trevordayschool

Zoë Barton '05 Senior Manager, Audience Development at Major League Baseball I'm writing this on a flight from New York City to New Orleans, where I'm told it's approximately four billion degrees. I moved to New Orleans a little over a year ago, after 33 years of hard time in the Big Apple. Everyone has asked me why, but to be honest, it was based completely on instinct. I love my hometown, but I wanted to experience a different culture and way of life, and achieve more balance. e pandemic has felt like two+ years of barely living, and I wanted to live and have a more joyful existence. I started my job at Major League Baseball (MLB) from my couch, the first day of quarantine. It was a wild experience, trying to learn the ins and outs of a job when the world was so uncertain, sports were paused, and I was trying to win over my coworkers while their children were crawling all over them during our Zoom calls. My job is to figure out ways to re-envision what baseball content could be, assess new distribution platforms, and analyze testing and historic data to optimize growth strategy. It allows me to celebrate all the things that make baseball fun and special, and plan strategic ways to bring the sport to a wider audience, remove barriers to entry, and figure out how it can appeal to different types of fans with different levels of fandom. Trying to do that with no live baseball? One star. Don't recommend it. at said, working for MLB has been the best job I've ever had. My colleagues and I feel as if we get to take the best parts of our childhoods and match them with the intellectual and academic pursuits of adulthood. ere's no better feeling than cocky men coming up to you at a bar during a game and trying to explain baseball to you. I wish I could capture a collection of photographs of the looks on their faces when I show them my business card. Check and mate, sirs. Recently, I took some of my oldest Class of 2005 friends, Ray Sultan, Eli Gelb, and Joanna Kandel, to a Mets game. I've known Ray and Joanna since preschool. Even though the game got rained out, we had a blast, because lifelong friends are like family. I certainly could not have predicted that I'd end up at MLB, but it all makes sense knowing how I got here. When I was a student at Trevor, I did a little bit of everything at different times. I was in plays and musicals; I played every sport; I danced; I went to Maine for a semester to do environmental science. I didn't have one core passion; I wanted to try it all. at continued into college and early adulthood. I was a double-major at Oberlin (Dance and Psychology) and did a lot of interdisciplinary work with conservatory musicians. After graduation, I worked with beloved then-director Peggy Sradnick at the Basic Trust daycare center with many other Trevor alums. Over the past ten years, I've worked in social media and audience development at Frederator Networks (an inde- pendent producer of animation for television and video), Al Jazeera America, rillist (an online media website covering food, drink, travel, and entertainment), and Time Inc. I developed a specific skill set, but made sure it could apply to many different content types so that I'd never get bored. Having a BA in Dance and working for MLB makes sense to me. I never wanted to have to choose one thing. Opposite page: Zoë views the French Quarter of New Orleans from a ferris wheel; is page, clockwise from top: Former classmates Ray Sultan, Joanna Kandel, and Eli Gelb join Zoë at a baseball game; Classmate Allyson Paty (left) and Zoë ham it up in drama class; Zoë wearing her Trevor Dragons softball jersey, again with Allyson; Zoë poses in front of her Starting Lineup collection. 5 7 T R E V O R D AY S C H O O L n S U M M E R 2 0 2 1 – 2 0 2 2

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