t really follow too many sports,” Butler said. “A lot of our sports win conference a lot. I’m big into sports and I love competition, so I love being a small part of these collegiate athletes’ competitions. It’s super fun.”
Beyond just employment, other students such as linguistics major and BYU graduate Cory Clements have been able to incorporate sports into academics with on-campus internships.
“I definitely was attracted to it because I love sports,” Clements said. “That was the main reason I wanted to do it,” he said. “I was still unsure where I wanted to go career-wise so I thought it was a good option to check out. It was cool.”
Coming back for fall semester after a summer internship, Clements heard about the BYU athletic marketing internship through emails from BYU student employment and thought it “sounded like a good time.”
“It was a lot of pre- and post-game work, setting up promotional stuff, field marketing, etc. We learned a lot,” he said. “It was fun to see the operational side of how things work in athletics marketing.”
Civil engineering major Jacob Flansberg also sees a different side of athletics working in the ticket office interacting with patrons and event coordinators.
“The ticket office is kind of behind the scenes, but is an important part to any sports event,” he said. “It is exciting to be involved on a different level and interact with people who are huge fans.”
Finance major Rueben Carlile also enjoyed interacting with the fans; he remembered “laughing his head off” while operating the infamous and now-banned kiss cam.
“I was a part of an organization called AV productions,” he said. “We do all of the audio/visual productions for any event on campus. Everything you’d see or hear at basketball game, soccer, rugby, etc. Anything in house was what we did.”
Carlile worked countless Friday and Saturday nights, but said he “loved the environment.”
“I had such a blast that I didn’t care about having to work on the weekends and stuff,” he said. “It was so cool.” For instance, Carlile would get to be on the floor during basketball games. A player would fall after making a basket and he’d be right there in their face with a camera, trying to get a good shot.
Assistant manager of BYU student employment Angela Murdock said new jobs are being posted daily on studentjobs.byu.edu, which is where most of these students found their employment.
“We’ve started posting already for spring and summer,” she said. “You can always use the search keyword if there’s a certain department or something specific. If you just put a single keyword in, it’ll find it if it’s in the posting at all.”
Clements recommends any job that allows for greater school involvement.
“On campus there’s a lot of opportunity I didn’t really know about,” Clements said. “My only message for students is to just get involved with stuff, whether internships, clubs whatever. They’re good resume items, but also just good experiences.”
