Interview with Bolivia RPCV Nat Reynolds, Director of Ticket Sales for Boise Hawks
Interview with Director of Ticket Sales Nat Reynolds
01/25/05 - Northwest League (NWL) Boise Hawks
Boise HawksHawk Talk: Why baseball? How did you get in this business? Why did you get in this business? What’s your background?
Nat Reynolds: My background is…well I did play-by-play when I was back east in upstate New York. I sold the radio time, got myself on it, just because I wanted to do play-by-play. But my wife wanted to come back west and there wasn’t a lot of money to be made in radio back east where we were living.
So I took a job in Idaho, where my family’s from, selling radio for the chance to get to do play-by-play on the radio – to do high school football and high school basketball. I wasn’t getting as much air-time as I wanted. Selling radio was…I was good at it, but I just didn’t find any satisfaction in it.
So, just by chance I met Dan Walker and told him about my background and he said, “What can we do for you? Would you like to be part of this team?” And I said, well yes if there’s some radio involved. I really need to keep on the radio. So I came over to sell some sponsorships and tickets with a chance to do some games with our play-by-play guy Mike Safford – started doing that, did okay with it with sales and things of that sort. I went through the season doing middle innings with Mike on the radio.
I like doing play-by-play. Baseball’s probably not where I want to be in play-by-play in the long term. Sales is kind of…I found a niche in it. I’m pretty good at it, so wherever that takes me. That’s kind of how I ended up in baseball.
HT: You have kind of this eclectic background – with the Peace Corps, with all these different things you’ve done. Talk about that, how have those experiences shaped who you are and how does it help you in sales?
[Excerpt]
NR: I don’t know. I don’t know if it does or not. When I graduated from the University of Idaho, I got married shortly after. My wife and I went to the Peace Corps. It was something we wanted to do. I was an environmental science major. So that was my background, environmental water rights – things of that sort, more on the social science side. My thesis was on native American treaty rights and how it would affect the Snake River…I mean it was just a completely other side of where I was at. I really enjoyed what I was doing - I liked the writing, I liked doing that.
When I got in the Peace Corps, about 9 months into it, I was just looking at myself going, “Geez, do I really want to come back to the United States and do water law or do environmental policy? I mean is that really what I want to do the rest of my life?”
I’m a sports junkie. I’m a sports radio junkie. So when my wife got pregnant, when we were down there, it was kind of one of those things that we didn’t really want to have the baby in the Peace Corps in Bolivia – health concerns things of that sort. So we came back to the United States, lived in my parents cabin in McCall, had the baby, I applied to grad schools, went back east to Syracuse – which is a great grad school for broadcast journalism. (Nat earned his master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse.)
I was a little naïve to the competition and the pay and having a child, being married, not having the freedom to be able to travel and take those low paying jobs in radio, or TV, or media. It’s impossible to live on $19,000 or less. A lot of times it’s less, without having to do some sales involved and live on that. So, to make a long story short, when I thought about what I wanted to do with my life – I wanted to do sports. It’s something I love. I’ve just built on that, one opportunity after another. It just seems like things kind of come up.
