Welcome to the Dog Pound

If you had told me 2 years ago that I’d be working for a championship winning hockey team I would have told you to screw off, but in a meaner way.

Seriously. I didn’t know the first thing about hockey. If you knew me at that time you would assume my favourite sport was day drinking. In actuality, my favourite sport was basketball. Then football, followed by baseball, then lacrosse, and finally we would get to hockey. Day drinking was more of an art than a sport anyway. However, here I am, almost a year to the day since graduating from Laurentian University’s Sports Administration program, finishing my first season with the Hamilton Bulldogs, 2018 OHL Champs.

After graduation, I wasn’t even thinking about going into sports. It was engraved in my brain from day one that there weren’t very many jobs in the industry and I would have more luck finding a job if I looked outside of sport. I had done an internship with the Hamilton Tiger Cats, and if that was the end of my career in sports I was fine with it. I ended up taking a job with a small tech startup in downtown Toronto, and started 6 days after I left Laurentian. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out. I won’t bore you with the details but the fact of the matter is the job wasn’t for me.

So, I decided I might as well look for something more sports related. I was unemployed for about a month and a half before the new Director of Ticketing with the Bulldogs stumbled upon my resume and gave me a call. A week later, the contract was signed and I was moving back to Hamilton.

Working for an OHL hockey team was not exactly what I expected. With such a small staff, everybody wears a lot of hats. Even though my job was ticket sales, I found myself going to community events, setting up activations on our concourse, coordinating meals for the staff on game days, selling merchandise, and more. I was expected to work all 34 home games plus preseason. You never truly understand what it’s like to work 60 hours a week until you start doing 60 hour weeks consistently. While I was busy doing my job, the team was doing its job as well. We ended our regular season at the top of the Eastern Conference and we were poised for a good playoff run.

For all the regular season was, the playoffs were so much more. There was so much more excitement from the city, so much more media coverage, and of course, so much more work to be done. The expectations from a sales perspective are much higher in the playoffs as well. That meant a lot of calls had to be made to fill the bowl. Hamilton has the biggest arena in the OHL, so creating a strong playoff atmosphere was no easy task. However, the work was worth it when the seats were filled.

The team kept winning, series after series, never going more than five games. It was a great time, but when we got to the OHL finals nobody expected Hamilton to beat the Soo.

The Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds were the top team in the OHL for the entire season. They had a record setting year, putting up 55 wins and 116 points through 68 regular season games. We had a good team, but most people were saying that we would be out in five games. Maybe six.

That series was a ton of work, for both the team on the ice and the team in the office. The marketing department decided that for our Game 4 matchup we were going to put 9000 t-shirts out in the crowd. However, there was a printing error on the shirts when they were sent to us. The error was noticed during Game 3, roughly 48 hours before the shirts needed to be on the seats. It was too late to get another 9000 sent by the manufacturers and we couldn’t put them on the seats with the misprint. The only solution was for the entire staff to take shifts using heat presses to cover up the mistake. The 15 business ops staff, plus some volunteers from hockey ops and even our team President and GM, Steve Staios, spent the night after Game 3, the entire day between games, and the morning and afternoon before Game 4 heat pressing little bars over the typo. I had never used a heat press before, but I’m sure I pressed over 1000 shirts. Add that skill to my resume. All of our hard work paid off and the crowd looked amazing.

The team ended up taking the series, thus beating goliath and winning the OHL Championship. The long nights and early mornings were well worth it. Some people go their entire careers without being part of a championship team, and I was fortunate enough to be a part of it in my very first season.

If you try to tell me I’ll be doing anything other than this in 2 years, I’ll tell you to screw off. But in a meaner way.

Evan