Seeing Sports from Another Perspective Part 2

Part 1 Can Be Found Here.

After our lunch break was over, which was about 1:50, we got moved to the upperdeck of M&T stadium for reassignment. My first assignment on the upperdeck lasted all of 5 minutes. The way the deck is constructed, the concourse is like a giant outdoor porch, which is very nice, the issue they have is people then going out of the bowl to smoke, and not standing in the right spot. So the job of myself and my friend was to stand 3 feet from the smoking fence, and if we saw anyone smoking in front of us, we had to tell them to smoke behind us. This obvisously does not sound like a job for two people, which the Supervisors figured out and five minutes later, I was moved into a section of the upperdeck with about 40 seconds left in the first half.

My intial job in the section was to watch the crowd and make sure that the fans from Philly didn't fight the fans from Baltimore. I phrase the statement like that because I was told to specifically watch the Philly fans, because they were already tagged as the problem fans just because they were the away fans. Personally, I agree with that statement to some degree. Trouble will be centered around away fans, but as I got to see first hand, its not always the away fan's fault.

As soon as the third quarter started, a Supervisor, and a few cops ran by me up to the top of the section, took an Eagle's fan out of the ballpark for fighting. I was then told to stand in the back of the section and basically babysit the Philadelphia fans. I was given a clicker which had four buttons on it. The first one called a supervisor, the second called a courtesy squad, the third called the police and the last one called the medics.

For the rest of the game I stood with the 40 or so Eagle's fans who kept on making their case to me that it was one of the Ravens fans who started all of the trouble in the section. They called me their babysitter, they talked to me a lot during the game. I had to break up a few arguments with fans during the rest of the game. That was when I was glad I have been a camp counselor for several years, if it wasn't for the conflict resolution skills I developed then, I would been sunk when trying to handle these arguments (basically I would have had to call the Supervisor for everything).

At the end of the game, the Eagles fans gave me an ovation and tried to get a cheer going for my first day on the job. What I found very interesting is that I was the first level of security for that section, and I have never been trained to be such. It was very easy for me to get trained personell if I needed them, but it makes you wonder when your at a game, how many people are trained secuity and how many people are just standing to look like security to make it seem like there is more security than there actually is. Its a very interesting dynamic because psychologically, one is less likely to cause trouble when it looks like theire are a ton of security guards.

Now I am not trying to bash the security system at football games From what I understand, in addition to the significant amount of cops in the stadium, there are a ton of undercover cops located all over the stadium to increase safety.

In the third installment of the series, I will discuss the end of the day, the stadium emptying out, and more behind the door things that happen at the stadium.

This entry was posted in Main Page. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *