It is March 31, 2018, and Huskies baseball is taking on the Hartford Hawks at Dunkin’ Park, home of the Hartford Yard Goats. “Do you have a game host we can borrow?” the team asks Goats director of event services Conor Geary.
“I thought about it and said, ‘Sure.’ I host the game. I kill it.” After the Huskies win 1–0, the UConn Athletics contingent has another question for Geary: “You were really good. Are you at all interested in talking to us about doing some stuff with UConn?”
And that’s how the institution that is GameDay Conor came to be a Husky.
He’s the arena/field/stadium host, whose job it is to get the fans into the game. He’s the guy you don’t see on television because on television, between quarters or halves or innings or during time-outs, they cut to a commercial. At a live event, when the game stops, somebody has to entertain the fans before they get out their phones and stop paying attention altogether.
The Hero Among Us spot, the Lucky Shot and Spot Shot challenges, the Half-Court Shot, the Junior Husky Starting Lineup, the Honorary Kid Captain award, the T-shirt Cannon, and the Sock Toss all need a master of ceremonies. And who else is going to launch the wave and lead the fan sing-along of “Sweet Caroline”?
UConn wanted him to start with a football game, says Geary, but he had too many fall schedule conflicts — which is how he got thrown straight into the deep end: “My first men’s game was Dan Hurley’s first game. My first women’s game was probably Geno’s 900th game.” It was 2018.
“There had been a tremendous amount of success, and the fan expectations were high,” he says. “The women hadn’t won a national championship since 2016, but they always had March aspirations. The men had last won in 2014, but Coach Hurley was able to have the team really shine and perform. The venues regularly sold out, in Hartford and in Storrs, for both men and women. That provides an electricity. You hear other coaching staff talk about it. Coming to UConn is different from other institutions. Having a full house of rabid fans, with 5,000 students in the student section at Gampel Pavilion, makes my job easier and more fun.”
