Her Story
About Hanna
I started my journey in sports management during my sophomore year of college in the summer of 2021, when I took my first internship with the Lafayette Aviators as a game day operations intern. That experience was transformative because I was a jack-of-all-trades, doing everything from ticket sales to operations to box office management and in-game promotions. The following summer in 2022, I interned with the Kalamazoo Growlers as a promotions and entertainment intern, and I absolutely fell in love with the entertainment side of baseball. I realized that at our level, making sure fans have an excellent experience regardless of the score is what keeps them coming back. In May 2023, I joined the Rockford Rivets as an Account Executive, selling tickets and helping with customer service. I quickly moved up to Director of Community Affairs and Promotions, where I got to oversee all the fun stuff like in-between inning contests, theme nights, giveaways, specialty jerseys, and auctions. One of my proudest achievements in that role was creating the Little Rivets Reading Program, which now has about 10,000 local students enrolled and gives them free tickets to games when they complete their reading challenge. After about a year in that role, I became Assistant General Manager for 9-10 months, overseeing day-to-day stadium operations, team and player operations, and all our sales, marketing, and operations staff. Then in October 2025, I stepped into my current role as General Manager, becoming the first woman GM in the Rivets organization's history at just 25 years old. Now I handle corporate partnerships and sponsorships, team operations including player recruitment and contract negotiations, travel logistics for away games, hospitality for visiting teams and umpires, and I oversee every department to make sure we're all working together smoothly. My typical game day is a 12-15 hour marathon starting around 9:30 or 10 AM, making sure all our departments are ready, then spending time during the game connecting with our partners and making sure they're happy. On non-game days during the off-season, it's more of a standard 9-to-5 with calls, paperwork, proposals, ordering supplies, and managing our facility rentals.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Hanna
01What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best career advice I've received is to never say no in an internship. It really shows that you're willing to do anything and everything to gain the experience, and it helps with reviews and is a key indicator of the kind of hard workers we look for when providing letters of recommendation. The second piece of advice that I've very much lived through is to be curious and ask questions, and that it's okay to not know everything. People are not expecting you to know everything when you first jump into a role, so being able to go to somebody that might know the role better, or networking with somebody to ask them questions is really important. Nobody's out to really harm you in your career, especially in a team or organization in a league like ours - we all like to help each other. So being okay with being able to ask questions is really important. And then networking is super important, too, through LinkedIn specifically, but also through in-person networking fairs and career fairs. I've leveraged my connections for job offers, promotions at different organizations, or when I'm looking to hire interns or full-time staff members. Those are the few items that I would say are the most important to me, personally.
02What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values that are most important to me in both my work and personal life are trust, honesty, and positivity. My philosophy is that if you can't trust your employer or your staff, then it's not going to be a healthy work environment or a healthy system that you create in your work environment, or even at home as well. Honesty is another value I take very seriously - honesty is the best policy, is what I was always told as a kid. Even if I know that the owner of my team is going to be really upset if I tell him something, but I'm being honest about it, he'd rather me be honest about it than have me say something that's completely false. The other value that I find very important for myself specifically is trying to find something positive out of every experience. Whether if I fail at something, it's a learning experience. Trying to find a positive angle for a bad situation is always a lot better, and I think, oh, it can be worse - I didn't have this learning opportunity, so this mistake or failure happened, you know? Having a positive outlook when bad things do happen is another important thing. Those are my big three that I would kind of consider my morals and values that I kind of live by, both here professionally at the Rivets and then also at home and in my personal life as well.
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