Over winter break of this year, Rice Sport Management students Alex Lowes ’18 and Evan Kravetz ’19 spent time working for different college football bowl games. Lowes worked at the Quick Lane Bowl which pitted Minnesota against Central Michigan at Ford Field in Detroit. Kravetz worked at the Orange Bowl in Miami in which Clemson faced Oklahoma as a part of the College Football Playoff.
“From going to production meetings, you see how many things have to go right in order for an event to be successful,” Kravetz said. “Overall it was pretty eye opening to see how much work goes into an event that I have watched yearly since I was a kid, and I'm proud to be a part of it.”
Kravetz was heavily involved in game day operations for the Orange Bowl. Lowes, on the other hand worked as a part of the event management team as an event management intern. Lowes worked with her team to put on a dinner at the Henry Ford Museum for both teams’ players, players’ families, staffs and donors, as well as the Quick Lane Bowl donors.
Although that experience was great, Lowes says that the most exciting part of the internship was gameday itself.
“During the game I had an all access pass to Ford Field,” Lowes said. “It was an unreal experience where I could use the tunnel and sidelines with free range. I mainly, dealt with set up of marketing activation on the field and throughout the concourse.”
Kravetz and Lowes are both varsity athletes at Rice. Kravetz is a pitcher for the baseball team and Lowes is a midfielder for the soccer team. This continues a tradition of Rice student-athletes working at bowl games as last year, women’s tennis players Lindsey Hodge and Savannah Durkin both performed similar internships.
This continued practice of Rice Sports Management underclassmen bucks an accepted trend across many universities that underclassmen are not qualified enough to perform high profile internships. Rice hopes to continue bucking this industry trend in the future by showcasing its students, freshmen through seniors, across the industry via a variety of internships.
Pax Kaplan-Sherman, a sophomore from Metuchen, New Jersey, is majoring in Sport Management and double-minoring in Business and Politics, Law & Social Thought.