By Lisa Kaczke
For a rabid baseball fan, it’s the co-op job dreams are made of: working with the Boston Red Sox at their home stadium, Fenway Park.
The majority of students who co-op at Fenway Park are involved in technical jobs or jobs involving physical training, said Rochelle Rosen, the communications manager of the Department of Cooperative Education, although some criminal justice majors work in security at the park. The News takes a look into the lives of three students currently working for the Red Sox.
Play by play
Some sit in the bleachers. Others, in the coveted seats above the Green Monster. But Andrew Hackett, who is on co-op, arguably has the best seat in the house.
Hackett, a senior communications major, spends his time at Fenway Park in the broadcasting booth sitting next to Northeastern professor and WEEI broadcaster Joe Castiglione.
Every two years, Castiglione offers a student in his sports broadcasting class an opportunity to study with him. In order to get the fiercely sought-after co-op position, Hackett e-mailed Castiglione every six months after taking his class freshman year, and was finally hand-picked by Castiglione for the paid two-year internship.
Hackett gets to Fenway three to four hours before each home game to start preparing for the broadcast. He spends the time gathering information that could be useful during the broadcast. He gets the lineup, reads through the press notes and checks to see if any records could be broken during the game, he said.
During the game he sits between the broadcasters, acting as another set of eyes and ears for the broadcast. He looks at media guides and game notes, passing notes to the broadcasters that he thinks they could use.
“Sometimes they read it, sometimes they throw it at me,” Hackett said.
If the Red Sox win, he goes on the field to get a player to be on a live post-game interview with the broadcasters. The players are nice and most say yes, he said. If the team loses, he gets quotes from the players about the game.
One of the perks of his internship was the chance to travel with the team during the World Series, he said. He had the opportunity to go out onto the field after the Sox finished their sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals.
“I don’t know if it could get any better than that,” he said.
On the big screen
Jumping and waving, many fans spend hours at Fenway Park trying to get on the infamous video screen above the Green Monster. And behind the camera catching the fans cheering for their favorite team is a former Northeastern student living out a dream of working at Fenway.
Pat Armstrong began his current job while on co-op last year. Calling himself a “videographer,” Armstrong wanders around Fenway Park during the game with a video camera and a backpack carrying the technical equipment for the camera.
“I almost look like a ghostbuster going around,” Armstrong said.
Armstrong spends the hours during the games filming the fans and celebrities at the baseball park. If a celebrity is attending the game, the front office at Fenway is notified and it is arranged beforehand that during a certain inning of the game Armstrong will put them up on the screen.
Aside from filming celebrities, Armstrong is given creative license to film any fans that he sees. It is his choice who goes up on the board, so he searches for the cutest kids and the fans dressed up in costumes.
“It’s fun to see people dressed up in a Halloween costume at a baseball game,” Armstrong said.
He gets a lot of people grabbing him, wanting to be on the big screen, he said, but said he has to stay focused during the games and not give in to everyone and the glitz of the celebrities, he said.
“As fun as it is, as cool as it is, I have to maintain a level of professionalism,” he said.
In addition to shooting footage of the pre-game activities and fans during the game, he recently started taking on more responsibility by putting together computer graphics packages to be used on “Red Sox Report” and “Red Sox Stories” on UPN.
Armstrong said he transferred from Eastern Connecticut State University after his sophomore year to get closer to New England professional sports. After working for a small sports show in Rhode Island, his advisor, Pam Goodale, put him down for a co-op job at Fenway. A month after he finished his co-op there in the fall, he was offered a post-graduation job. Armstrong graduated in April with a degree in communications, and now works for the Sox full time.
“It couldn’t have worked out better. I love it here. My heart is here,” Armstrong said.
Behind the Scenes
Thousands of Red Sox fans tune into their TV for a couple of hours when their team plays, but most do not know all the prep work that goes into bringing the game to living rooms across New England.
Mark Giragosian, a production assistant for New England Sports Network (NESN), began his unpaid co-op job last fall running a studio camera for the sports desk at NESN. After his co-op ended, his supervisor offered him a part-time job at NESN starting in January. Before this season began, he was promoted to production assistant for Red Sox baseball on the cable network. He was excited about the promotion because only five to six people work on the show. Giragosian said he counts himself lucky to have landed the job.
Giragosian begins his day five hours before game time and spends the hours running between the mobile NESN truck in Fenway’s parking lot and the ballpark. Giragosian runs errands for the producers, such as getting the lineup from the locker room. His job is to basically get anything the producers need, he said. During the games, he runs the score bar at the top of the TV screen that shows how many balls and strikes there are in the inning. He wraps up with an hour in the locker room after the game. They do one-on-one interviews with the players and his job is to feed the tape from the locker room to NESN during the interview so it can be used.
Giragosian said he is looking forward to continuing with broadcast production after he graduates.
Thousands of people see the end product of what he does on TV, he said.
“I like being part of the production. People don’t know how much we do,” Giragosian said.