It’s been a long and fruitful relationship between the sport management program at the University of Massachusetts and the Valley Blue Sox.

The Blue Sox — which compete in the New England Collegiate Baseball League — have been working with UMass’ Isenberg School of Management dating back to their early days as the Holyoke Giants. 

That partnership has grown throughout the years, with UMass sending more and more interns to work for the Blue Sox during the summer months. Interns have helped out in a variety of roles with the team. 

“We’ve had this partnership for a while now,” said Steve McKelvey, Isenberg Sport Management’s Department Chair. “It goes back to when I taught a sales class and we sold sponsorships and tickets for them back when they were the Holyoke Giants. There’s a long history between our department and that organization.

“The last five, six, seven years, we’ve built a strong pipeline,” McKelvey continued. “It begins when they come to our career fair to recruit our students. They built a very robust internship program and provide real opportunities for our students to get experience in the areas they’re interested in pursuing. It’s a proving ground and opportunity for students to get to learn and gain real world experience.”

That pipeline has resulted in some interns remaining on staff after graduating. The last three Blue Sox general managers — Chris Weyant, Kate Weir and Tyler Descheneaux — are all graduates of UMass’ McCormick Department of Sport Management. All started out as interns and worked their way to the top after graduation. 

“I’m proud that the last three GMs have been from UMass,” McKelvey said. “It’s created a cool pipeline for us.”

What does that GM role hold with the Blue Sox? Probably not what you’d expect. 

The GM’s aren’t selecting players, rather running every other operation within the team to make them operational on a day-to-day basis. That includes tasks such as marketing, communication, PR, in addition to managing all the team’s interns and other tasks of that nature. It’s a position that requires many hats, helping prepare those individuals for the many different types of jobs they may move onto in the future. 

“Right now it’s wearing all those different hats,” Descheneaux, who’s in his second year as the Blue Sox GM, said. “Sales and marketing, I know all that stuff and every position that we’ve offered I’ve had to do. It’s cool. I liked stats growing up but never pursued going into analytics but it’s cool seeing that background. I’ve learned how the broadcasts are put together and see that side of all of it, too. Being the manager for 15 interns, which was a role I was previously in, I’ve loved it. It goes back to all the stuff I learned at Isenberg. It’s been great.” 

Weir, who was the GM from 2020 through the 2021 season, is now working as an event coordinator at Brignole Vineyard in East Granby, Conn. She said her time as GM of the Blue Sox — where she was planning events for every game throughout the club’s season — has made the transition to her new job seamless. 

“There’s plenty of crossover,” Weir said. “My experience with the Blue Sox has helped tremendously in every aspect of my career. With the Blue Sox I was overseeing every single aspect of the team on a day-to-day basis, from things like sales to the gameday experience. That aspect specifically has translated to my role as an event coordinator. I viewed every game with the Blue Sox as its own event and wanted to make it an experience for all the fans. I got a crash course in planning that with two and a half months straight of planning two or three games a week.”

It’s not just the GM who wears all those hats. The Blue Sox allow interns to try their hands at all those different roles in hopes of finding out what they might like doing — and what they might not like doing — for a future career in sport.

“It provides an opportunity for them to build their resume, which is so important, and our program puts so much emphasis on getting real world experience in the summer,” McKelvey said. “We wanted to have internship opportunities in the summer that weren’t just getting coffee and doing all the grunt work. Of course they’re doing some of that, but they’re also doing a lot of work that ties into the field that they want to get into.”

The learning environment created by the Blue Sox makes for an ideal internship, according to Emily Must, Director of Internships and a Senior Lecturer for the Sport Management Department at UMass.

“It’s a great learning environment,” Must said. “They’ve figured out a way to make the intern experience better. They’ve divided up the work and are paying them. So many internships go unpaid so any opportunity to add compensation here is always an incentive to return as a junior or a senior when you could go somewhere else. They keep you around to train you, increase your responsibility if they can depend on you. I’ve always admired that.” 

For those that rose to the role of GM like Weyant — who spent three years interning with the Blue Sox before taking over the GM role for the 2018 season — it also helped him prepare for the next stage of his career. He now works as a corporate hospitality coordinator for MassMutual, a Fortune 500 company, noting how the experience with the Blue Sox has made the transition to MassMutual much easier. 

“Right now I don’t manage anyone,” Weyant said. “It’s unique because I wasn’t in that role for a number of years. That’s different coming into this role where it taught me how to manage people. It was trial by error. I had never been in a position where I had managed people in the past. That put me in the fire. The team and Fred Ciaglo, the president at the time, were really supportive and understood that this was a big role for someone my age. Not having a lot of experience, they were really supportive in terms of if I made a mistake, there was nothing that was insurmountable. Now working for a Fortune 500 company, you don’t play a big role in the success of it. With the Blue Sox, a lot of the responsibilities and consequences fall on you. It’s stressful but it’s a good group.” 

Weir said it was great to work with so many UMass students throughout her internship and time as GM. She credited both McKelvey and Must for being great resources for her even after she graduated. 

“At least 50 to 60 percent of the interns were from UMass when I was there,” Weir said. “It’s cool because most of us didn’t know each other before interning, even though we were in the same program at UMass. You get to meet all these people and I still stay in touch with them. The UMass professors like Steve McKelvey and Emily Must were constant resources for me. It was my first major role out of school and they were both tremendous in helping me figure things out and how to take over everything. Chris was great as well and was a great resource. The connection and my time with the Blue Sox helped me develop into the person I am today.” 

So far this season the Blue Sox are 9-12, and sit in third place in the NECBL’s West Division. While the condensed season only runs on the field for a few months, Descheneaux — who graduated from UMass in 2022 and took over the GM role shortly after — noted that it’s a year-round process to get ready for when the games begin each June. 

“So far so good,” Descheneaux said. “It’s going well. It’s always good to be around the team when they’re doing well. It’s awesome. This is my first full-time gig out of school. I jumped right into it. When I got to college I was intending to be on the marketing side of things. There’s a lot of that that goes into the GM job. Two months of play, 10 months of planning. It’s an interesting season.” 

What makes the internship so special is the family environment the Blue Sox have created, one that has brought people like Weyant back even after he stopped working for the team. 

“I’m really thankful for the opportunity,” Weyant said. “I worked under two ownership groups and am still involved with the team and still on the Western Mass. Hall of Fame committee. I ran the banquet in the spring so there’s still some involvement there. It’s still a family for me. They’re good people. It’s a small grassroots organization looking to do something good in the community.”

After a day off for the Fourth of July, the Blue Sox travel to New Hampshire on Wednesday night for a game against the Upper Valley Nighthawks. They return home Thursday for a doubleheader against Vermont at MacKenzie Stadium, beginning at 5 p.m.

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