{"id":247452,"date":"2026-06-12T07:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T11:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=247452"},"modified":"2026-06-12T12:39:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T16:39:32","slug":"uconn-magazine-gameday-conor-is-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2026\/06\/uconn-magazine-gameday-conor-is-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"UConn Magazine: Gameday Conor is Everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"stagWeb\">It is March 31, 2018, and Huskies baseball is taking on the\u00a0<\/span>Hartford Hawks at Dunkin\u2019 Park, home of the Hartford Yard Goats. \u201cDo you have a game host we can borrow?\u201d the team asks Goats director of event services Conor Geary.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI thought about it and said, \u2018Sure.\u2019 I host the game. I kill it.\u201d After the Huskies win 1\u20130, the UConn Athletics contingent has another question for Geary: \u201cYou were really good. Are you at all interested in talking to us about doing some stuff with UConn?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>And that\u2019s how the institution that is GameDay Conor came to be a Husky.<\/p>\n<p>He\u2019s the arena\/field\/stadium host, whose job it is to get the fans into the game. He\u2019s the guy you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n<p>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 \u201cSweet Caroline\u201d?<\/p>\n<p>UConn wanted him to start with a football game, says Geary, but he had too many fall schedule conflicts \u2014 which is how he got thrown straight into the deep end: \u201cMy first men\u2019s game was Dan Hurley\u2019s first game. My first women\u2019s game was probably Geno\u2019s 900th game.\u201d It was 2018.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere had been a tremendous amount of success, and the fan expectations were high,\u201d he says. \u201cThe women hadn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/magazine.uconn.edu\/2026\/06\/11\/gameday-conor-is-everywhere\/?utm_campaign=magazine_summer2026&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_source=uconn_today_readmore\">Read on for more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019ve been to a UConn basketball, football, or baseball game since 2018, you\u2019ve likely cheered, sung, waved, and screamed along with the ubiquitous Conor Geary aka GameDay Conor<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":247454,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1712,2649,2235,102],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[117],"class_list":["post-247452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-athletics","category-blue-pride","category-today-homepage","category-uconn-magazine"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-15 23:17:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":247453,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247452\/revisions\/247453"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/247454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247452"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=247452"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=247452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}