Behind the Scenes: Game Day at Harvard Stadium
Before every game is the meeting.
Every Wednesday before a home football game, members of the Harvard Department of Athletics sit down to walk through duties for the upcoming Saturday. Together, the people in that room are responsible for everything from the preparation of the field to the cleaning of the grounds, from the tweeting in anticipation to the Instagramming in celebration. Behind the scenes at every football game is a fine-tuned Harvard Athletics operation every bit as efficient as the undefeated team it prepares to showcase.
Hot Ticket
It’s two hours prior to the start of the Crimson’s home season opener, and the region around the stadium has not yet come to life. But the scene inside the Harvard ticketing office is bustling.
Ticket manager Nick Majocha stands in the middle of it all. Hunkered down inside the ground floor Murr Center office with stacks of tickets scattered throughout, Majocha is busy instructing nine salespeople on gameday procedures.
"Our biggest priority is undergraduate involvement," ticket manager Nick Majocha said."It's not about revenue at all."
Some are undergraduate employees in their first day on the job; others have sold and distributed tickets for several seasons and work full-time jobs. A few staffers have already taken their posts at other locations, including a shed out in front of the main office windows, a will call booth, and at the nearby Lavietes Pavilion.
“Be as vocal as you can,” Majocha instructed his salespeople. “Ask people if they need help.”
It’s a job that requires multitasking. In addition to coordinating several locations, Majocha’s office manages ticket claims from families of players, secures cash from gameday sales, and distributes free tickets for the department’s weekly promotions. Customers who experience confusion about how to claim their tickets—for instance, reunion attendees who purchased seats through the Alumni Association and not the athletics ticketing office—are his responsibility.
On a typical day, ticketing locations open two hours before the start of each home football game. While sales windows will look dead for a while, prime time is rapidly approaching—the vast majority of tickets will be sold in the 45 minutes prior to kickoff and the first half hour of the game.
Many fans choose to purchase their seats online in the days leading up to the game. But in-person, gameday sales remain popular for Crimson football games—especially because Harvard Stadium will not be close to capacity unless Yale is in town.
“People don’t want to buy in advance,” Majocha said. “They know that the game’s not going to sell out.... They say, ‘I’m going to see how the weather is,’ and then they buy the tickets.”
Between 5:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. on the night of the Holy Cross opener on Sept. 19, the ticketing office distributed a total of 2,640 stubs—1,164 of which went to undergraduates. Prior to the game, Majocha estimated a crowd of about 15,000. He wasn’t off by much—the official attendance clocked in at 15,132.
According to Majocha, a central priority for the ticketing office is to make it easy for undergraduates—who gain free entrance to all home sporting events—to come out to games.
“Our biggest priority is undergraduate involvement,” Majocha said. “It’s not about revenue at all. We want to get more of them here…. We try anything. We would sit outside their dorm rooms and beg them and give them tickets.”
Not only students have access to free tickets, however. As the Holy Cross game was Harvard Night, the team’s only night game at the Stadium all season, Majocha estimates that roughly 1,200 tickets were distributed cost-free to Harvard faculty, staff, and graduate students the week before the game. The ticketing policy also allows for four free tickets to be given to each player’s family.
The ticketing office also coordinates season ticket sales, although holders represent just a fraction of the gameday crowd. The clientele has remained strikingly consistent in size in recent years. According to Majocha, while there were 510 season ticket holders a decade ago, the number has barely moved since, to 526.
“It’s a loyal base,” Majocha said. “[But] I think this day and age, especially with football, people don’t feel the need to buy a season ticket. They say, ‘I’m going to come to three games; I’ll just buy the ticket when I come.’”
Marketing the Enthusiasm
“You have to download the Crimzone app!”
“How do I turn my location services on?”
“I just checked in. Can I get a T-shirt?”
These are just a few of the sounds that make their way over the buzz at the undergraduate tailgate prior to the football team’s opener against Holy Cross as students attempt to confirm their presence with the new Crimzone Rewards app. Hosted by the athletic department’s marketing office, the event sought to get students across the Charles River and into Harvard Stadium.
For marketing manager Andy Vatistas and his department, that’s the number one priority—increasing student involvement and enthusiasm.
“We want to get people here,” Vatistas said. “We want to get people in the seats…and build community and pride in Harvard. Part of that is getting the undergrad students, graduates, and faculty and staff here.”
The student tailgate certainly succeeded in terms of boosting undergraduate attendance. As early as two hours before kickoff, students could be found spinning a raffle wheel or eating free pizza. Others played cornhole or lined up to claim their free T-shirts; for many freshmen, this will be one of the first items in their wardrobe emblazoned with the crimson H.
According to Vatistas, over 700 attendees received shirts, and a number of student tickets were distributed to contribute to the total of over 1,400. All 200 pizzas were eaten.
The event was particularly noteworthy due to the close coordination between Vatistas’ office and organizations such as the Office of Student Life, the College Events Board, and DAPA. These groups publicized the tailgate in advance and had representatives present. For the marketing staff, such communication represented another important way to boost student involvement.
“We’ve all kind of joined forces and did this tailgate, which is not something we do too frequently,” Vatistas said. “But we’re really excited about this event in particular. For me, the best way to [attract students] is to work with other student groups and work with other people across campus.”
Perhaps the marketing initiative most visible to students has been this fall’s launch of the Crimzone Rewards app. Students create a mobile profile and then wirelessly “check in” to various home sporting events, earning points that can be used to enter a grand prize drawing.
The idea to create the app picked up steam over the summer, when the marketing department opted to replace the HUID swipe system of checking into games with the wireless app. A third-party company built the program, which debuted early in the fall.
According to Vatistas, over 1,300 students are currently registered with the app, which also allows the athletic department to acquire a mass of student emails not ordinarily provided by the University.
The marketing manager has witnessed firsthand the evolution of the initiative to increase student involvement.
“We started our student rewards program about four years ago, when I was an intern,” Vatistas said. “It started with filling out a sheet of paper every time you came to a game. We added it up and put it all into a raffle and picked one…. This past summer we decided to go toward the app with a check-in basis. We wanted to try something new and innovative.”
In addition to coordinating events and mechanisms to boost attendance, the marketing department is also responsible for weekly promotions. For instance, the Holy Cross opener represented Harvard Night, when faculty, staff, and graduate students received free admission. Later promotions included Community Day, giving free tickets for Cambridge, Allston, and Brighton residents and discounted tickets for police, fire, and military personnel.
Putting It All to the Test
Long before a single ticket is sold, any marketing events commence, or a Crimson-helmeted player takes the field, the events crew must ensure that the logistics of the game will progress smoothly.
“Depending on the start of the game, we’ll arrive four to five hours before that, and we’ll get in really while no one else is in the facility,” said Caitlyn Young, assistant director of athletics. “It’s really just double checking everything is ready to go, that there are no problems.”
Young’s team will arrive before 9 a.m. for a 1 p.m. start time, splitting up its long list of tasks—checking both the home and visiting teams’ locker rooms to make sure everything is set up, doing a test drive of the scoreboard, putting up the three flags, and testing the various microphones.
"[During Harvard-Yale weekend], there's a lot more hands in the pie just trying to make sure things get done," said assistant director of athletics Caitlyn Young.
If everything goes smoothly, the group can breathe a sigh of relief with hours to spare, killing time until people start rolling in.
The crew welcomes the officials—scheduled months in advance—along with the chain crew, security officials, and the visiting team, directing all of the moving parts to their appropriate places in anticipation of the game.
But if things don’t go as planned—for instance, before the Columbia game on Nov. 8, when the scoreboard refused to cooperate—those four hours come in handy, and it’s up to the events crew to troubleshoot and make sure everything is ready by game time. Prior to the Columbia contest, Young eventually got ahold of an electrician to walk her team through the steps to fix the scoreboard, and a crisis was averted.
Besides running the game itself, the events crew is responsible for the surrounding affairs such as pregame tailgates and receptions, and postgame gatherings. Young often works with the Harvard Alumni Association, typically having to navigate a cluttered calendar. Since there are other athletic events occurring simultaneously with football, the job of the events crew is a weekly juggling act.
“It gets challenging when you have the crossovers in seasons,” Young said. “Right now we’re finishing up the fall, but we’re also starting, full swing now, into the winter. We just happen to have some of the biggest events at those times…. Just being prepared to shuffle people around and have the necessary facilities ready and staff ready, it gets difficult.”
The toughest juggling act—for arguably all departments of Harvard Athletics—comes during the third Saturday of November with the Harvard-Yale football weekend. But Young tries to think of The Game as simply another football contest, just with a significantly larger crowd.
“There’re a lot more hands in the pie just trying to make sure things get done,” Young said. “[But] we’ve done this four times so far this season, so from a gameday standpoint and the protocols we go through and what’s going to be happening on the field, it’s really the same that’s been happening all season.”
Field of Dreams
Preparation each game may start just days in advance, but preparation of the field occurs months before kickoff. The field is kept pristine year-round, a bubble put over it in the winter to preserve the playing conditions.
With use by the men’s and women’s lacrosse teams in the spring, and outside groups—like the FXFL’s Boston Brawlers—occupying it during football’s off days in the fall, the field must be well prepared to deal with the year-round wear-and-tear.
During any given football week, the preparation will start days in advance, according to facilities manager Jason Waldron. The field is vacuumed and the stands are cleaned. Utilities are checked to determine whether anything is broken and needs to be fixed. The facilities group’s efforts are crucial in making the field presentable come game day.
“Once a week we’ll come and groom the field,” Waldron said. “The purpose of that is to disperse the infill…. Also, for aesthetic purposes, it kind of looks like a freshly mowed cut.”
The preparation is not the same every week, however. Waldron and his crew will prepare differently on Thursday and Friday if the Saturday forecast calls for rain—as it did against Cornell on Oct. 11— or, as is possible in chilly Cambridge Novembers, if it calls for snow.
“We’ll have more guys on the field during a rain day, just keeping an eye on the field and making sure it’s draining properly,” Waldron said. “If it’s puddling up in an area, then we know that maybe that specific spot needs to be addressed.”
On the day of the game, the group will hand over the reins to a grounds crew that it has contracted from Cambridge Landscape for over 30 years. There are typically five grounds crew members for a given event, with two or three custodians in the stadium and another couple remaining around the grounds in case of emergency.
The grounds crew will arrive six hours before kickoff, making sure that the pylons are set, the turf is firm, and all the yardage markers have been drawn. Waldron himself will arrive in the early morning for an afternoon game, setting the standard for the group.
“Our goal is that when a crowd comes in, they’re coming into a well-kept, safe facility,” Waldron said. “You need to come in early to make sure that’s the case.”
Telling the Story
When the final whistle blows, after the teams leave the field and the fans file out of the stadium, the day is far from over for the Harvard Office of Athletic Communications.
During the game, communications handles social media, updates live statistics online, distributes stat sheets to the media throughout the day, and makes sure operations run smoothly in the press box. Such duties range from carrying food for the media up to the top of the elevator-less Harvard Stadium to laying out game notes and rosters for each media member.
Gone are big statistics monitors in the press box of years past. One of the major upgrades made this year was to the live stats website, PrestoSports, which was revamped to take on a more user-friendly interface.
“People run out of space,” said Tim Williamson, the Director of Athletic Communications. “That’s one of the areas where we are setting up a lot of equipment. It takes a lot of time to do that, and we don’t need to do that.”
As the game wraps up in the fourth quarter, a staff member from communications leaves the press box for the third floor of the Murr Center to ready the lounge for the postgame press conference.
And communications still isn’t done after bringing in players and coaches for the media to question and managing the press conference. In addition to posting its own release to the GoCrimson website, at least one member of the department remains in the Murr Lounge to field any final questions from reporters.
“If we have a seven o’clock game and it’s on TV, we probably aren’t leaving here until 12:30 or 1,” said Alli Miller, the secondary media contact for football. “We’re always the last one out, so if a media member is still writing their story, we stay until they’re done, and then we lock up and close down.”
Preparation for a game begins long before Saturday for communications. The department is responsible for distributing credentials earlier in the week to media, the opponent, and any NFL scouts who will be in attendance. The group creates game notes with statistics from the past week and a scouting report on the opposing team. The day before the game—usually Friday—a few people head up to the press box to distribute the game notes and test out the live statistics software.
Further into the football season, things get a bit more chaotic in the communications world, and as with all other departments, this culminates during Harvard-Yale weekend. Preparation begins over a week before The Game. The communications office bustles with action, as members of the press start flowing in and out of the Murr Lounge to do pregame interviews, and an abundance of press credentials are printed for the biggest game of the year.
“For a day like that, it is basically all hands on deck,” Williamson said.
With all the various cogs every game day, it would be easy for the department to get bogged down in box scores, press conferences, and live stat software malfunctions. But for Miller, the greater experience of the communications team makes the job worth it.
“Especially here at Harvard, we have the greatest student-athletes that I’ve ever been around in the country,” Miller said. “I really like getting to know them and getting to know their stories and forming bonds with them and sharing their stories with other people. When it comes down to it, that is my job.”
—Staff writer David Freed can be reached at david.freed@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @CrimsonDPFreed.
—Staff writer Samantha Lin can be reached at samantha.lin@thcrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @Linsamnity.
—Staff writer David Steinbach can be reached at david.steinbach@thecrimson.com.