"I just feel so blessed being able to promote these women (in sports) and put them on a platform.” University of Minnesota Crookston communication alumna and former soccer player Olivia Puttin 2020, who is now the assistant director of sports communications for University of Minnesota Athletics, couldn’t have spoken truer words after finding her passion lies in sports.
Before deciding to play collegiate soccer at the UMN Crookston, Puttin says she wanted to be a high school history teacher and never thought about “getting into” sports media. She also never knew Crookston had a campus until she received an email from former UMN Crookston women’s soccer head coach Joe Alianiello.
“Something that's really important to me is that every single person in my family has gone and graduated from the University of Minnesota or a University of Minnesota campus,” Puttin mentioned as she recalls her first campus visit in Crookston.
Puttin says her life goal was to play college soccer somewhere and she would have loved to play for the University of Minnesota. Crookston turned out to be the option and she would still get the prestigious UMN degree.
Puttin attributes UMN Crookston’s small class sizes, tight knit community, and supportive faculty to her success.
“That really made a big difference in my education,” she continued. “Getting to know your professors and classmates, honestly, makes a big impact and that helped me succeed. I don’t think I would have had the same experience had I gone to a bigger school or a different place.”
During her sophomore year at UMN Crookston, a conversation with her former internship supervisor, Shawn Smith of Golden Eagle Athletics, set the idea in motion for Puttin’s path with the UMN Golden Gophers. Smith sat down with her to go over graduate programs and assistantships in the athletics world, and she was “wowed.” Puttin acknowledged that nobody in her family had ever gotten a master’s degree before and it felt like a “good way to transition into the real world.”
This conversation prompted Puttin to email Michelle Traversie, sports information director for UMN Gopher Athletics who is now her current boss, which led to an informational interview between the two. Before she knew it, Puttin was off to shadow athletic events on the Twin Cities campus during her sophomore and junior years at Crookston. Later, with the support of Crookston faculty, she transferred her credits to an online program and began a full-time internship with the Golden Gophers.
“A turning point for me was when I worked the 2017 NCAA Volleyball Final Four at the Target Center,” Puttin continued. “I remember being there and thinking ‘yeah, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life’.”
During her internship with the Gophers, when she was working the 2019 men’s basketball NCAA Final Four tournament at U.S. Bank Stadium, Puttin met Claude Felton who would later become her boss in graduate school at the University of Georgia. Felton was part of the media organizing committee for the Final Four and had worked every tournament since the 80s or 90s, she mentioned.
Puttin kept in touch with Felton and eventually got accepted for a graduate assistantship at the U of Georgia. She planned to visit and tour, but those plans were affected by the pandemic, so later she moved to Georgia site unseen. Her first year at Georgia felt “weird” because the pandemic meant events like football games were operating at half-capacity, though her second year meant she got to truly experience what it meant to attend a “really big” SEC (Southeastern Conference) school, which to Puttin, felt like a “whole other beast.”
Attributing her experience as a student-athlete to transitioning to her role in sports communication, Puttin says it helped her stand out on her resume and taught her time-management skills, how to deal with adversity, and helped her relate to the athletes she works with every day. Puttin currently works as an assistant director of sports communications (sports information director) for Golden Gopher women's basketball, softball, and women's soccer, and holds a second job with the Minnesota Aurora - a preprofessional women’s soccer club in Eagan, Minn.
Puttin says she feels “blessed” to be able to promote female athletes, and believes her generation and coworkers are “breaking the glass ceiling”, building opportunities for women in sports, and “challenging the stigma” that women face in the sports industry. “There are a lot of women in the sports industry that want to be in this (field) and want to build a career, and I think the best place for women to do that is through women's sports,” she expressed. “I feel like I am part of the solution of opening up doorways for other women that want to be in sports by trying to make it a safe place for women to come in and build their own career.”
Puttin travels with her teams full-time and some of her duties at the UMN include public relations, running their social media accounts and websites, writing releases, sending out word rosters to announcers and broadcasters, and creating game notes. She also acts as a liaison between the student-athletes and coaches, and the media and fans by coordinating interviews and pitching stories to different media outlets. Because of this, Puttin says it is important to build a strong relationship with her student-athletes to help her pull stories from them. She has even been able to land her athletes' stories on the front page of the Star Tribune newspaper.
“It was a really big deal for a woman’s sport (soccer) that doesn't get a lot of media attention to get to the front page of the biggest newspaper in the state,” she explained. “It makes me really happy when student- athletes get excited about the stuff that I'm doing, because these are things they're going to remember for the rest of their life. Being able to be a part of helping promote them, and being a part of their experience in college is what makes me the most excited and grateful.”
Though the transition from being an athlete to entering the workforce in athletics can be difficult, Puttin wants current athletes to know they are “so much more” than their sport. “There's so many other opportunities in this world for you to excel in something else, so don't let your life as a student-athlete determine who you are or your value,” Puttin advises. “Because you're not just a soccer player, you are so many other things outside of your sport, and you're gonna figure out who you are. Once you do that you can literally do anything in this world.”
Puttin’s dream was to work for the Gophers and now she is fulfilling that dream. She says her next goal is to be a senior women’s administrator, but says it will take years of experience to get there and she is still “making her way.”
Puttin credits her experiences at the UMN Crookston helped shape her career.
“I think about Crookston every single day,” she says. “I think about my friends that I met there. I think about the professors, about playing soccer, I think about the experiences that I had there, and how it shaped me. It's definitely a really special place to me, I'm so thankful for it.”
Written for the Torch Alumni Magazine - Summer 2025
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