| Stack hits a home run with Colorado Rockies | |
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When Matt Stack started working at his current job in 2001, people might have said that he hit a home run — literally. The ’95 business management graduate is a baseball/network administrator for the Colorado Rockies, last year’s National League champions based in Denver, Colo. “When you work for a baseball team, you don’t think of work in terms of years; you think of it in terms of seasons, and this will be my eighth season working for the Rockies,” he said. “Of course last year we had a great run making it to the post season for the second time in the franchise history. I was at every playoff game,” Stack continued. “I think what’s most interesting, though, is to watch the development of the new players each year. It’s exciting to watch a college kid get drafted a couple of years ago and then have such a major impact on our club like Troy Tulowitzki did. “The Rockies are a relatively young team, established in 1993, but it’s a team that has its sight on long-term success,” he said. |
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How do Stack’s responsibilities with the team help encourage that longterm success? While he interacts with players like Tulowitzki (whose name he and others often shorten to Tulo) and Todd Helton (another Tennessee connection) every day during the playing season, Stack works perhaps most closely with the Major League’s athletic trainers, scouts, coaches and medical staff responsible for keeping those players healthy. He and his department provide the tools responsible for tracking player injuries and each one’s rehabilitation process. “Information technology work is information technology work no matter where you’re employed, but one of the more interesting tasks our department has responsibility for is digitally capturing each pitch of every game,” he said. Up to five years of such digital video footage is archived so that individual players can study their pitches or swings in order to work toward improvement. “The greatest challenge with this job, as with most any other information technology job, is not losing sight of the big picture by falling into a pattern of being reactive instead of proactive,” Stack said. “The hardest thing is finding the right balance between long-term projects and daily issues.” (Spring 2008) |
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