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Irons in the Fire

There's never a dull moment in Devin Dismang's work with the Chicago Fire soccer club.

Devin Dismang spent his childhood aspiring to be a professional athlete – a typical dream for young boys growing up that 99 percent of the time never reaches fruition. What isn’t typical, however, is how Dismang has still managed to parlay that boyhood love of athletics into a career in pro sports.

Dismang works for the Chicago Fire Soccer Club, a Major League Soccer franchise; his title is Game Production and Presentation Coordinator. What does that mean, you ask? Well, essentially it means he oversees every aspect of a Chicago Fire home match that isn’t directly related to the action on the pitch.

“I would say that everything at least goes through me or goes across my desk,” said Dismang, who studied sports management at EIU. His purview at Toyota Park is so wide-ranging it’d be nearly impossible to list everything and not leave something off.

Dismang – or one of the many Fire employees working under his direction – is responsible for everything from the stadium’s video boards to what music and public address announcements are heard during a game. If there are postgame fireworks, special halftime performers, or specific arrangements required for the singer of the national anthem, Dismang had a hand in the arrangements.

Those energetic “Firestarters” you see pumping up fans before and during matches? Sparky the mascot? The in-game promotions? Devin is involved in all that stuff. With all that responsibility, it’s difficult to imagine he was still in a classroom not that long ago.

“Yeah, to be dead honest, I thought I'd be more of a lower kind of person and I would be taking orders instead of giving them,” admits Dismang when asked where he thought he’d be two years after graduating.

“Half my staff I work with on a daily basis is twice my age, so when I walked in the room the first day – being 24 years old – they kind of thought it was a joke.”

He’s no joke, though, and he’s definitely the envy of a lot of friends from school.

“A lot of them love it, a lot of them are jealous,” he said. “A lot of them have similar jobs; some of my best friends work for the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, doing the same thing out in Carolina. My girlfriend works for the (Philadelphia) Eagles doing some of the same stuff, but mainly on the guest services level.”

Many of those friends who also studied sports management are still looking for the perfect job, though, and Dismang says he’s generally willing to help by putting in a good word, agreeing to be a reference on a resume, or maybe even trying to get somebody some work with the Fire. One could surmise, though, that the reason he’s already working full-time in the field is because of the work he did before ever finishing his degree. 

“At 16, I started working for the Chicago Bears,” remembers Dismang. “In my hometown of Bourbonnais, they had (preseason training camp), so I worked there for about two years.”

During his junior year of college, Dismang took a part-time job with the Fire as a part of the club’s street team and also did the same work for the Chicago Sky WNBA club.

“That's where I kind of got my grassroots marketing and game presentation experience,” said Dismang. “I was lucky enough to get a position with the Atlanta Falcons; I was their event marketing assistant. I was in charge of all the game presentation: National anthem singers, color guards, halftimes … things like that.”

Dismang parlayed that NFL experience into an internship doing the same sort of work for the Tulsa 66ers, the NBA Development League affiliate of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

“Luckily I still kept my bridges here with the Fire, and one of the guys emailed me one day,” said Dismang of the latest step in his career path.

“He asked if I was interested in coming home.”

Dismang sacrificed a lot of his social life at EIU in order to work the part-time gigs we’ve just mentioned, but it was clearly a worthwhile endeavor.

“Man, it was definitely rough driving from and to Eastern almost every weekend,” said Dismang, who added that his friends would routinely attempt to talk him into skipping northbound weekend trips to hang with them in Charleston instead.

“I was like, ‘No, I'm trying to get this career.’ And at the end of the day, it kind of all worked out. I would have never gotten this job if it hadn't been those weekends.”

Not that Dismang lacks fond memories of Eastern; he built friendships and long-lasting business contacts with fellow students pursuing the same line of work, and he’s quick to laud the mentoring he got from Dr. Jon Oliver in the Department of Kinesiology and Sports Studies.

“Dr. Oliver was definitely one of my huge influences,” said Dismang. “He was hard on me and my friends -- there's no doubt about that -- because he knew we were good at what we did. He would call on me for things and he would use my experience in class. He would say, ‘So Devin, as someone who works in the MLS, what do you think about this going on with tickets?’ And I'd give my opinion. We still keep in contact through LinkedIn, and I’m looking to go to Eastern at some point and do work with him.”

Dismang recalls his decision to transfer into EIU from North Central College despite having a full scholarship at the Naperville school and the utter lack of regret he’s experienced because of that decision.

“I wasn't happy and my best friends were down at Eastern,” he remembered. “I'd heard honestly nothing about Eastern … I literally went down there for a day and I met a bunch of people and was like ‘Yep, this is where it is. This is what I'm doing.’ You can't put a dollar amount on happiness at the end of the day, and I don't ever regret it day in and day out.”

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