games operations | jamie drysdale

Chapter Thirty-Three

"Home opener guys! Who's excited?" I asked as I walked into our game operations meeting room. Scott got moved from his job up to the board of directors for the team, and I just recently took over for Game Operations Manager. My job doesn't change too much, more pay and I have a couple more responsibilities but from what I've gathered so far I've been doing most of Scott's job since the beginning anyways.

"I'm super excited, this is the most exciting job I've ever had." A girl named Katie said, I had just hired her on with the new crew, there were a few people who came back this season. I still had Sean, Ben, Victoria, June, and Hunter, and then I hired on Katie, Justin, Francesca, Gia, and Mike, hiring one extra person this year to try and pick up the slack since we didn't hire anyone to take over for my assistant manager job. 

"So how much contact do we have with the players?" Gia asked.

"Very little, we tell them if they're a star at the end of the game and that's about it for you guys." I told her. 

"How much contact do you have with the players?" Francesca asked.

"A lot, for multiple reasons." I responded. 

"How?" She asked quickly.

"Well, I run all of their events, so wherever they show up outside of the rink I work with them on that, as well as I'm here every day at the rink where they also are. I also live with three of them." I told her.

"Who do you live with?" Katie asked.

"Zegras, McTavish and Drysdale." I said.

"So it says your last name is Drysdale here, is he your brother?" Mike asked. The crew from last year and I all laughed a little bit.

"That would be really weird." Sean said, still looking through the schedule for the night. 

"Why would it be weird?" Gia asked.

"They're married." Ben responded. 

"Oh, you're the girl all over his instagram." Katie said.

"Yes, now we're two hours away from puck drop, doors are opening in thirty minutes so we're going to have to get through this quickly." I said. I started going through the entire script, they had all worked the pre-season games so they sort of knew their way around the building and the job, we just have some different agreements with partners pre-season versus regular season, and playoffs if we get that far.  "Alright, any questions?" I asked them once I was finished.

"Yeah, for the entrance giveaways how long do we have to stay there?" Katie asked, we were handing out clappers as people came into the building.

"Until they're all gone, or the crowd dies down, whichever comes first. Stay there until at least warmups start." I told her. They all nodded and gathered their stuff to leave and get to the doors for the give aways. I sat in the game ops room to organize a couple things before the game started, eventually walking down to the dressing room area to the cord room. 

"Sky, I'm glad you're here I need your help." Dallas the team head coach said as I made my way down.

"What's up?" I asked him. 

"I'm having issues with one of your crew already." He said.

"Why? What happened?" I asked him, pulling my clipboard into my chest. I moved my eyes around to see who was around, knowing that Sean needed to be down here in a few minutes to send our flag bearers onto the ice. Also kind of looking for Jamie, I hadn't seen him all day except for when I woke up to get to the arena and he was still asleep. 

"I caught one of the girls down here, claimed she got lost and was trying to find her bearings, but I didn't like how she was acting around the players. So, I guess it's not much of an issue but just something that came up. She seemed...off. I wasn't a fan of her aura." He said, his voice was quiet and he was looking around, also trying to make sure no one overheard the conversation.