Ryan Freidin ‘24 has been working for the Houston Astros as one of three content producers for almost a year now. However, when he applied to Rice, he never had any intention of working in video. He started as a Sport Analytics major.
“I thought I was going to work in baseball crunching numbers and doing analytics and all of that,” Freidin said. “Then I took a calculus class, and while I loved my instructor, but did not like the class. I was like, ‘I could never do this for the rest of my life’.”
Freidin quickly dropped the Sport Analytics major. He said that even though he didn’t know what he was going to do after that, he was never worried.
“The reason I felt confident dropping the sport analytics path was because I knew no matter what field I was going to be in, it was going to be in sports,” Freidin said. “Since I was going to be in sports, I knew the Department of Sport Management was going to take care of me.”
He started with an internship doing video operations with Rice football. He shot coaches film for practices, but quickly realized he preferred creative video to operational video.
“When I had the camera in my hand, I had a few opportunities to shoot creative video," Freidin said. "It showed me that I had an interest in this field, and this was something that I wanted to do, even if it wasn't within the video operations field.”
His next few internships were on the creative side. He worked as a video intern with Rice baseball, the Baltimore Orioles, USA Baseball, and NFL Films. By the time he was a senior at Rice, Ryan had even started South Main Creatives, an internship program for Rice students aspiring to enter the creative and digital marketing field.
“I think every internship you get, every experience you have is important,” Freidin said. “I felt like during every experience, I learned more about what I wanted to do and where I wanted to be.”
His path to the Astros though began with him working for Major League Baseball. Starting on opening day of the 2024 season, Freidin was one of two creatives shooting content at Minute Maid Park for MLB.
“I was able to, even before I started working with the Astros, start creating relationships with their videographers or their photographers, knowing that this was a place I wanted to be and I wanted to work full time,” Freidin said. “I was able to start nurturing those relationships and see what an incredible group of people they were.”
His job, along with the other content producers on the team, is to attend to all the video needs for the Astros. Beyond covering the games, his team puts together commercials seen on the Space City Home Network, social media videos promoting merchandise and any videos that go on the jumbotron, which the video team calls ‘El Grande’.
“There is nothing quite like seeing your video on ‘El Grande’ for the first time,” Freidin said. “One of my very first pieces was a rally video. We played it probably in the 7th, 8th inning to get the fans going, get the players juiced and to really just keep the energy high in the stadium. And seeing that my first couple weeks into the job was really, really neat.”
For the 2025 season, fans can expect big things.
“We're really ramping up, and planning everything content-wise and creative-wise for this season,” Freidin said. “We’re coming up with our new looks, we’re coming up with our new kind of campaign slogans.”
Kathleen Ortiz, a junior from Kingwood, Texas, is studying Social Policy Analysis and Sport Management with a concentration in Sport Law.