Scoring Position

 As a kid, Brigitte Rec ’17 had big-league dreams.

“I wanted to be the first female manager of the Boston Red Sox,” said Rec, who grew up a huge baseball fan in Long Valley, New Jersey.

Rec’s hope of running a ball club from the dugout faded as she grew up, but she never fully gave up on the idea of someday working for the Red Sox.

Today, Rec is director of design for creative services with Fenway Sports Management, the marketing arm of Fenway Sports Group. That’s the Boston-based company that owns the Red Sox and other sports properties, including the National Hockey League’s Pittsburgh Penguins, English professional soccer team Liverpool Football Club of the Premier League, a NASCAR team and the global marketing rights of basketball superstar LeBron James. In her job, Rec leads a team of artists that develops marketing and promotional designs for companies that partner with Fenway-owned entities.

She is one of a significant number of Roanoke alumnae now working in the highest levels of American sports, including World Series winners, NBA champions, National Football League teams and Olympics broadcasters. These women lead off-the-field teams that are responsible for a host of accomplishments, which include bringing in millions of dollars in revenues, running the business side of franchises and handling legal matters.

When you watch a Red Sox game, look for the small patch on a player’s sleeve that bears a simple logo for Massachusetts Mutual, a life insurance company that paid to advertise on uniforms. Rec’s team designed the small “MassMutual” patch — as well as splashier, high-tech advertisements around venerable Fenway Park.

Her career highlight happened not long after she arrived in Boston in 2018, when the Red Sox won the World Series over the Los Angeles Dodgers.

“I started in September 2018 at Fenway Park, and a few weeks later, we're holding a trophy,” said Rec, who graduated from Roanoke with a communications degree and a minor in art. She was a photographer and the sports editor for the Brackety-Ack, Roanoke’s college newspaper.

Lisa Meyer '00 interned for several minor league baseball teams as a Maroon, and today she is director of business & legal affairs and risk management for the Golden State Warriors.

Roanoke’s big-league talent also includes Lisa Meyer’00, director of business & legal affairs and risk management for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors; Stacey Nicely ’05, senior director of new ticket initiatives for Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves; Lauren Byrnes ’12, director of strategic planning, sports & Olympics for NBC Universal Media; and Kaity Diskerud ’16, director of business solutions in the corporate partnerships department for the NFL’s Tennessee Titans.

Other Roanoke alumni working in the front offices of minor-league teams and in sports media include Alexandra Crutchfield ’16, a vice president for the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs of the Southern Professional Hockey League, and Randi Burrell ’05, a vice president for the Iowa Wolves of the NBA’s G League. Jamella “Mel” Foster ’17, social media editor and Tik Tok creator for Yahoo Sports, also hosts her own popular Tik Tok channel, “Hoopin’ With Mel,” that attracts nearly 40,000 followers.

Some of the women majored in sports-specific studies, such as sport management, while at Roanoke. But they all said the people at Roanoke supported them and helped them on their career journeys, even if they took a nontraditional path into sports.

“I never had any roadblocks,” said Burrell, a Montgomery County, Virginia, native who majored in health and human performance. “Nobody ever said, ‘Hey, I wouldn’t go that route,’ or ‘That's gonna be hard.’ It was always, ‘Let's figure it out.’ And that's Roanoke College.” 

For Randi Burrell '05, working with the Athletics Department at Roanoke and interning with minor league teams helped solidify a desire to build a career in sports.

Goal setting 

Growing up in Alleghany County, Virginia, Nicely watched Braves games on TBS with her parents and grandmother. This was back in the 1990s when Chipper Jones, Ryan Klesko, Andruw Jones, John Smoltz and Greg Maddux were the stars of teams that made five World Series trips.

“I always wanted to work for the Braves,” said Nicely, who earned a psychology degree at Roanoke. 
Soon after, she landed a job in the Braves ticket office and began working her way up the ladder. As senior director for new ticket initiatives, she helps the club find ways to reach potential fans and get them into the Braves’ Stadium, Truist Park.

She leads a team that comes up with specialty ticket promotions for game-day events that include Education Day (geared toward elementary-aged children), Barbie Night, Star Wars Night, Harry Potter Night, a Latino-themed Los Bravos game and a Girls Night Out package.

“I like doing things that reach different audiences and tie it to a baseball game,” she said. 

Stacey Nicely '05 worked in Roanoke's Public Relations Office and interned with the old Roanoke Express hockey team. She earned a World Series ring as senior director of new ticket initiatives for the Atlanta Braves.

Nicely said her psychology professors and advisors worked with her to develop a sports background that would help her pursue her career. She worked in Roanoke’s Public Relations Office (now Marketing and Communications) all four years of college, with a focus on sports writing, and she undertook an internship with the old Roanoke Express minor-league hockey team.

“They never geared me toward something else,” she said of her professors.

Meyer, too, was committed to working in sports. Roanoke didn’t add a sports analytics concentration until 2020, but as a math major in the late 1990s, she was attuned to the growing interest in advanced sports statistics, especially in baseball. Meyer, a New Jersey native and a fan of the Yankees and the Giants, interned for several minor league baseball teams while a student at Roanoke and took a winding path to the NBA.

Following graduation, she worked briefly at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, in basketball operations for the Miami Heat, and for the former Miami Sol of the WNBA before taking a hiatus to work in different fields and earn a law degree. Then she jumped back into the ring by spending eight years in legal affairs, finance and public relations for New Jersey-based boxing promoter Main Events. She moved on to Legends, a sports and entertainment company co-founded by the Yankees and Dallas Cowboys, but lost that job in pandemic-related layoffs in 2021. That’s when she joined the Warriors, a team led by superstar Stephen Curry that has won four titles since 2015. Her job is to alleviate risks for fans who attend games or concerts at Chase Center in San Francisco, manage the organization’s insurance program, and support the arena’s legal needs.  

“Everything from sponsorships to concerts, games and private events, to litigation and everything in between,” she said.

She also handles risk management for the new Golden State Valkyries WNBA team. A self-described “concert freak,” she has seen shows by Adele, Elton John and – naturally, for a Jersey girl – Bruce Springsteen. And those are just the shows when she isn’t on the clock.

Diskerud, the director of business solutions for the Titans, sees so many celebrities at football games in Music City USA that she’s almost desensitized to it. Just this fall, as she watched the game from a suite with corporate partners, an acquaintance pointed out that country music singer and rapper Jelly Roll was in the suite next door.

“One of our guests is like, ‘Oh my god, is that Jelly Roll?’ I have to remind myself that this is not normal,” she said. “This landscape of the NFL is top tier, and that brings top-tier personalities and brands and partners.”

Diskerud, a native of Hershey, Pennsylvania, was captain of Roanoke’s women’s tennis team and, after a sojourn into exercise science, majored in sport management. She’s been with the Titans since 2017 and, up until recently, she worked on what marketing folks call the activation side — where all the promotions, advertisements and sponsorships are put into action in the stadium. A company doesn’t just want its name emblazoned on a billboard hanging from a stadium deck; it wants interactive videos, games and other multimedia promotions to connect with fans and possible customers.

“The classic static sign is not something that a lot of these big brands deem valuable,” Diskerud said. “They want to feel like we're doing something completely integrated, matching our two missions together.”

That’s why 69,000 fans in Nashville’s Nissan Stadium get to see the Dance Cam sponsored by Little Caesars during a timeout, or find themselves seated in the Lucky Row, which wins them a free Coca-Cola. Product tie-ins are ubiquitous at a sporting event. Now that Diskerud works on the solutions side of partnerships, she develops packages to entice companies to spend lots of money on the Titans.

When the Titans open their new $2.1 billion stadium in 2027, even more high-tech sponsorships and placements will be possible, Diskerud said.

Sports revenues are enormous across the board. NBC saw a record $1.2 billion in ad spending during the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics, according to Yahoo Finance, and Roanoke alumna Byrnes played a role in securing that money for NBC Universal.

As strategic planning director for NBC’s sports and Olympics division, New York-based Byrnes (at left) leads a team that packages advertising space, which includes digital platforms and television, and sells it to clients. If you were part of the 30 million viewers on average who watched the Paris games, you probably saw commercials that Byrnes and her team shepherded onto your screens.

“I put a price on that spot, then we negotiate with the ad agency to land on a price,” Byrnes said. “When I see it running in prime time during the Olympics, I know that I'm looking at a commercial that's worth over a million dollars, and I contributed to that.” 

Byrnes didn’t aim for Olympic gold while studying sociology and human resource management at Roanoke. Her television career began at Bravo TV, a network she hated to leave because “I like my ‘Housewives.’” But NBC was starting an all-Olympics channel, and the chance to work in sports was enticing. The network also carries the NFL and, in 2025, will add NBA broadcasts.

“Sports generate not only a ton of revenue, but are just really a fun opportunity,” Byrnes said. “It’s great to be a partner of the NFL, the Olympics, and the NBA upcoming. It continues to grow.”

Working the Olympics, though, is her favorite.

“When you work on the games, you're working all 17 days that it's airing, and you work with a really close-knit team … and it’s a different kind of fun, especially with the amount of viewers that are coming in to watch it.”

Foster (at right), who was a shooting guard for the Maroons basketball team from 2013 to 2017, knew she wanted to work in sports even though she was “not good enough to make the WNBA,” she said. She majored in communications and was comfortable behind a microphone, as evidenced by the “Hot Topics With Mel” show she hosted on WRKE-FM. A Raleigh, North Carolina native, Foster interned at Roanoke’s NBC affiliate WSLS-TV, a job suggested by assistant professor Debra Melican.

After graduation, Foster worked as a production assistant for ESPN, handling graphics for “NFL Live” and “SportsCenter,” and shooting video for social media platforms.

She joined Yahoo Sports in July 2024 as a senior social media editor, which put her in front of the camera to cover the Connecticut Sun during the WNBA playoffs, as well as the Boston Celtics media day, when she interviewed NBA superstars Jason Tatum and Jaylen Brown.

Her “Hoopin’ With Mel” Tik Tok channel allows her to offer opinions and news about women’s basketball at the college and pro levels. “The thing I love about my platform is that I get to show a little love, a little shine” for women’s hoops, she said. 

Kaity Diskerud '16 earned a degree in sport management at Roanoke; now she works in the corporate partnerships department for the Tennessee Titans.

Game on 

The road to a sports career doesn’t start at the Olympic or NFL level. Sometimes it starts on the sidelines of an Old Dominion Athletic Conference basketball game in the old Bast Center.

That’s where Crutchfield and Diskerud could be found a decade ago, working at the scorer’s table, choosing songs for the public-address system and handling other menial tasks during men’s and women’s basketball games. Crutchfield, a Roanoke native, had an on-court view of sports by playing varsity volleyball and tennis at Roanoke, but it was while working for the sports information office and the college’s Athletic Department that she got a peek at all the off-court work that happens before, during and after games.

“We did things like organizing photos and updating the website, and even a little bit of writing,” Crutchfield said. She also learned that working in sports means you can’t always be emotionally connected to wins and losses.  

She remembered her boss at the time, former director of athletic communication Chris Kilcoyne, and his resolute reaction to a heartbreaking basketball loss.

“Kaity and I saw Chris afterward, and he's acting like nothing had happened. And I was like, ‘Are you bummed out that they lost?’ And he said, ‘Just part of the gig.’”

That attitude has served Crutchfield well in her role as a vice president for Roanoke’s minor-league hockey team. She oversees almost all the Rail Yard Dawgs’ off-the-ice aspects, which include advertising, sales, media and game-night management at the Berglund Center.

“I have my hand in everything that's not the power play,” she said.

Alexandra Crutchfield '16 is a vice president for the Roanoke Rail Yard Dawgs. She worked for the sports information office and the Athletics Department at Roanoke, where she played tennis and volleyball.

Both Crutchfield and Rec said the internships they scored as Roanoke students played a role in landing jobs. Rec, who was a hurdler for Roanoke’s track and field team, reignited her passion for baseball by interning as a photographer for the Cape Cod Baseball League for college players.  

“I was like, ‘Man, I don't want this summer to end,’” she said. “I'm having so much fun, just sitting on the sidelines and watching these games.”

Officials in Roanoke’s Alumni Office put Rec in contact with other alumni who worked in baseball, which opened the door to a full-time job with the Red Sox two years after graduation.  

The minor leagues provided early experience for others, too. Meyer interned for the former Salem Avalanche and New Jersey Cardinals minor league baseball teams, handling chores such as running on-field promotions between innings, selling tickets and merchandise, or pulling tarp over the diamond during rain delays. Burrell also interned for the Avalanche, hawking programs, pouring beers and working in the press box, and she interned for Salem’s Parks and Recreation Department. 

A stint with the former Roanoke Dazzle was Burrell’s entry into minor league basketball, a realm where she has worked ever since. She worked for legendary Roanoke basketball coaches Page Moir and Susan Dunagan, and she knew she wanted to work in sports as a career. As a high-ranking official in the Iowa Wolves front office, she is now a mainstay on the sidelines, helping manage most facets of game night operations. 

“The minors is a great place to have your hand in a lot of things,” she said. 

You can also win a championship in your hometown, as Crutchfield did when the Rail Yard Dawgs claimed the SPHL title in 2023. She even planned the championship processional through downtown Roanoke. “People were lined up to see us,” she said. 

Nicely, who used to watch Braves games with her grandmother, took her parents to a couple games when the Braves played the Houston Astros in the 2021 World Series. When the Braves won the title, Nicely got to ride in the World Series parade through the streets of Atlanta.

And as an employee of the Braves, she even received a World Series ring.

“When I started working for the Braves,” she said, “I would go by myself to watch a game. I couldn’t believe I was there, and this was my job. It’s all very surreal.”