Director of Softball Operations, Virginia Tech

So, my name is Whitney Davis Showalter, and I'm the director of operations for softball here at Virginia Tech. So, in my day to day role, I work on everything from travel, which entails hotels, bus, airline, the whole nine yards. Team mom, essentially, because I do all of our meals, all of our planning, game day operations, whether it's getting the visiting teams here, making sure they have locker rooms, making sure the umpires, everything is set, the field is ready to go. Alumni relations, making sure that we keep our alumni in the loop, and to make sure that we have some alumni weekends to bring them back and make them feel special. I also work a little bit with everything as far as within the athletic department, I work with the business office, I'm our financial manager, I also work with the communications office, help run our social media, help with our marketing team to make sure we're promoting our student athletes, autograph sessions, that kind of thing. Game day's usually, at least at home game days, we'll have a pregame meal, so we usually do that three hours out, and we'll have a film session then. We usually arrive at the field two hours prior to start warmup, so I'll make sure that the field crew's there, field's lined, umpires have everything that they need, visiting team knows where to go, make sure they have everything they need, and that everything runs smoothly as far as the timeline pregame. We usually will have someone throw out a first pitch, or some type of marketing promotion going on, so we'll make sure that everything is set up for that. And then, games are usually two hours long, roughly. For spring, I usually start planning travel in July or August, just so that way I can go ahead and have all of our hotels, that kind of thing, starting to take place, just because when we do the contracts, they have to come back across campus, go to legal, our athletic director has to sign off on them, so it's kind of a longer process than most would think especially when you're trying to book roughly 20 rooms at a time. So, what I try to do is usually have at least once a year to be able to bring back the alumni, whether it's homecoming weekend, whether we try to do something big in the spring. Every five years, I try to plan kind of like what we call a blowout weekend, where we'll bring them back for a whole weekend of events, so that's a pretty big deal to be able to bring them back, do some fun things. I usually try to send them an email once a month, just kind of letting them know what's going on with their program, because we're the ones that kind of had the history and kind of built it, so they wanna know what the future of it is too.