The weekdays start bright and early for Jaymen Buchanan, Reed Smith, and Dario Love. The three industrial and systems engineering students arrive at the University of Tennessee football facility at 6:45 a.m. to begin preparing for practice. They stay until noon, when they head across campus to attend classes. Then, it’s homework until 9:30 p.m.
Buchanan, Smith, and Love repeat the routine every day throughout the fall and winter. Only they are not football players, they are team managers. The three are the only engineering majors among the 20 UT football managers.
“It’s a lot of hours during the weeks, but it all pays off on the weekends during games,” said Buchanan, a junior from Virginia. “The atmosphere here is different than anywhere else, and it’s just great to be a part of that and know you played a role in some way.”
Buchanan, Smith, and Love all inquired about joining the football program as managers before they arrived on campus as freshmen. They contacted Allen “Hawk” Sitzler, the associate director of equipment and apparel for UT Athletics. After conducting interviews with Sitzler, they were invited to join the staff.
The three get scholarships for being a team manager during the school year. If they work during the summer, they get paid for their hours.
“It allows me to still stay close to the game,” said Love, a sophomore who played football at Christian Academy of Knoxville. “I also really like developing relationships with players and coaches. That’s something I never thought I would be able to do. Just being able to talk to them on a daily basis is pretty cool.”
Balancing Books and Ball
Balancing their time as managers with their academics isn’t easy. They each are assigned a different position group to work with during practices. Buchanan works with wide receivers, Love with special teams, and Smith with defensive backs. They get all the equipment ready for morning practices, help with field drills, and put all the equipment away before heading to class.
“We have to fit all our homework and everything else around football,” said Smith, a sophomore from Cleveland, Tennessee. “It’s every bit of 40 hours a week, seven days a week. I don’t have much free time at all. You really have to sit in there and grind your homework out until 9:30 most nights.”
Love is following in his family’s legacy by majoring in engineering. His dad is a nuclear engineer, while his mom and one of his brothers are chemical engineers.
“My dad is retired now, but he owns a company in Oak Ridge that works with Isotek, Y12 and the Oak Ridge National Lab,” Love said. “That is kind of something I want to do, just get into his business and possibly manage a team or something over there.”
Buchanan has a cousin who is an industrial engineer and works for Amazon. He encouraged Buchanan to pursue the major.
“I’ve always kind of wondered the why of everything that I’ve done,” said Buchanan, who plans to pursue internship opportunities this summer. “And with industrial engineering, you can kind of dig deeper into why we do anything that we do, especially from the industrial standpoint or business standpoint.”
Buchanan believes he’s gained a lot of important time management skills while at UT. He takes his academics seriously, and never wants his football responsibilities to inhibit his learning.
“The professors all know I’m a manager, and they all support me,” Buchanan said. “Anytime I have to miss class because of our travel to games, they all accommodate for that. They’ve all been really understanding and really nice.”
Detailed Preparations
Buchanan, Love, and Smith have a different perspective than most students on college football Saturdays at Neyland Stadium. They arrive six hours before kickoff to begin organizing equipment and setting up the lockers of the players. That includes pre-game shorts and shirts, game uniforms, pads, and helmets.
“Everything in the locker room has to be perfect and set up the same way,” Reed said. “Everything folded in their locker must be in a certain order—shorts, underwear, shirts. Even the T on the pants has to face a certain way.”
Once the game ends, Buchanan, Love, and Smith stay for at least an hour longer taking care of any tasks required. Buchanan usually gets mistaken for a player when he finally emerges from the locker room and encounters fans.
“All the kids are wanting my autograph,” he said. “I try to tell them I’m not a player, but they don’t believe me, so I just end up signing.”
The team managers return to campus on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. to transport the equipment back from the stadium to the practice facility to have ready for Monday’s practice. It’s a cycle that repeats for at least 13 games this season.
Buchanan, Love, and Smith will get a month off from their duties once the season ends before returning in February to prepare for spring practice in March. They are proud to represent the Tickle College of Engineering as football team managers. Although their work doesn’t get much attention, they feel appreciated by those who mean the most.
“The coaches and players, they’ll say thank you,” Love said. “Obviously our friends, they always send me pictures of me out there, and they always say, ‘Go Dario.’ That makes me feel good.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (865-974-0683, rpotkey@utk.edu)