Back at Monroe High School in the mid-1990s, Brandy Guinaugh was deeply involved in theater. She had the leads in a couple of school productions, including sophomore year, when she played Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz.
The role so defined her that when she went to her 20-year school reunion recently classmates kept bringing up her Dorothy days.
While so much has changed — the 38-year-old Guinaugh is the Dayton Dragons vice president of sponsor services and was just named the Midwest League’s woman executive of the year — some things have not.
Instead of that “off to see the Wizard” refrain, she said she tells people she’s hiring now that their job, like hers, will be ‘’like running off to join the circus.”
While she deals with sponsor agreements and suite contracts, Guinaugh is responsible for coordinating over 50 non-baseball events at Fifth Third Field, including the much-embraced Hometown Heroes, the Home Run for Life and the Dragons MVP programs.
“Every day is different,” she said. “For me, it’s like where else do you get a job where you feel this passionate about it and really feel like you can make a difference?”
Dragons president and general manager Bob Murphy praised her “enthusiasm and meticulous standards,” and now with her Midwest League honor, she’s in the running for Rawlings’ national woman executive of the year.
It’s doubtful any of the other nominees has coordinated more heartfelt moments on the field than Guinaugh has in recent years.
One a few years back involved U.S. Air Force Captain Jim Thigpen, a member of the 726th Aeronautical Systems Group that manages the B-2 stealth bomber who was on his second tour of Iraq and his fourth in the Middle East.
The Dragons work with the Dayton Development Coalition to honor deployed military members and their families — Hometown Heroes, they’re called — at every home game.
“Two games a year we have a between-innings break where we bring people onto the field who are being sworn into the service or maybe have just gotten home from deployment,” Guinaugh said.
The latter was the case when the Dragons saluted Thigpen, his wife Kim and their two young sons.
“We were able to pull off an amazing surprise with that one,” Guinaugh said. “Captain Thigpen had come back early and not told anyone. Then we brought his wife and two boys out onto the field and mocked up what was supposed to be a satellite hookup with him (in Iraq) on the big video board.”
Thigpen’s image appeared on the large screen and then quickly disappeared as if the satellite feed had failed. The crowd groaned and Thigpen’s wife dropped her head in utter disappointment.
“His poor family was out there and you could see the sadness in their faces,” Guinaugh said.
And then suddenly the crowd roared in delight. Behind the family — coming out of the first-base dugout where he had been hidden — was Captain Thigpen wearing his desert camouflage and combat boots and holding a bouquet of roses.
As his wife and kids turned, he began to run to them.
“The whole crowd erupted and there was waterworks everywhere,” Guinaugh said.
As she thought about that reunion, Guinaugh began to tear up herself:
“In times like that, you realize this is why we sometimes work 70 and 80 hours a week during the season. When you really work to make something special happen this is what you are capable of doing.”
Hard-working parents
Guinaugh grew up in Middletown and learned her work ethic from her mother and father.
She said her dad worked 31 years at Armco and then AK Steel. After her parents split up, she said her mom worked three jobs — at a local credit union, as a caterer and cleaning offices at night — to support her and her brother Josh.
“Back when I was applying for college scholarships, we didn’t have a computer so my mom worked it out with the offices she cleaned that I could come in and use their typewriters and stuff to fill out all my paperwork,” she said.
When she enrolled at Miami University, Guinaugh said she became the first person in her family to go to college.
She got a marketing degree and then was hired by Fifth Third Bank, where she had worked as a teller during her college days. After serving as a branch manager and in marketing, she joined the Dragons in 2004.
One plus from the banking business, she said, was that she “saw many women in senior positions. That was really inspirational.”
While she has moved up the ranks with the Dragons, she has also maintained a home life, thanks in a big way to her husband, David.
Last summer, working up to two days before her delivery, she gave birth to daughter Coraline.
Now back on the job, which can sometimes entail workdays that begin at 8:30 a.m. and don’t get her back home until 11 p.m. on game nights with special promotions, Guinaugh manages because David has become the stay-at-home parent.
“He is great with her and on the long days, he and Coraline come visit me at the ballpark,” she smiled.
And then there are the days where she can slip out early before the game ends.
“But if the game happens to be on TV, as soon as I get home, I turn it on,” she laughed. “That’s when my husband just looks at me and says ‘Really?’ ”
Heart stings tugged
This past season the Dragons ranked seventh among 160 minor league teams in attendance and were the only Class A team in the top 10. The rest were Triple-A clubs. The team has sold out every home game in its 17 seasons, now 1,188 straight, making for the longest streak in the history of North American pro sports.
“We get such great community support, so not only should we be expected to give back to the community but we’re happy to do so,” Guinaugh said.
She said one of the programs she’s “most proud to be a part of” is the Dragons MVP Program, which rewards fourth- and fifth-grade students from a five-county area for anything from good grades and transformed behavior to citizenship and community involvement.
The program that tugs the most heartstrings, though, is the Home Run for Life.
Partnered with Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the Dragons honor youngsters who, mostly, are battling or have overcome life-threatening illnesses.
In 2014 the honoree was Mattie Magill, a Miamisburg Middle School seventh-grader, who had gotten a bone marrow transplant to combat her acute lymphoblastic leukemia.
“When I’m interviewing the people, I get ideas and with her I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be cool if we could get her together with her donor, this person who had given her this amazing gift?” Guinaugh said. “Mattie knew who she was, but they had never met.”
The donor was Kathleen Czel, a young teacher from Bridgeport, Conn. And unbeknownst to Mattie, the Dragons flew her to Dayton for that special night.
And after the third inning of the game with the Great Lakes Loons, the contest was briefly halted as Mattie was brought to home plate.
With the Loons lined up along the first-base line and the Dragons assembled along the third-base path, Mattie began her home run trot, slapping players’ palms along the way.
Back at home plate, she got the surprise of her life when Czel stepped onto the field.
“Mattie ran to her and it turned out to be the perfect moment,” Guinaugh said. “We had a camera set up to record it and we made a PSA from it — bethematch.org — about becoming a bone marrow donor.
“With programs like this, not only do we try to honor the people, but I feel we can bring an awareness to both our players and the fans about an issue that they might not directly be impacted by. It’s moments like this that I realize I’m so lucky to be able to do what I do.”
She started to smile: “If anybody had told me in high school that I’d be working in professional baseball, I never would have believed it.”
She has come a long way since then.
These days — especially when she takes part in the Dragons MVP program at area schools — she’s often accompanied by the Dragons’ overstuffed, over-animated mascot, Heater.
“He’s a big hit with fourth- and fifth-graders,” she grinned..
When she was in The Wizard of Oz her sidekick was the little dog Toto.
“Except for our play, he wasn’t real,” she said. “I got a fake dog.”
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