Erin Mason: Clemson Football

In an industry that is traditionally male-dominated, women have been breaking ground and becoming their own within the world of football. Whether working as a coach, tech, training, or media, women have begun to play a significant role in the world of football both on and off the field. I had the opportunity to sit down, via Zoom, with Erin Mason. Erin is a sophomore at Clemson University, originally from just outside of DC in Ashburn, VA, who works for the Clemson Tigers Football team. Her dream that began in fifth grade came true upon her freshman year at Clemson. I got to chat with her about getting involved, her experience, and advice she may have for other girls looking to get involved in football at such a young age. 

Erin’s Story:

A little bit about Erin…

Potentially graduating a year early, Erin is currently a Sophmore Sports Communications major at Clemson University. When she was applying to colleges she knew she wanted to work in football, knowing this she applied to major football schools like Michigan, Penn State, and Tennessee. She ultimately decided on Clemson University in South Carolina. She says, “I still don't really know what made me go to Clemson because Penn State is much closer to home. But yeah, I ended up here, so I think it was just part of God's plan.”  Upon arriving at Clemson she had an opportunity to work for Clemson Football in the Coaches Film Department. Besides Clemson football, Erin is involved with the Association for Women in Sports Media, acronym ASWM, said as awesome. In this organization, she serves as the Vice President where she plans events for other women in sports. 

She deems herself as a “little baby freshman” when she started and remembers the football facilities building being the first place she had ever walked into at Clemson. Two weeks prior to her freshman year she landed on campus alone, figuring things out, and working a lot since fall camp was taking place. Since she knew she wanted to work in football, she knew she needed to get her foot in the door in any way possible. That way she could go where she wanted from there. She started within Coaches Film and then noticed that there was a creative sector within the Coaches Department. There, there are three students and two full-time staff members that worked on the internal creative department. Within this department they work a lot of highlight videos that the team watches Friday nights before games and Monday highlight videos post Saturday game-days. Knowing that she wanted to work her way into a more creative field, she began to take on smaller projects and watching over people's shoulders, watching them closely and teching herself things as she had previously had no camera experience prior. She says, “So I was very confused, but I started to do that and then at some point expressed an interest in moving into that creative role because I knew we had two seniors graduating, so I knew that there were open spaces in that role. So I expressed an interest in that and got good feedback, obviously, because that's where I'm at now.” She ended up moving into this new role last Spring and has been working within the creative department for the last year now, and over the summer started expanding herself into the world of graphics which taught her new skills. 

How did you get involved?

Erin knew she wanted to work in football from a young age, so once she got accepted to Clemson she got right to work on getting herself immersed into their football community. While she deems it embarrassing and awkward, she did her research on everyone that worked within Clemson and “quite literally I emailed everyone on staff besides the coaches. And the email was essentially like, ‘Hi, my name's Erin Mason. A little bit about me. Following that, I'm looking for any possible openings she might have or fall or spring of whatever year that was. And I was like, 'If you have any openings, please let me know. Would love to set up a time to talk.’ And then I attached my resume to that, obviously, at the time, I did not have a portfolio because like I said, I had never done anything with the camera before. So it was pretty much just a brief email explaining who I was and then my resume.” After she sent these emails out she got responses from two different departments; athletic training and video. She knew she didn’t want to do athletic training, as she had done it in high school and it's “much more glamorous on Greys’ Anatomy” and more of a support role. She kept that response in her back pocket, knowing it was a way to get involved until she heard back from video and Coaches Film, and again not exactly being what she wanted to do, it was a way to get her foot in the door and become involved. She could move on from there. She took the role and from there decided she could take on roles that she was really interested in. She could put in the effort and show the potential she had, and that is how she ultimately got placed into the creative role that she is in now.

What are some of your specific roles and responsibilities?

Erin’s job works with several different roles and responsibilities. From time to time, she helps out with Coaches Film. But currently, her main roles involve filming games and working on highlights for every home game. She edits the weekly highlight video that is shown to the players on Friday nights before games. It's called “hotel tape” and it is a seven minute long video that recapps the game, “the whole goal is to hype the guys up for the game the next day.” Besides full highlights, she also worked on specific position highlights. Sometimes a wide receiver or running back coach will ask her for highlight videos, so she will create a video and edit it for them. A lot of her job consists of helping out other departments and editing. She also dabbles into social media, and focuses on off field programming that is there for the players, “it's essentially like a life outside of football program so they focus a lot on like helping the guys that they' organized helping them with career services, mental health services, uh basically everything that's part of their life that's not football. And they have a lot of events that they like covered so we can promote those on social media.”  Lastly, and in my opinion one of the coolest things she does, is turning graphics into motion. She can take a static image and turn it into movement, and then the department can send it out to recruits. Overall, she focuses on a lot of photo and video editing, the creative side that she loves. 

 What does a game-day in your life look like?

Every Clemson home game, she had to be there five hours before the game. “So we'll just use like a 3 PM kick because that's nice in the middle of the day. We have to carpool so we usually have to leave like 30 minutes before we actually need to be there to pick up everyone and get there on time, even though I only live about 10 minutes away from facilities. So if it was like a 3 PM kick, I would have to be there at 10 AM. So I'd probably wake up at like eight or something, get changed into my uniform, which is lovely, lovely polo and khakis, (laughs) lovely, but get changed into my uniform, go pickup whoever we need to pickup on the carpool list, and head straight into the facilities from there, we will get served either breakfast or lunch. So we'll kind of all sit down together as a team like our video department as a team and eat together, start off the day, you know, together. And then once we're done with that, we will grab our stuff that we need for the day and head over to the stadium. So we usually end up over at the stadium about four to four and a half hours before kick. And once we're over there, it's really all just setting up stuff so I will set up my camera and tripod or high hat I'm using that day, whatever lens I'm using, set that stuff up, make sure it's all good to go, test everything, make sure my lenses are clean. And then the team gets there about two hours before the game. I like to go out on the field and just kind of walk around, take some time to clear my head because I do get nervous on game day.” 

Once the team arrives, she gets content with them walking down Tiger Walk, which is what you would typically expect and see as a player media walk on any level of the game. She then films her content throughout the game and then after the game it's the opposite of before the game, lots of cleanup. A lot of the work she does on game-day is edited and organized on the Sunday after the fame. “That is when we will go through our footage, label our footage. So what play it was and then whether it was, good shot, kind of good shot, a great shot, bad shot, whatever, we'll kind of go in and label that. And then that's when I get to work on beginning my kind of baseline process for the following highlight video for that Friday. and that's when I kind of started going through. Everyone's footage. We have a lot of people shooting the game, so there's a lot of different footage to go through and stuff.”

What is your greatest memory of working for Clemson football?

A lot of Erin’s best memories of working for Clemson football is working with her coworkers and being with the people around the building. Whether it's during fall camp or during the season, she just likes to sit with her coworkers and ear, have fun, and laugh. Besides the personal relationships that make the team memorable, she loves doing events with the team, especially Lake Day. “Lake day is super fun. and take all the guys out to the lake. Everyone gets on a boat and stuff. So that's always the super fun one because you, I mean, you get to be out on the lake and you really get to see the guys personalities.” And the biggest memory she has was the Gator Bowl from last year. “we played Kentucky. The last two minutes of that game were just like so high energy and so intense because it was such a close game and the score was just going back and forth, and that was actually my first game that I got to film pilots for so that was just a really exciting opportunity for me.”

Is there something you find more challenging about working in football than you expected going into it?

While part of Erin wants to say the time commitment, coming from working in high school football that was run like a college program, she knew what she was getting herself into. But something that surprised her was having to work on her confidence. “I never really struggled with confidence at all before coming here and then working here, I kind of started to struggle with that in terms of my job just because it's not like like you can see a video you make and hear people tell you they really like it, but like you're not always going to get that feedback or validation. You could make the best video of your life and nobody could be like, ‘yeah, that's really cool’ or ‘cool you're doing a great job.’ And that's not necessarily what bothers me.I am very hard on myself. So for example, my first game this season, I filmed a really good game. I had some of the best shots of the biggest plays of the game. And in our labeling system, we either leave it no label, we label it good, great, or epic. If it's good, it's just like a shot we can use, if it's great it's something we probably want to use, and if it's epic it's just like an amazing shot. I labeled two of my shots that definitely should have been labeled way better either like great or epic, I just labeled them like good, and people came up to me and they were like ‘you need to like tell us if you have those shots because like we were looking for a good shot and like since you didn't like label yours like great or anything, like we didn't think it was like going to be like better than the other ones we had.’ So they came up to me and were like, ‘you  need to have some confidence in yourselves.’ And it's not so much that I lack confidence in a way where I'm like, I don't believe in myself. It's just like, I'm very hard on myself and I let that carry over in sort of like my projects, like I'll spend a lot more time on something than I should just going back through and rewatching it because I'm like not sure about it the first time, even if it's like one of the best things I've ever made.” While this isn’t something she labels as a downside, it wasn’t something that she was expecting. 

Do you feel since starting at Clemson, that women working within the field has grown? How and why?

The short answer from Erin is, yes. And she hasn’t just seen it within football, but other sports too. Within her department she even sees more women working in the roles than men. “The only thing I do notice is most of the full-time people are men. But a lot of the students are women, which I find really interesting because I think that kind of goes to show that like women in the field is really growing and like as we're starting to like graduates and stuff, like it's going to become more and more women in full-time positions.” She feels that overall there are improvements being made and that there is an overall shift.  

What do you hope to do with this experience post graduation from Clemson?

Erin has two goals post-graduation; building a strong portfolio and using all of the skills she has learned while working at Clemson. In terms of a portfolio, she finds it hard to stay completely organized since there is so much content she is producing, but wants to be able to show it to someone who may be looking to hire her for a similar role post-grad. And while she wants to carry her editing and creative skills over, what struck me the most was bringing her skills of working with others into the greater world of sports and football. “I used to be really shy. Like you can literally, if you ask anyone in my department how I was a year ago and how I am now they would be like, ‘dude, you are not the same person,’ because I used to walk around here and not say hi to anyone and be like so shocked people would say hi to me, and I'd like freak out and not know what to do. Like just random people, not even like a really good player or anything, like just some random staff and they would say hi to me and I would just like freeze. And now I'm the complete opposite, now like when I pass someone I say hi to everyone, no matter who it is. So I really hope that I can kind of bring with me into my next position and kind of display that more through the content I'm making.” 

Do you have any advice for girls coming into college who may want to get involved similarly to how you have? 

Similarly to what she did, Erin recommends getting your foot in the door even if it's not something you specifically want to do. Once you get into any role, you can learn and move around from there. This turned out great and worked for her. The second thing she recommends is to reach out, don’t be afraid to try and build connections. “Like even if somebody's not hiring right now, it could still be really great for you to just have a call with them and just connect with them. Just kind of get to know what they do and get to know like their position, who they are a little more, because that does go a long way for in the future if they are looking for candidates, they're more likely to remember you than if you just emailed them, they said we're not hiring and you're just like okay. If you sit down and have that call with them, you become a lot more memorable. But also it's good to have those talks with people because like there's people that are in roles that I thought would be really appealing to me and I had a call with them and it was great to connect with them but as they told me about some of those like real responsibilities of their job and not just all like the glorious stuff that I thought it would be, I was kind of like, I don't really want that role at all. So it kind of helps me figure out more of what I want and more of where I'm passionate.”