New job thrills box office manager

By NANCY TULLIS
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
YOUNGSTOWN -- Not even Hurricane Katrina could spoil Kelly Dolan's chance for the job she always dreamed of having.
"It's crunch time, and I'm having the time of my life," Dolan said Friday. "I am exactly where I want to be."
Dolan is the box office manager for the SteelHounds, Youngstown's Central Hockey League professional hockey team.
With hours to go before the start of the SteelHounds first game on their home ice at the convocation center Friday, the SteelHounds executive offices were abuzz with excitement. No one was more excited than Dolan.
A former Cleveland resident who earned a degree in sports management from the University of Dayton, Dolan came to the SteelHounds from New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina close on her heels.
Hurricane experience
Her first day with the SteelHounds was supposed to be Sept. 6, but she packed up most of her belongings and crammed as much as she could into her little car and left town a week early.
She stayed with friends in Nashville and planned to return later for her furniture and the rest of her belongings. When television news showed scenes of people wading waist-deep in water at the mall a mile from her third-story apartment, she knew there might not be much left to salvage.
When she returned, she found most of the damage was done from the storm. A portion of the roof of her third-floor apartment had been ripped away. Ironically, the hole was in the roof above an interior room, where she'd logically put the remainder of her packed boxes.
Dolan said with good dry-cleaning, she salvaged about 60 percent of the clothes she'd left behind. She'd taken personal papers and photographs with her.
She said she only took about 36 hours to revisit New Orleans. She returned with six more boxes and left ruined furniture and a soggy apartment behind.
As she printed tickets, answered phones and clowned around with Crusher, the SteelHounds mascot, Friday morning, New Orleans and the flattened and flooded Jefferson Parish seemed a universe and a lifetime away.
'A perfect fit'
Dolan said she liked New Orleans but didn't intend to stay there for a long time. She enjoyed her job as assistant ticket manager at the University of New Orleans, but there was more emphasis on tickets for concerts and other campus events rather than on sports.
Her desire to return to a sports-oriented job, and specifically as a ticket manager for a professional team, sent her on an Internet job search weeks before Katrina was even a tropical depression. She found the SteelHounds job on the Internet, and it seemed like a perfect fit. It was.
George Manias, SteelHounds general manager, said he knew about five minutes into the interview with Dolan that he wanted to hire her. He offered to give her as much time off as she needed to return to New Orleans, but she didn't miss a beat.
"I can't express the admiration I have for Kelly," Manias said. "For her to be able to go through all that [Katrina] and then still pull off for me everything she did for me that first weekend was just phenomenal. She is very happy to be here, and that sure is great for us."
Optimistic outlook
Dolan said she is still working through some insurance issues but has put Hurricane Katrina behind her. She said some of her University of New Orleans co-workers were missing in the first few days after the storm, but all have been accounted for.
She said she may return to New Orleans for a visit in a year or two.
"I did not want to let the disaster monopolize my life," she said. "I have nothing to complain about. I am not lacking anything. Hurricane Katrina was a little bump in the road."
As for her job with the SteelHounds -- a brand new hockey team in a brand new arena -- Dolan said all the puzzle pieces are coming together.
"Everywhere I go when I'm wearing SteelHounds clothes, people ask lots of questions," she said. "People are excited for the team to be here. Coach has put together a good team, and we're going to have good attendance this weekend. The arena is great. There literally is not a bad seat in the house. I've checked.
"The excitement among the team and the coaches and the owner and the town -- that's what's going to make this team a success," Dolan said. "We're going to get them [fans] in here this weekend. Then we're going to get them to come back."