Jordan Bray at Indy Eleven
By Katie Shane
Confucius once said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
It may be an unobtainable goal for some, but Saint Mary-of-the-Woods Senior Jordan Bray has already mastered the concept.
The marketing major with a graphic design minor spent the summer of 2016 combining her career aspirations in marketing with her passion as a student-athlete on the Pomeroy Soccer team by working as an intern for Indy Eleven, Indianapolis’s professional soccer team.
Even while casually describing the league and team, Bray doesn’t waste a chance to promote and market the “Boys in Blue” as Indy Eleven is affectionately referred. “We play in the North American Soccer League (NASL),” Bray explains of the twelve team league. “Typically, the average person in the United States only knows about Major League Soccer (MLS) when it comes to soccer. If I could draw a comparison for folks, MLS would be the ‘major league’ while NASL is the ‘minor league’ right under it. However, the Boys in Blue were Spring Champions this past spring season, and are currently heading the league as the fall season is underway!”
During the summer, while she wasn’t dropping information about Indy Eleven into conversation, Bray spent the summer working in marketing for the fairly new team, which had its first season in 2014. Bray did everything from work game day set-up to hanging up posters around Indianapolis. She was also the sole intern assigned to a “zip code project” in which research was conducted to determined specific areas of Indianapolis to focus marketing and advertising.
“Indy Eleven is new to the soccer world, so we were still trying to figure out how and who to target specifically when it came to advertising,” she explains. “After (the research) was completed and the group chose which zip codes we wanted to allocate advertising funds to, I compiled lists of different ad mediums and their price quotes. After presenting all of my information in a meeting, my three superiors finalized the choices and signed contracts. Now, we have a lot more billboards, radio ads and television commercials playing.”
Bray says the research project, which took nearly the entire summer to finalize, was by far the hardest part of the experience, but also the most rewarding. The Terre Haute, Ind., native could see her hard work pay off, which in turn will hopefully pay off for the team in the future.
Internships are always an effective way for students to gain real world experience in their course of study, while building on the skills they’ve learned in the classroom. She says she will pursue a career in marketing, possibly for a sports team.
That passion an interest in sports has been with Bray since she was a kid. She played soccer all her life, including for the Pomeroys. Bray says her recent time on the field and in the classroom at The Woods has molded her into the person she is today.
“Saint Mary-of-the-Woods taught me to use my voice,” she explains. “And recognize that an educated, empowered, independent young woman can go anywhere she wants to take herself.”
And it’s with that new confident stride that Bray enters her final semester at The Woods. The impact her summer will have on her future is not lost on Bray, who is still pinching herself that she had the chance to combine her two passions into one job.
“I cannot put into words how much I valued this job because I got to not only work in a corporate office, but for a professional soccer team. Soccer is an integral part of my life. It has taught me a myriad of skills—above all else, teamwork. And this internship showed me that marketing especially is all teamwork. It’s not just one person taking on a project; its multiple brains constantly adding creative and unique perspectives to reach our goal,” she says pausing with a laugh. “If you will excuse my pun!”