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By
R.V. Baugus
Frank Roach has been giving back
to the public
assembly industry for so long that the picture you would expect to see of
him
is one of a man with palms outstretched and pockets turned inside out, the
universal sign for someone who could be figuratively and literally spent.
But such a description is the exact opposite of where Frank Roach’s life is
these days. Oh, the palms might still be outstretched, but the message is
not one of a man at the finish line but of someone saying to bring on the
next challenge.
In this case, the challenge and pursuit have been going on for five years at
the University of South Carolina in Columbia, where Roach is the interim
chair and senior lecturer in the Department of Sport & Entertainment
Management. It is here where the man who has given so much to an industry
that has been so good to him is now preparing the next generation of not
only facility managers but those who will work in sports and entertainment
to understand what makes this such a special business. It is a calling that
Roach could not have likely envisioned in a lengthy career that has taken
him from such diverse employers as the Hampton (VA) Coliseum, Ringling
Bros., MCA/Universal, SFX/Clear Channel and even Roach’s own business.
Now that he is on a college campus, Roach is re-energized and, in his own
words, on a singular mission: “I am here because I want to help develop
better employees to go into the industry that was so good to me for so
long,” he says.
That is a cut-through-the-clutter message that is typical of Roach, a man
who has been driven throughout his exemplary career and a man who has never
known a risk too great to take. What else could explain his career path, one
that while atypical of what might be considered the norm in the industry is
one that has left a positive imprint at every stop along the way.
This latest stop is not about Roach, but about the future of the industry
and how it is managed. “The foundation was already here in the way the sport
and entertainment program was structured when I arrived,” Roach says. “We
try to get our students to understand what the business is and get them
excited about it. They know about sports and they know about entertainment.
It’s the venue part of this business that is certainly misunderstood. Most
people don’t know it even exists.
“I try to get kids at this age to understand what great career opportunities
exist,” continues Roach. “We won’t get them all, bit if I can grab 15 or 20
— and we’ll get more than that — and get them excited and fired up to make a
career in this business, then this industry will be so much better 30 years
down the road than it is now.”
Sudden Exposure
Back when Roach was growing up in the mountain town of Covington, Va., he
remembers going to the Salem Civic Center and the Roanoke Civic Center to
see concerts. He witnessed an exhibition National Football League game at
Victory Stadium, which seated about 30,000 fans. He also remembers seeing
the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey circus for the first time when he was 22,
and thinking about how unbelievable it was that he would be working for
Ringling Bros. just seven years later.
Those experiences were all part of his youth that saw Roach
graduate from the College of William & Mary in 1972 with a degree in
political science. “It’s funny, because I went to school originally thinking
I would be a biology major,” he
 says. “Then I went into political science,
and when I graduated in what was a pretty bad job market I only knew that I
didn’t want to work for the federal government.”
Roach ended up taking the Virginia state merit test and took a job as a
social worker in the Department of Social Services. “I didn’t even spend too
long doing that,” Roach says with a laugh. “I was sitting at work one day
and a coworker named Jennifer Fox who ran a work incentive program tapped me
on the shoulder and said she knew of a job in the Department of Commerce for
the City of Hampton that was perfect for me.”
The position turned out to be an administrative assistant job and Roach’s
supervisor would be a man named Andy Greenwell, someone that to this day
Roach considers one of his most influential mentors. “I applied and got it,”
he says of his big break in February 1973. “My first day at work I walk in
and they asked me what I was doing there. I said, I work here now.’ They
said, No, no, no, we’re doing the tennis tournament at the coliseum. You are
supposed to be at the coliseum.’ The city actually promoted a major tennis
tournament, and that was pretty much my entry into the business.”
By November 1975, Roach became the assistant director to Greenwell in
running the Hampton Coliseum. One of his earliest negotiating challenges was
in convincing EarlDuryea and the circus to return to play the coliseum.
“There had been some issues and they had publicly stated they would never
again play the coliseum,” Roach says. “We drove to Washington, D.C., to meet
with their folks and made it our mission to get the show back, which we were
able to do.”
Roach must have made a very favorable impression, because in 1979 after
their purchase of Ice Follies and Holiday on Ice, Duryea asked Roach to come
work as his assistant. “Seven years earlier I am watching this spectacle for
the first time as a fan, and now I’m working here...”Roach marvels as his
voice trails off.
That's Entertainment
Under the umbrella that was Feld Entertainment, Roach prospered and learned
from an organization that was expert in training its employees and giving
them the support they needed to achieve success.
“It was just a fantastic company to work for and gave me a base, but I
believed then as I do now that the key to real long term success is that you
have to be willing to take a risk,” Roach says. “I had been at Ringling for
15 years and was closely identified with the job I had, so I knew that a
move would get me out of my comfort zone.”
Thus Roach left to work for MCA/Universal in Los Angeles, where he started a
family tour and put together the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (you might
have heard of that production). He later would start his own company and
began an involvement in the wildly successful Barney tour before selling that and another of his companies to SFX. It was then onto Houston and a
position with Clear Channel, where Roach worked for a major concert
promotion company that also served as a sports agency and operated sporting
events, including an arena tour featuring the U.S. Women’s World Cup soccer
championship team.
Despite the challenges and successes of his diversified career, Roach was
thinking ahead about what he might want to do next and came up, well, rather
empty. “Even my last year at Clear Channel I was thinking about that, and
said to my wife [Sally] that nothing was grabbing me,” he says. “She
suggested teaching, but I objected. She said that other than the opening of
the Power Ranger show that the most excited she had seen me on an annual
basis was when I went to the public assembly school at Oglebay.”
Indeed, Roach had been invited as a guest lecturer around 1990 by Frank
Russo and Ray Ward to talk about why events play one building instead of
another and how a building rises above the competition. Roach went on to
become a regular instructor and to this day calls the school “the best thing
IAAM has ever done. I’m not sure anything will top it.”
Of course, it paid for Roach to listen to his wife, herself a public
assembly veteran with an impeccable career whom Roach had met at a District
1 meeting in Philadelphia in 1986.
It's 9:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and Frank Roach stands before his Introduction
to Live Entertainment class to talk about today’s assignment. The students
will bunch in groups of five or six and write down what they would classify
as live entertainment events. Roach adds that a definition of live
entertainment is a product created by someone for someone else’s
entertainment to make money.
One such group comes up with 39 answers, including dog shows, fashion shows,
car shows, spelling bees, poker competitions, air shows, food-eating
contests, stunt shows and gentlemen’s clubs (yikes!), among others.
The debate is lively among the class about what is and what is not live
entertainment. Roach has clearly moved his students to deeper thinking and
discussion on the topic, something he is expert at doing, according to Sara Schenck and Michael Pfeffer, two students who have learned under Roach’s
teaching.
“I have learned more from Frank than anyone else,” says Schenck, who this
summer is interning in the marketing department at American Airlines Center
in Dallas and has aspirations of being the first female commissioner of the
National Football League. “He was my instructor in May 2006 when he took a
group to Australia to study venue management. It was then I learned that
this industry is all about networking, being nice, helping others, and
always being willing and able to learn. Frank has made it clear that it is
important to want to learn and that we continue to learn more throughout our
life.”
Schenck adds that her classes have prepared her mostly with time management
and being able to multitask. She has volunteered
at the IAAM Annual Conference and also worked as the facility assistant at
the Ervin J. Nutter Center in Dayton, Ohio,
under John Siehl and Jim Brown,
where she learned about the day-to-day challenges a university facility
faces.
Pfeffer has also volunteered at the IAAM Annual Conference as well as last
year’s Arena Management Conference in Charlotte. Like Schenck, he too has
lofty goals, including to become the general manager of a facility by the
age of 35 and to achieve Certified Facilities
Executive (CFE) status.
Pfeffer believes he is better prepared to accomplish his goals thanks to
being in Roach’s classroom.
“Frank offers a very unique and rewarding experience in our department,”
Pfeffer says. “He has best prepared me for the job application process and
real-world adaptation. In fact, Frank’s connections [in this case with RBC
Center General Manager Dave Olsen] helped me secure my internship with the
RBC Center. It is because of Frank’s inthe-classroom and
out-of-the-classroom teachings that I feel
ready to enter a job and perform it at my best level. I consider him a
mentor.” |
After she suggested teaching, Roach admitted that he had speaking, writing
books and writing for a living on his to-do list. “Then I thought that
teaching at the university level kind of combines a few of these things,” he
says.
Education Excellence
The University of South Carolina appealed to Roach because “the foundation
was already here in the way the sport and entertainment program was
structured,” he says. It was the first university to take what was a sports
management department and create it as a department within the university as
opposed to a program within some other department.
Roach does not pretend to know all the answers to succeed in the business,
but his practical experience gives him an advantage that not many
universities are fortunate to have on their staff.
For example, Roach teaches his class of some 70 students, mostly freshmen
and sophomores, that most of the pieces in the event business are invisible
to the customer. “You’ve got some touch points, but most customers don’t
know who a promoter is,” he says. “That’s also true for students coming in
to this university who are 17 or 18 years old. They have no idea what the
business is about. They are here because they are fans of something. We are
trying to get them to understand how the business is different than being a
fan,
 what working in the business means. If you are really a fan of football
and enjoy watching football, you probably don’t want to work for a football
team, because you’re not going to see the game, you’re going to be working.
If you want to transcend being a fan by being a part of the event, then you
are a candidate to work in the business.”
The curriculum at South Carolina requires students to fulfill two full
internships. “We are a big believer that classroom theory is important, but
you really learn by doing,” Roach says.
Roach took 24 students to Australia last summer, where they had the
opportunity to visit venues in Melbourne and Sydney and to shadow the
facility managers for a day. Back home, it is the students who run the
popular International Conference on Sport & Entertainment Business, an
annual conference that brings together those in the academic world with
those working in the industry and has welcomed keynote speakers such as
Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner John Swofford and uberagent Leigh
Steinberg.
Roach takes the subject of professional development quite seriously because
he knows the next generation of leaders in the industry will come from his
and other universities across the country.
“Students are important to me,” he says. “I try and take the time to get to
know as many of them as I can individually and understand what makes them
tick and what they want to do in life. I am interested in their individual
success as they move along.”
Roach admits some uneasiness when he first arrived on campus as to how he
would fit in. Those concerns were quickly alleviated.
“I was very fortunate to have a department chair in Tom Regan and a faculty
that was in this department at the time as well as a dean in Pat Moody who
saw my teaching at Oglebay as a demonstration of an ability to teach and
made me worth taking a chance on,” he says.
As Roach has moved on to yet another leadership mantle in his career, he
believes his success comes from trying to look at things from the other
party’s perspective. “I do believe in a 180- degree perspective,” he says.
“We all see things from where we are. But if you want to fully understand
something, you have to be able to step around and look at it from the other
side.
“When I was at the arena in Hampton, we were very successful by trying to
figure out what promoters wanted. Look at how others see a situation and
acknowledge the validity of the other party’s side evenS if you don’t agree.
And hopefully if you are a leader you have a bigger and broader perspective
than most. It’s your job to get that across. Let’s try and find a joint
vision of where we should go.”
Like a proud papa (hey, this instructor is so hip that when he was joshing
with a student at the copier, the youngster just remarked back, “Oh, Papa!”
which tells the interviewer that the teacher goes by the nickname of Papa
Roach in honor of the rock band with the same name), Roach lauds the work
being d one at his university.
“My ultimate motivation is to turn out better employees for this industry,”
he says. “One of the ways we do that is to attract better students here. In
this college, our department has the highest entering SAT scores. As we turn
out better employees in the industry and they make their name and mark in
the business, that in turn helps us attract even a better caliber of
student, which helps us turn out better employees back into the industry.
“I feel I’ve been blessed by this industry. Some people choose to give back
by getting heavily involved in IAAM activities or other types of things,
which to a degree I have been fortunate to do with the association. But I
just saw an opportunity here and received a little help and guidance from my
wife to make this decision. This is an opportunity to give back to the
business in a way that will last a whole lot longer than I will.”
As Roach says this, you can’t help but notice the palms are again slightly
outstretched and again you know you are hearing a man not ready for papa’s
rocking chair but rather someone ready to keep conquering the challenges
before him. fm
R.V. Baugus is editor of Facility Manager
magazine.
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