Tim Crowley (left, now a content producer with SNY), Rylee Pay (now a broadcaster with the Portland Sea Dogs), and Jake Starr (now a broadcaster with the Reading Fightin’ Phils) were interns with the Cotuit Kettleers last season.Cotuit Kettleers
While interns serve mostly in complementary roles for leagues and teams across the sports spectrum, in the Cape Cod Baseball League, they are as essential as the ballparks they work to maintain.
“We’d be in so much trouble without them,” said Leah Ridpath, who oversees the Cotuit Kettleers’ internship program.
The nonprofit league, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary this season and includes 10 teams that are run by volunteer officials, is known as being the country’s top collegiate summer league. But behind the scenes, the Massachusetts-based league is also a powerhouse for interns, churning a high volume of young talent into the next generation of sports business stars.
“I consider the interns the offensive linemen of the league,” said Scott Oberhelman, a former baseball operations intern for the Wareham Gatemen. “They’re the reason why that whole league is operating and why it flows the way it does.”
There are 22 interns at the league level this summer, with the biggest presence in public relations. Cape Cod President Andrew Lang, who stepped into his current role in January, hopes to nearly double that number in the coming years. Each of the 10 teams has at least 20 interns, dwarfing the number of full-time counterparts. They’re in every department: media, marketing, design, operations, analytics and broadcasting, where interns regularly serve as the play-by-play and color voices of their respective teams.
In Cotuit, for example, three of the Kettleers’ 20-plus interns last year were in the broadcast booth. A year later, Jake Starr, the former Kettleers play-by-play announcer, is a media relations and broadcasting manager for the Reading Fightin’ Phils, and former Cotuit broadcasters Rylee Pay and Tim Crowley have landed in roles with the Portland Sea Dogs and SNY, respectively.
Notable alumni include Derek Volner, ESPN director of communications; Sammy Levitt, San Diego Padres Radio Network host; Alexis Downie, Anaheim Ducks host and content producer; Alex Rosen, Philadelphia Phillies scout; and Kayla Baptista, Texas Rangers player development coach, among countless others.
“They all move on to bigger and better things,” Lang said. “But they got their start here.”
Though unpaid (interns do receive a small stipend and an option for college credit), the internships are highly coveted. In the league’s PR department, only 19.5% of interns who interviewed for a position received an offer for the summer. In Cotuit, Ridpath said she receives hundreds of applications every year, with the broadcast internships the most highly sought.
And they come from all over the country, not just the New England area. In 2016, Oberhelman was going to school at Marietta College in Ohio when Lang interviewed him before offering him an internship. Oberhelman played collegiate baseball but realized he wasn’t going to be able to continue playing at the next level.
“I was like, ‘Well, if I can’t play there, I still want to be there,’” he said.
That thinking paid off. Oberhelman turned his Gatemen internship into an internship with the Oakland A’s, which he then turned into a full-time role in the Houston Astros’ scouting department, where he still works as an area scout.
“If it wasn’t for this league, if it wasn’t for Wareham and [Lang], I don’t know where I’d be right now,” Oberhelman said. “There’s a whole lot of people in the baseball world right now that would be able to say the same thing about Cape Cod baseball.”
