Brandon Tosti dreamed of a career in game entertainment, but when he actually entered the industry, it wasn’t what he had thought it would be.
“You automatically assume you’re going to be drinking beer with Charles Barkley and playing video games with Shaquille O’Neal on the bus or on the plane,” Tosti recently told The Epoch Times.
But the reality of the grind is far from glamorous.
“The fact is you’re there before anyone else on a game day, and you’re the last one to leave,” he said.
Tosti, who interned with the minor league hockey team, the Kentucky Thoroughblades, wrote the book “Bright Lights & Long Nights” to help sports enthusiasts and students understand the business.
“The game entertainment crew handles music, the halftime promotions, free t-shirts, and that kind of entertainment,” Tosti said. “Someone has to coordinate all that. They’ve got headsets on, and they’re talking the whole time.”
In his book, Tosti weaves in interviews with 60 of his co-workers, such as the mascot for the Denver Nuggets, the Dick Sporting Goods Park turf manager, and a game entertainment deejay.
His target audience is the 22-year-old who just graduated from college.
“That aspiring sport management student who is trying to break into the industry has no idea and they don’t know where to start,” Tosti said. “It’s the career book I needed when I was 22.”
The Denver, Colorado, resident has worked behind the scenes for some 28 years.
The fast-paced, unpredictable, and unique business of sports also involves paying attention to details like cleanliness, repairing broken equipment, monitoring entrances and exits, checking in golf carts, and ensuring that all electronics are being charged overnight.
“The front office is filled with dedicated, hard-working individuals that no one hears about, and I want sports fans to understand the work it takes to make game days happen,” Tosti said.
Eventually, he landed at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, where he sold and managed corporate partnerships.
What further surprised Tosti was the transient nature of jobs in the sporting industry.
“If you can sell tickets and generate revenue and sponsorships, you'll always have a job, but you have to be mobile,” he said. “You might work for two or three years making $40,000 in Tallahassee, then get a job in Atlanta, and from there go to D.C., then Vegas.”
Tosti’s job titles have included University of Kentucky women’s basketball team manager and director of Dick’s Sporting Goods Park in Commerce City, which is home to the Colorado Rapids soccer team.
“My career path has been a wild ride filled with surprises, hard-to-believe stories, and a closet full of golf shirts,” he said.
One of the highlights of his career was being tapped to scrimmage with the USA Women’s 2004 Olympic Basketball team while working with the Metro Denver Sports Commission.
Tosti is also known for starting a Denver-based nonprofit called Sports For A Cause, which benefited children in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
“We would take sports equipment down to New Orleans and donate it to high schools and recreation centers,” he said.
“Bright Lights & Long Nights,” published in 2024, isn’t Tosti’s first book.
He also wrote “Who We Meet Along The Way,” which is based on a decade of his social media entries.
“I just treated Facebook as my online journal in that book,” Tosti added. “I literally wrote about a hundred different people and their stories of how we met and what impact they had on my life.”
