Hocktober!

Good afternoon from the Wranglers front office, fans! I don’t know about you, but I love a good pun. In case you missed it, this blog post is titled, “Hocktober,” which is a mash-up of “hockey” and “October.” It’s also my new favorite word (along with “Soxtober” if my baseball boys, the Red Sox, had made it into the play-offs).

Things are getting crazy around here now that October 1st is tomorrow. Players are coming in and out of the office getting paperwork done, and the rest of us are eating pizza that magically appeared on someone’s desk between all the phone calls, emails, meetings and countless other things going on. As I prepare for my first season in hockey, I figured I’d let everyone in on some of the daily things I do for the team.

I start each morning by checking on our social media pages – yes, that’s probably me responding to your tweets and Facebook comments! I make sure everything is going swimmingly, and will check back as new things go on throughout the day. After that, I get to my emails. Then comes a whole lot of writing.

For my usual player signing press releases, which is what I’ve been primarily writing as the season gets closer, I need to compile a lot of information. I find the guy’s stats, get quotes from Head Coach Mougenel about them, try to get the guys themselves on the phone to talk to them about joining the team, and then turn it into a story. On a good day, when all of the pieces fall into place, it takes me about an hour to get it done. Once we get a press release sent out, I try to start drafting the next one I have planned to get ahead, and I’ll sometimes end up having three or four started that wait around for all the details to be finalized before we share the information with everyone.

As the media director, I’m also the new stat person. I’ve been chipping away at putting together player bios, team stat packs and game notes templates to get prepared for the start of the season. I’m fairly decent at math, but you can only stare at so many numbers for so long before you need a break. Luckily, we have ECHL officials who actually create the stats, so I just have to plug them all in and keep everything up to date. If we didn’t, I’d probably spend every night crying at my desk!

Random things fill up the rest of my day. I usually have at least one meeting, and some projects take longer than I originally planned time for. Sometimes I’ll be searching for stories about the Wranglers online, or trying to find new publications in town that I’d like to talk to. Emails usually give me more things to do, too. I get talked into going out for lunch from time to time, or , like today, I sit at my desk and write a blog post while eating free pizza.

When I wake up tomorrow, it will be Hocktober 1st, and that means 20 days until our first home game, 13 days until our first away game in Alaska, eight days until our lone home pre-season game, and ONE day until our black and white scrimmage. Hockey has returned to Las Vegas, folks, and don’t worry – we’re going to keep it here until we win the Kelly Cup in April!