UC Student Pushes Career in Sports by Volunteering
- Release Date:Friday, March 19, 2010
UC student Robert Spain landed a unique opportunity for spring break. After volunteering last year at the WVIAC conference basketball tournament in Charleston and the Conference USA tournament in Tennessee, the Mid-American Conference (MAC) invited him to work its 2010 conference tournament as the only non-MAC student volunteer.
Spain was responsible for writing game notes throughout the tournament, but got his best job at the end. An Associated Press reporter was covering the MAC men's championship game, and the tournament director asked Spain to write up the women's final. His challenge: have it posted within three minutes of the buzzer.
He succeeded, and the story of the Bowling Green Falcons defeating Toledo and securing an NCAA bid went up with his byline: http://www.mac-sports.com/ViewArticle.dbml?SPSID=42881&SPID=3793&DB_OEM_ID=9400&ATCLID=204907579
Robert credits his athletic marketing professor with encouraging him to seek out these opportunities. Ever since she arrived at UC, Professor Michelle Wells has been harping (her words) on students to find real-world ways to employ the skills they learn in school, and to get out there and network. Employers, according to Wells, don't want to see what classes students took — they want to see how students have applied those classes in real-world situations. Spain took this advice to heart last year, when he called Will Prewitt of the WVIAC and volunteered to work the conference basketball tournament. After successfully helping out there, he landed his next gig at the Conference USA tournament in Tennessee the following week.
This year, he called several other conferences and the MAC accepted him based on the fact that he had worked with Conference USA last year. The MAC paid his costs to stay and work in Cleveland for the tournament. According to Wells, "It's a great example of a student going out of his way to get the real-world experience that I try to get them to obtain in order to set themselves apart from the students at the other 300+ sports administration programs in the United States. It's the type of thing I'm working to get all of our students to do on a regular basis."
