The evening air was mild, giving us sweet relief from the summer heat. As I ran around the pond with my camera in hand, though, you could have convinced me the heat wave was still going.

Starting my career in journalism, I never put that much forethought into what goes into an event like Cops & Bobbers. News reporting is often focused on an event’s importance to the community rather than every second of work leading up to the date. This meant I had the pleasure of experiencing the behind-the-scenes, but always through a veil that filtered out the effort, hardship, laughter, and compromise that comes before the date of the event. My marketing internship at Gurnee Park District made me realize I never got to see behind the behind-the-scenes.

Stepping into this role was intimidating, to say the least. I had experience with marketing, but never on this scale and never with this much autonomy. I was once brought along for a marketing project where I animated a commercial. This single deliverable was for a small company and wasn’t very public facing.

Cops & Bobbers, despite being merely a community fishing event, felt significantly bigger than that. There were more eyes on my work, more moving parts within a campaign, and more diversity in my assigned projects. Most importantly, though, my department trusted my judgment. It felt like an especially big opportunity because it would give me the chance to do something I’ve never done before: promote an event on my own.

The opportunity started with a list of sponsors to contact. Despite all the humbling cold-calling I have done in my life, sponsorship outreach was especially tough at first. There’s a difference between calling someone in hopes of interviewing them and doing so to get a donation. One thing journalism taught me, though, is to be persistent. I just kept calling and emailing. Weeks went by without a single donation. Just days before the event, though, I had nine unique sponsors on board.

To prepare the media for the event, I also wrote two press releases, one of which included my interview with Patrick Murray of the Gurnee Police Department. The release caught the eye of the Daily Herald, who sent out a staff photographer to capture the event. On the evening of Cops & Bobbers, I had the chance to coordinate with the Herald photographer while also taking photos of the event myself.

By the time raffle winners were announced, the sun was nearly ready to set. Watching a kid’s face light up the park over a White Sox ticket or free pizza made every unanswered sponsor email worth it. The next morning, my dad laid out the newspaper right where I drink my coffee, our event sitting right at the top.

Cops & Bobbers wasn’t the only time I felt this. It was a pattern throughout the whole summer. Of course, I went into the internship hoping to strengthen my marketing and communications skills, but I walked away with so much more. On my first day, I was nervous and in an oversharing mood, and I found myself telling my new coworkers about the time my pet turtles escaped. I braced for silence. Instead, the whole team started riffing on it, and by lunch it had become a running joke that followed me for the rest of the summer. That’s the kind of department I got to learn from: one that wanted to help each other grow, and laugh, every single day. Cops & Bobbers taught me about deadlines, sponsors, and sweat in the summer heat – but it also taught me what community actually looks like from the inside.