Ryan Lane
Omaha Storm Chasers
Werner Park
12356 Ballpark Way
Papillion, NE 68046
Jason Kinney and Andrew Madden
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For my internship, I worked with the Omaha Storm Chasers. It is an interesting to know that although minor league baseball in Omaha has been around off and on for 124 years that the
Storm Chasers have only been around for three seasons. Previous to that they were known as the
Omaha Royals and they played at Rosenblatt Stadium. They currently play and have offices at
Werner Park. They have many attractions to be offered but the main one would be the Triple-A team of the Kansas City Royals. They have a large sales team which has about 15 full time sales people. They have a maintenance staff for the park that employees 4 full time employees. They have their baseball operations team that consists of three people or so. They offer an apparel and merchandise store known as the Storm Front which has around two or three people to run it.
Their broadcast team consists of two full time people. They have a multimedia team of two or three full timers as well. Within all of these departments they have a large number of part time employees that are there just for game time. There is an outside company that handles concessions. The players and coaching staff is employed through Kansas City so we did not deal with them very much. Mainly they have a General Manager and an assistant General Manager that are at the top with a group of five or six executives and then the rest of the employees are under them in the sales team and other departments that I mentioned earlier.
My job, along with the other interns, was mostly game day things such as working in the
Storm Front, the kids play areas, the speed gun game called mojo and Bud booth which is a station that people can sign up to be the designated driver for their group and also Hurl the Pearl,

Lane 3 which is a fund raiser for the Ronald McDonald house. Hurl the Pearl is an event that takes place in the middle of the fifth inning where a truck drives around the warning track and for two dollar donations you get a softie ball to through into the sunroof of the truck. If you make it you would receive a free value meal at McDonalds and a ticket to fan appreciation night and also your name was entered for a drawing to win a prive pack that included many great prizes. Along with game day we would help in the office during the day with things that needed to get done but mostly we would drive around and hand out pocket schedules to local businesses to display and hand out. I spent most of my time working the Storm Front and Mojo. At the end of all the games we would hand out coupons and pocket schedules to the fans as the exited.
A lot of what we had to do was serving the customers. This could be through kids attractions such as the play areas, wiffleball park and Mojo. It also includes the Storm Front. I learned how to use a cash register. Most of what I learned though was customer service and how to make sure everyone at the park was having a good time. We didn’t have much more to learn other than how to inflate an inflatable bounce house and other inflatable things.
Another opportunity that I got while there was to plan and organize advertisement and marketing strategies to try and compete with the College World Series. It has been only three years since they shared park and it was the first time the Storm Chasers tried to play games in
Omaha during that week. The College World Series is a huge event in Omaha and it was hard to try and advertise for it. We had about three weeks to prepare and contact little league tournament directors to try and promote the Storm Chasers games. We were basically focusing on one night. It happened to be a Peanut Allergy awareness night. During the College World
Series there are a lot of little league tournaments going on. We tried to focus on them and wanted to get them involved. We ended up only being involved with one tournament but we

Lane 4 went out and posted flyer, handed out some as well and we took one of the mascots along to throw out the first pitch of the tournament. It was hard to tell if our advertising worked though so we never really heard if we did well or not.
It was a great place to work. I got to go to a baseball field almost every day to work. The offices are a bit cramped but it had a good flow through it. The Storm Front is located near the main entrance into the park. The Kids areas where mostly in behind the outfield, one was in behind left field and the other was behind center field. It is a brand new park, having just opened in 2011.
We were trained mostly on the job but we also had a short training day where everyone came in and they told us how to do everything. Our first few times at the park our supervisor would come and show us exactly what we needed to do to get everything ready. This included blowing up the inflatables, getting the radar gun ready to go, and setting up the Storm Front to have fans come shop. It also included setting up the locations to sell Hurl the Pearl balls outside each of the two gates. They would also show us which coupons were going to be handed out so we had to get those ready to hand out prior to around the sixth inning.
Most of the problems we would face were easily handled. We normally had either a supervisor near us or we would have a walkie talkie to be able to contact them. There weren’t to many problems though. The most problems I faced were in the Storm Front and it had to do with ringing people up and if they had gift cards I had to wait till my supervisor was available or if there was a promotion and I needed to know how to change a price, but again my supervisor was normally there to help with those types of problems.

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My biggest accomplishment in my mind was kind of becoming the go to intern. If they needed something done often times they would get me to help with it. Other accomplishments though were the we raised more money for the Ronald McDonald house than they did last year, I also go the opportunity to be a bat boy for the Cuban National Team when they played the US
National Team. Personally though, I felt like I was part of the management team. They treated us like we weren’t interns and made sure we knew we were part of the team.
During my time there, I also got to shadow some of the full time employees. This included being able to work with the club house manager and sit in the broadcast booth with the radio broadcast team. These were really cool times to be there. I got to see how all the stuff behind the scenes is done and that was a cool experience. We also partook in classroom sessions and this is where they had the heads of the departments such as ticket sales and broadcast come in and talk to us about what they do day to day, during the season and also during the off season.
This was cool because we not only got an insight to what they do during the season but also what they do during the off season and that was more the part we never get to see because we were never there during the off season. Some of the other community relations stuff that we did were putting on camps for kids during the week, helping with events that didn’t have anything to do with a baseball game, and also when Bob Gibson’s statue was revealed we helped with the security of that event and got to meet people like Joe Torre and Bud Selig. That was special because that doesn’t happen every year.
Overall, this internship is a great experience. You get insight into minor league baseball and you get to see what the front office work is all about, which is ticket sales. I would defiantly recommend that students do this internship even. I would recommend you do it before your junior thought to see if this would interest you. I unfortunately would have liked to change my

Lane 6 major after this because I see now that a sports business like this will hire a regular business major just as likely as a Sports Management major.
As for the training from Concordia, I think we could do more for our Sports Studies majors. If you could have a class that could bring in people from like the Storm Chasers, the
Saltdogs, the Haymakers and other teams or organizations to give an insight of small market teams that would be really beneficial. We had about five sessions with department heads at the park and they were very interesting and beneficial to me as I move on in my career.
I had a great time with this internship. I kind of know now that I don’t want to work in
Minor League baseball but to know that before trying to get a job with one is much better than having to work a whole season and not liking it. I got to meet some great people this summer and expand my network to what is now almost coast to coast. I got to learn the ins and outs of
Minor League baseball and that has always been interesting to me because I have been to many different stadiums watching my brother play in the Cardinals organization. I learn some valuable lessons from everyone at the park. I learned that even when you have everything planned out everything can go wrong and you just need to roll with the punches. That has to do with one day the scoreboard just stopped working before the game so they scrambled to try and fix it but it didn’t ever work during the game. Eventually they decided to announce a Blackout deal in the
Storm Front, which was everything that was mainly black was 15 percent off. They made a lot of sales and it was cool to see how even though the scoreboard was broken that they made something good out of it. Fans were just fine without the scoreboard working even though it was annoying to not always know the score or count or anything else that was on the scoreboard.

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I know feel like I am a part of the Storm Chasers. They had an terrible regular season but they made the playoffs, they won the Pacific Coast League and beat the International League
Champion Durham Bulls. Our General Manager, Martie Cordaro, was named Triple-A’s executive of the year. It was an exciting summer with the team going from third to first in less than two weeks and then to watch them in the playoffs was an awesome experience.