This is a guest blog by Samantha Morrison. She is a student at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College and summer intern at USA Football.
I had the pleasure of working for a company called USA Football this past summer. USA Football is the national governing body of youth football in the United States. They strive to help make the game better and safer for those who play, coach, officiate, and organize football. This company is constantly providing new resources for the game, as well as perfecting drills to promote safer game practices such as heads up tackling. I know that more recently concussions have become a hot topic, so USA Football has put a major emphasis on concussion awareness.
I love what USA Football does and I love sports, so I was super excited when I found out I would be working as a Digital Sales Intern for them this summer. My main objective for this job was dealing with the selling of our League Website and Management System to organizations. League would fill out online forms or regional managers would submit forms of interest in the system and from there I would contact the liaison for the league. I would provide them with more information and address any questions that they might have. Once they made a decision and wanted to use our system, I would send them online forms to fill out and it would get passed along to our partners over at Bonzi.
Over the course of this internship I had over 180 different leads for interest in obtaining a League Website and Management System for tackle or flag football organizations. Of those contacts, I sent online forms to more than 70 different organizations with about 35 or so leagues completing and submitting their online forms. Along with getting organizations to connect with USA Football, I helped to personally bring in more than $25,000 in revenue for the company.
The biggest challenge that I faced while at my internship was reaching some of my contacts. I had numerous leads that would not respond to my phone calls, so from there I would email to try and reach them. I helped to write and fix-up a series of emails that would be sent to unresponsive leads. If the contact had been sent the entire series, then they would be marked down as unresponsive so we could move on and focus on leads that were more interested in partnering up with us through our League Website and Management System offer.
I grew professionally during this internship by working on my skills and fine tuning them. I can better communicate since I had so many different channels I had to use like phone, person, Skype, and email. My time management and organization skills were used every day with having to balance all the calls, meetings, and projects I was given. Networking was another aspect that helped me to grow professionally. I used all my connections I made to get projects that I had more interest in, so that I could see if it was something I would want to do in my future.
Thanks to the help of networking, I had an opportunity to help with the Protection Tour that was held at the Indianapolis Colts’ training facility. This was hands down my favorite part of my entire internship. I loved that I had an opportunity to be a part of an event that would help to make a difference. The Protection Tour is an event that USA Football hosted to help raise concussion awareness. I gladly volunteered my time and spent one of my Saturdays helping with tasks such as registration, stuffing swag bags, taking pictures, and videoing how to properly tackle. I left with a smile on my face feeling so blessed to have had such a great opportunity.
I learned a lot throughout this experience that I could have not learned by sitting in the classroom. I really discovered my strengths and weaknesses in the professional world and even helped to narrow down the number of career paths I was looking at for the future. I like talking to people, but I do not know if I could talk to them only by phone every day. I like being behind the computer, but I do not want to sit around for all hours. I now have a better idea; I know what I want.
My career goals have shifted and I am glad they have. I have a passion for social media, events, and helping others. This internship not only confirmed that, but made me certain I would be doing something that I loved for my future. I think that everyone should try an internship before deciding on a career path. You would be surprised at what you will learn about yourself and about what your true passions really are in life!
