Ashley Weingartz Relishes Experience At NCAA Career In Sports Forum

By Joe Corley
ECUPirates.com

There is seldom a day off for Ashley Weingartz, and she would have it no other way.

Weingartz, an ECU softball player who is set to graduate with a degree in sports studies in May of 2019, used some of her limited down time this summer to travel to Indianapolis to participate in the Career in Sports Forum and educational forum hosted by the NCAA. It was another step toward what she hopes will be a career in collegiate athletics.

"Normally, my only time off is around Christmas break because not a lot of people schedule a bunch of stuff around Christmas," Weingartz said. "Summers are very busy for me. I'm involved with the Greenville Little Leagues, I'm running around doing workouts, everything. The weekend at the NCAA conference was really a good chance to kind of be away from everything. I didn't really have any responsibilities other than going to the conference."

The daughter of Brian and Ann Weingartz, Ashley quickly became accustomed to working in and around sports. Brian Weingartz is the commissioner of Greenville Little Leagues, and Ashley grew up a baseball player. She also did whatever jobs at the park that needed to be done.

After graduating from Rose High School, the Greenville native enrolled at ECU to play softball and initially intended to major in nursing. That lasted one year before the call of a lifetime in sports became too loud to ignore.

"I realized that I didn't want to do nursing as much as I'd thought," said Weingartz, who also helps out with gameday operations in athletics media relations with ECU football and basketball. "I've been around sports my entire life. My parents are heavily involved. My dad's also a football official. I've just been surrounded by it my entire life. It was really being on a campus and seeing everything, how much I was affected by my experience as a student-athlete, and just the people that are around our athletic department. It really made me say, 'I want to stay here. Four years is not going to be enough. I want to be in this industry.'

"It wasn't even necessarily the rigor, it was more of what was I going to want to wake up and do every single day. Seeing how much I loved it here - that's why I decided I wanted to stay."

Last summer, Weingartz interned with Little League International in Williamsport, Pa. While there, she received an email from Danielle Morrin, Director of Life Skills, with details about the NCAA conference. She kept it in the back of her mind and, when applications opened this year, she got back in touch with Morrin.

"I said, 'Hey Danielle, can we look into this?' Weingartz said. "So (ECU) nominated me because I had expressed interest. Then there's an application process where you have essays to write, and your resume, and things like that. And then about a month later they notify you if you get accepted.

"I was certainly hoping to get it. I think the biggest thing for me was that I knew it would help me out a lot if I got it. I felt like I was the type of person that they were looking for - somebody who really wanted to go into the sports field but maybe wasn't quite sure of which avenue to go down, whether I wanted to be in student development, coaching or administration."

So in late May, Weingartz took time out of her schedule – which in addition to six days a week working with the Little League includes an internship at Game Plan, a student-athlete development company headquartered in Greenville, along with working on her softball skills ahead of her senior year at ECU – to head to Indianapolis. There, she was one of 240 student-athletes from all parts of the country to take advantage of a tremendous opportunity.

There was a career fair-type event during which participants were able to have one-on-one interaction with those already in the field, breakout groups with speakers from all over the country, lectures, personality assessment and the opportunity to interact not only with student-athletes from different sports, but also different schools.

"I think my favorite part was the fact that there were 240 athletes there from everywhere," Weingartz said. "We were all in the same hotels, we were all doing the same stuff everyday, so getting to meet such a wide variety of people from so many different sports and so many different places was so enjoyable. I really enjoy getting to know athletes from other sports at ECU as well. To get to expand that even more was a highlight.

"I learned how many different avenues there are in athletics. It was very focused on collegiate athletics, but I learned a lot about things such as what goes on at conference offices, which I didn't know as much about before, and how it's different at different levels of schools like Division I through Division III. It was really good information."

Now back in Greenville, Weingartz is back in the business mindset. When the North State and Tar Heel championships were held on Monday, June 18, she was there at Stallings Stadium at Elm Street Park working concessions. Work has also begun in preparation for the tournaments that will begin next week. Weingartz is concentrating on "revamping some social media stuff for some of our tournaments and expanding my portfolio."

Weingartz expects to go directly into graduate school in sports management and is looking at graduate schools this summer. She hopes to get a graduate assistant slot wherever she ends up, and hopes the experience she gains will help her narrow down her eventual path, whether it be coaching, media relations, marketing, administration or another specialty.

ECU, however, clearly made a difference in her life.

"When I went to college, I wasn't necessarily thinking I was going to make a career out of sports," Weingartz said. "Getting on campus and being a student-athlete for an entire year and seeing the culture here really inspired me that I wanted to stay in collegiate athletics. That was a big turning point for me, getting on campus and seeing what goes on behind the scenes and meeting all the people."

Ashley Weingartz Relishes Experience At NCAA Career In Sports Forum

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Ashley Weingartz

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