Lucy Carpenter ’22
Current job: Player Social Coordinator, MLB
Major: Media arts and production, communications minor
Hometown: Singapore
Sports: Women’s volleyball and beach volleyball
Favorite places in Stockton: Gian’s Deli, Market Tavern
When you turn on a Major League Baseball game, you’ll see dozens of athletes in peak physical condition going head-to-head. What you don’t see, though, are the people behind the scenes who handle the other aspects of MLB’s day-to-day operations.
You might think of coaches, physical trainers or meal planners. There are also plenty of people who do jobs you might not have thought of. For example, consider player social coordinators. They’re the people who help your favorite MLB player fill their social media with their best moments.
“We coordinate custom content for all the guys in the league,” says Lucy Carpenter ’22, who earned a degree in media arts and production with a minor in communication. “So, we work with the video editors and graphic designers to create custom videos, highlights and recap videos for them to post on their Instagrams and TikToks.”
For Carpenter, who was a dual sport athlete throughout her time at University of the Pacific, working in major league sports seems like a natural evolution. You might assume that working for such a big business means you need to arrange your college career around that outcome.
But that’s not how it played out for Carpenter, who says her education, her sports and internship with Pacific Athletics kept her pretty busy. It was in her senior year, when she applied for an internship with the San Francisco Giants, that her vision started coming together.
“It made me realize that even if I’m not an athlete after I graduate, I still wanted to be involved with sports. It’s part of my identity. And I thought it would be so cool to contribute to sports, especially from the creative side, which is what I was studying,” Carpenter says.
Getting a start in professional sports
Being in Stockton turned out to be a key step in her journey toward MLB. After graduating, Carpenter reached out to the director of communications for the local minor league baseball team, the Stockton Ports. That led to a part-time job in the team’s press box.
Her experiences at Pacific helped get her foot in the door. Carpenter was pursuing her interests in social media through her communications minor, using the creative skills she was learning for her media arts and production degree. That had also helped her during a Pacific Athletics internship, where she worked in a baseball press box and created content for their social media.
Those experiences helped her identify an opportunity for the Ports.
“I expressed my interest in social media. I knew they had social media pages, but they didn’t really have anybody running them,” Carpenter says.
After a few weeks of working with the Ports part-time, the team asked her to run its social media. That led to a full-time internship and turned into a job at the end of the season.
One lesson Carpenter highlights about her time with Pacific Athletics and the Ports: keep an eye open for opportunity and go after it when you see it. That attitude is what helped her land her current role.
Working with Major League Baseball
She was looking for a job with a Major League Baseball team when she came across a listing for an MLB player social coordinator. With the 2023 baseball season looming, Carpenter applied. About three weeks later, was coordinating content for MLB players’ social media profiles.
Even at the national level, Carpenter points out that her work still has Central Valley ties.
“Aaron Judge is from Linden, which is near Stockton. And he is one of the guys we work with a lot,” she says. “After every series win the Yankees have, we provide Aaron Judge a video for his Instagram. So, if you see the little highlight videos that he posts, that’s us.”
Looking back now, Carpenter jokes about how far she’s come since her first year at Pacific. There’s a lot of pressure on high-school students to start planning their careers, especially if they want to work for a prestigious sports league like MLB. Looking ahead isn’t a bad thing at all, and it can help guide your path to success. But Carpenter’s story emphasizes the importance of the process of getting there, too.
“Just go for it, right? You never know who you’re going to meet. You never know what it’s going to lead to,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be forever, but it’s a learning opportunity. And it’s going to take you somewhere.”
So, it’s important to have a plan, but it’s also important to be adaptable and learn along the way.
For anyone else interested in working in major league sports, Carpenter says the most important thing is to get involved.
“Whether it’s event staff working in the press box, or social media or even volunteering,” she says. “That’s a great resume opportunity. It’s really cool being able to work in your college athletic department and it’s also a perfect learning opportunity. That’s a good entry-level step. It doesn’t matter if it’s big or small. Take any opportunity you find and create opportunities for yourself if they’re not coming to you.”