Week 1 Work Log 5/27/25-5/30/25
Hours Worked: 15.5
The first day of my internship was the day after Memorial Day. I went into the administrative office at Perdue Stadium to meet Ben and he gave me a basic rundown of what the internship would look like and introduced me to the other interns working there: Lizzie, Jamie, and Elise. Ben showed me around the stadium and took me up to the press box. The first thing he had Elise and I work on was inputing the hometowns of players from the visiting team into the stat recording site for a game to be played later that night. We then rolled T-shirts so that they could be tossed into the crowd for a promotion during the game. After that, I spent the remainder of the day developing ideas on promotional themes for a video to help boost season ticket sales. Although I was scheduled to come in on Wednesday to observe the atmosphere in-game (there was a game scheduled at 1 o'clock), an early rainout sent every member of the team staff home for the day. Day two was Thursday, and I spent most of that day writing an "alumni update" for the Shorebirds to promote. I selected a former Shorebirds standout, pitcher Houston Roth, and wrote a 600 word article on his baseball career from high school to college to the Oriole farm system and I then detailed how far through the system he had progressed. This required me to do a lot of research from his college athletics page as well as reading about his stats on MiLB.com but Ben had given me an example of one that had been written before so I had an example to go off of. After this, I was introduced to another intern, Preston, and Ben asked the two of us to come up with a social media plan to promote the games and fireworks that would be held the day before Independence Day. On Friday, Jamie and I were the only interns in the office, so Ben took the opportunity to teach us how all of the different equipment in the press box works. He then had us prep all of it for the game that night so that we would familiarize ourselves with it. We set up the video board and inserted graphics to display on the Jumbotron, prepared stat recording softwares, and opened up music computers. I had seen all of this equipment at Salisbury and in the previous two days but had not really known how to operate it so this was very informative for me. Jamie and I then spent the remainder of the day writing more articles for the Shorebirds season guide. Specifically, I focused on an upcoming promotion in which the team would don uniforms and have a night that was Scrapple-themed. There was a lot of different work that I got to experience in this first week but it was enjoyable and informative.​
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See some of my work from week one here!
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Week 2 Work Log 6/3/25-6/5/25
Hours Worked: 15
During my second week, I started to establish a routine and get a feel for what I would be doing on a day-to-day basis. The team was on the road so it was much calmer throughout the week because there weren't any games being played in the evening. On Tuesday, the first thing Ben had us do was go up to the press box and input players' names numbers and hometowns for the upcoming visiting opponent into the sideboard system. This was relatively simple. I pulled up the Salem Red Sox roster and read the details for each active player and Lizzie entered them into the system. I spent the rest of Tuesday working with Elise on creating military trivia for an upcoming promotion. We made 20 multiple choice questions each with one correct answer and three wrong answers. Once Ben approved the questions, he showed us how to make the graphics to display the questions on the video board using the photoshop software. This was an interesting but time consuming task that carried into Wednesday. In total, we created over 80 graphics. I then spent the remainder of Wednesday working on the Delmarva Scrapple promotion article that I started in week one . On Thursday, I wrote another alumni update article, this time on Vance Honeycutt, one of the Orioles top prospects. I had to do a lot of research but since this was my second time writing one, I knew roughly what Ben was looking for and that helped me to get it done fairly easily. Thursday was also interesting because it was the first time that all seven summer interns were there. Isabella had started on Tuesday and Mackenzie started on Thursday and, with everyone there, Ben took us on a tour of the stadium. We got to see team locker rooms and training rooms and we went onto the field and into the bullpen. Overall, this was probably the coolest experience I've had to this point.
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See some of my work from week two here!
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Week 3 Work Log 6/10/25-6/12/25
Hours Worked: 19.5
My third week was when I really began to see variety in the types of jobs I was doing. On Tuesday I had the opportunity to upload lineups into Stringer, which is major league baseball's statistics tracking site. Previously, I had only observed either Lizzie or Ben doing this. I also spent time on Tuesday writing another promotional article for Maryland pride night. This is a sponsored promotion designed to try and draw fans to the stadium that is done every Thursday. Fans are encouraged to wear gear representing the state of Maryland and I wrote an article detailing an upcoming shirt giveaway that would accompany Maryland pride night. I began Wednesday by playing around with adobe photoshop. I had used photoshop sparingly prior to this and wanted to become familiar with it. Ben gave me a premade graphic and asked me to try and recreate it on my own. Honestly, this war pretty difficult and it took some getting used to. I made progress but didn't finish before Ben had all four interns come down to the field. He wanted us to write a question on a whiteboard and film players' responses as they walked out on the field for practice. This was the first time I had interacted with the players directly so I really had a good time with it. Elise and I asked players what their favorite sunflower seed flavor as they walked on the field and filmed their responses in order to make a social media video. On Wednesday evening, Elise and I had the opportunity to come back to the stadium and be in the press box during a game. Ben told us we could shadow to see what things looked like during the game. As a fan of baseball, I had never seen the "behind the scenes" work in real time so this was quite enjoyable and informative for me. On Thursday, Elise and I spent the whole day using Adobe Premiere to edit and create a sequence of the interviews from the day prior. This posed some challenges for us because we had to learn to navigate the software and also deal with some audio that wasn't properly syncing with the clips. However, we were able to get it worked out into a video. The video is for a program called The Birdbook in which players are asked different questions such as "what is your favorite ballpark food?" or in our case, what their favorite type of sunflower seed is. I feel like I learned so much about what sports communications looks like during a game as well as in preparation for a game.
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Week 4 Work Log 6/17/25-6/20/25
Hours Worked: 20
The fourth week was similar to the second week in that them team was on the road so the atmosphere was much more relaxed. I started off the week by working with Elise to edit the interviews from the previous week and make them into a sequence using adobe premiere. We had started this the previous week so Tuesday was spent mostly on finishing touches. We added background music, put in subtitles with background colors to increase their visibility, etc. On Wednesday we spent the day combing through photograph archives looking for pictures to potentially use for a Fourth of July social media content calendar. The archive site was pretty slow, so this took some time, but we did come up with about 12 photos that we thought would fit the Independence Day theme. After that, Elise, Jamie, Lizzie, and myself went to Ben's office and the five of us came up with a concrete plan for the ten-day content calendar. This was the first time we all worked on the same project together and it was really fun and rewarding because it was productive but also built camaraderie. On Thursday, I got to write another alumni update. This was my third time writing an article like this and I really enjoyed it just because I was essentially reading and writing about baseball players. On Friday Ben had me comb through the rosters and find any players that made it to the majors. The official Shorebirds website lists all former players who have made it to the MLB, however it hadn't been updated in a few seasons so he had me go through rosters from 2017 on and add any players to the list that weren't already on it. I rounded out the week by doing more practice with Adobe Photoshop like I did last week.
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Week 5 Work Log 7/1/25-7/3/25
Hours Worked: 20
After a week away on a family trip, I returned to the internship at the beginning of July and pretty much picked up where I left off. During my time away, the other interns had filmed players answering a 4th of July question for another bird book segment similar to the one I had worked on earlier. I spent all day Tuesday and most of Wednesday editing those clips and while Elise was there for some of the editing, there were a lot of times where I had to figure out how to use different functions of Adobe Premiere on my own. This proved to be a little challenging but I did eventually figure everything out and Elise was there to help me when I had a question. It was more time consuming than anything. On Thursday I started off the day by taking a package containing 6000 signed baseball cards to the Fedex Store to be shipped. After that, I spent the rest of the day researching players and coming up with potential interview questions for a player feature story that I will be writing soon. Ben said that I will likely have the opportunity to conduct the interview and I'm really excited about this because interviewing is a skill that I've gotten pretty good at and it is something I enjoy. On Friday, I did more practice with Premiere and Photoshop.
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Week 6 Work Log 7/15/25-7/18/25
Hours Worked: 20
I returned from another week off and immediately got back to work. Because of the two weeks away I had to adjust my schedule a little bit to make sure that I got enough hours before the deadline. Tuesday started out with me and Elise doing the live book. what we essentially did was look up the active rosters of the next two opponents and update them in the stat site. We then worked on gathering pictures of two particular players. This posed a couple of challenges, the first being that the picture storage site was incredibly slow and required a lot of patience to navigate. The second was that we didn't have any pictures of one of the players because we didn't have any information on him. Once we found pictures of the first player, I began writing an article on Manny Machado. He is probably the most notable former Shorebird and recently reached 2,000 career MLB hits and Ben wanted me to write an article on him. Ben wasn't around on Wednesday but he called me in the morning and gave me work to do for the day. I spent all of Wednesday and part of the day Thursday practicing on Photoshop. He asked me to find a graphic that had already been made, open a new sheet and try to recreate it so that I would learn to use the platform. It took a lot of time and research on my part but I was able to recreate and he said I did well. The main thing, though, is that I feel much more comfortable with using Photoshop. After that Jamie and I went through Spotify and put together a playlist of Christmas songs for the upcoming Christmas in July celebration. After a day and a half of using Photoshop, this felt incredibly easy. Friday was spent filming another bird book segment since the players finally came back from the All-Star break. Once we finished filming and loaded the clips onto the computer, we began editing on Premiere. We spent all of Friday putting the video together.
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Week 7 Work Log 7/22/25-7/25/25
Hours Worked: 21
​This week I had two main tasks to complete, the first had to do with the MLB draft. Ben asked me to write statements and gather info on every Orioles draft pick. This was easier for certain players than others depending on if they were drafted out of college, junior college, or high school. Once I had info on them, I wrote social media welcome captions so that if any of them debuted with us, we would have a welcome post ready. I also spent some time with Elise gathering 2-3 action shots of each player to use in those posts. We also did another Bird Book segment this week. After spending all of Tuesday and a lot of Wednesday working on draft stuff, we spent Thursday and Friday doing Bird Book. On Thursday, we went down on the field, questioned players, and filmed their responses. This took a little longer than usual because they were delayed in coming onto the field. We came in on Friday, spent the day editing on Premiere and putting the video together.
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Week 8 Work Log 7/29/25-8/1/25
Hours Worked: 20
Week 8 started off differently than previous weeks had. I began the day by doing the live book with Preston. Since the team was on the road this week, Ben wanted to get ahead on updating the rosters of our opponents. So we went through and did the rosters of our next three opponents. After we finished that, he sent us both a collection of headshots from two of the teams and told us to compare to their roster. He wanted to find out which of their players we had headshots for and which ones we didn't. Once this was done, he again had me working on material about the draft picks. I had captions written for each player, but he wanted them written to fit X's character limit while including hashtags that the team includes in every post. So, I went through every player's caption, added the hashtags, and shortened were necessary to fit the 280 character limit. On Wednesday, I spent the morning writing an article on Houston Roth. I had done my first alumni article on him early in the summer, and on Tuesday night, he suited up for the Orioles after a long and winding road through the minors. This took some time because I had to simply explain some very fine points regarding MLB eligibility rules, but I got it done. That afternoon, we did something a little different. Ben brought us a Walmart reaction test game and said we would be doing a video of it with the players. After all of us interns had some fun with it, we established the rules that we would tell the players about when they participated. This was definitely the funniest and most entertaining part of the week. Thursday and Friday were spent combing through photos looking for action shots of players from a list that Ben had given us. We had to use the same very slow database, so this took a lot of time and patience simply by nature.
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Week 9 Work Log 8/5/25-8/7/25
Hours Worked: 15
My second-to-last week was the first one in which I faced a really significant challenge. Tuesday started normally with me updating live book rosters and Ben teaching me how to input for the home team since there is a different procedure for the Shorebirds then there is for opponents. Later on, Elise, Isabella, and I went down to the field with the reaction game and we were intending to film for another Bird Book. We got a few rounds in before the game died and we couldn't find a charger that was compatible with it. Isabella and I ended up staying an extra hour trying to get it resolved but found no success, so we had to adjust our plans on Wednesday. In the morning, we edited the footage that we did have into an outline of a segment, and in the afternoon, we went down on the field again and asked the players to participate in the same game they had the day before. We were planning on spending all of Wednesday editing, but since there wasn't footage to edit, we couldn't do as much as we wanted to.​ Things got even more complicate on Wednesday when it started raining. The players warmups were delayed by several hours, so Ben ended up sending all of the interns home. That made Thursday a very busy day as we now had three segments to film with the players in one day. That morning, I wrote a player feature on Wehiwa Aloy, one of the Orioles high draft choices that would soon be coming to Delmarva. Since it was Isabella's last day, Ben brought in pizza for all of the interns and we had lunch together to celebrate the summer. After that, all of us interns went down to the field and we were out there for several hours with the players asking them questions, getting them to sign baby pictures, and doing the reaction game all at once. It took awhile and there was a lot going on, but we ultimately got it all done.
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Week 10 Work Log 8/12/25-8/14/25
Hours Worked: 15
My last week of my internship was still busy despite the fact that the team was on the road and the season was winding down. On Tuesday, Elise and I spent all day editing the three bird book videos that we had spent the previous week filming intermittently. Surprisingly, we were able to hammer out every one in five hours. This was very tiring but we did get every video done and they were the same high quality that they have been all summer. Wednesday was Jamie and Lizzie's last day, but we still had work to do. I reviewed and edited the player feature article that I had written the week prior on Wehiwa Aloy and then sent it to Ben. After that, he had me begin writing a season recap article in which I detailed the players that have stood out this year. I spent most of Thursday finishing that up and then, when it was time to leave, Ben said goodbye to me and Elise and we had a brief conversation about the summer. Basically, it was just a closing conversation, but a meaningful one nonetheless. With that, my ten weeks at the Shorebirds came to an end.
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