Fans first: What Brynnan Norris ’22 loves most about working for the Savannah Bananas
Fans of the Savannah Bananas baseball team never know exactly what they'll encounter on game day.
You might see a baseball player performing a choreographed dance to a hit song by
Taylor Swift. A player could run the bases while wearing a yellow plaid kilt. A hitter
might step up to the plate escorted by the one-and-only Banana Pep Band. And country
line dances are considered the perfect way to celebrate a score.
In other words, Grayson Stadium in Savannah, Georgia, can be a pretty wild place on
game day — and the players, staff and fans wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s crazy,” laughs Brynnan Norris ’22, a member of the Savannah Bananas World Tour
Logistics Team who manages travel and accommodations. “They're really good about building
that energy, keeping it going, getting the people excited. They put on a show for
hours and hours.”
The Savannah Bananas are a professional exhibition team who play a more fast-paced
version of baseball called "Banana Ball" with alternate rules, such as a two-hour
time limit and if a fan in the stands catches a ball, it counts as an out.
Norris, who majored in hospitality management at K-State, discovered the Bananas in
2017 while on a post-high school graduation trip to Savannah with her mom.
“It was one of our last days of our little trip, and we were walking along River Street,
which has a bunch of shops and restaurants, and found a Savannah Bananas logo T-shirt
in one of the gift shops,” Norris recalls. “I'm like, ‘What the heck is that? What
is this team? Is this even real?’”
Of course she had to jump onto social media to find out more, and the more she learned,
the more she fell in love with the team and its unique philosophy.
Fast-forward to 2020, and Norris found herself looking for a summer internship. She
saw the Savannah Bananas had a group tickets and hospitality internship available,
applied for the position, and was hired. The internship turned out to be both educational
and fun. “I built relationships there, and that's what I love to do,” she said.
She kept up with those Banana connections after moving back to Kansas, first to work
for the K-State Alumni Association in Manhattan and then Chicken N Pickle in Wichita.
Then in 2023, a door opened to work for the Bananas full time, and it was a very easy
“yes.”
“I've been back for a little over a year now, and absolutely loving all the crazy
that comes with it,” she says. “Typical days really aren't a thing in Banana Land
for any department, really.”
The group’s traveling season is February through October, and the other months are
dedicated to preparing for the next upcoming season. Norris’ role involves planning
travel itineraries, booking hotels, arranging bus or air travel, and scheduling catering.
“In the last three weeks, I probably slept in my own bed three nights,” she said.
“Being on the road for a week and a half and then coming home for a couple days, then
going back on the road. But I love it.”
On home game days, the gates open around one and a half hours before the 7 p.m. start
time, but fans can enter the Party Plaza around 3:30. Guests can shop for merchandise
and enjoy food and beverages. There’s also a pre-show before the game, where fans
can expect to be entertained by beloved Bananas’ traditions such as the pep band;
a magician; Princess Potassium; and Bananas trivia. Then after the game, the players
meet with fans to sign autographs, and a DJ entertains the crowd. The night ends with
everyone in the stadium gathering in a big circle and linking arms as the song “Stand
by Me” plays.
“It's really fun,” Norris said. “At the end of the day, it's always someone's first
game. And so we make sure we're providing a genuine and fun show for them, to make
sure that they're having the best possible Bananas experience that they can have.”
Norris said that one of the things she respects most about the organization is the
“fans first” philosophy.
“Our company is called Fans First Entertainment. We have 11 principles that we all
follow, and being fanatical about the fan is No. 1,” she said. “For a lot of [the
staff at Fans First Entertainment], their fans are going to be external fans — so
people who are actually coming to the game, who are consuming the online entertainment
through social media, who are watching our YouTube broadcast, who are buying merchandise,
people outside the organization. Those are their fans that they want to be fanatical
about.
“For me, my fans are all internal. So that's the 330 plus people that I work with
on a daily basis, whether that's them traveling to Philadelphia or them going to Tampa,
or them going wherever they're going with us. That's my biggest thing, I get to build
relationships with the people that I see and talk to every single day and every single
weekend; I get to know them. Get to know their little quirks of like, ‘Hey, I know
so and so doesn't like tomatoes on a sandwich.’ Things like that are like, ‘Hey, I
know that these two guys are always going to be roommates on the road, they're always
besties.’ To get to serve the people who are working so hard to entertain other fans,
that I get to do that for them is so cool to me. I just love all these people so much.
It’s really my second family.”