Daniel Montgomery is confident that his 213,345 Hail State Rewards points for attending Mississippi State sporting events is an unbreakable record.
Given that Montgomery spent eight years as an MSU student and earned two degrees in kinesiology while going to as many games as possible, he is probably right.
He may no longer be a student, but Montgomery is still a regular presence at all athletic venues on campus. After receiving his master’s degree in 2023, he joined the athletic facilities team full time and is currently in his first year as MSU’s coordinator for athletic facilities and quality assurance.
“I never really needed the prizes as much as I just wanted to see how high I could get my numbers,” Montgomery said. “But most of it was (that) I just wanted to go support those teams, because some of the smaller sports don’t get the support that basketball and baseball and football do. Especially once I got in athletics and I started to know some of the coaches and the staff and was taking classes with some of these players, I wanted to go support them.”
Due to his father’s job as a pastor, Montgomery moved around a lot as a child, living in larger cities like Memphis and Louisville as well as the small northern Kentucky town of Campbellsburg. But the family settled in Starkville when Montgomery was 12, and he has remained there for the last 17 years.
Montgomery graduated from Starkville High School in 2014 with highest honors, and while his personal athletic exploits were confined to the Yellow Jackets’ bowling team, he had always been a big Bulldogs fan and never considered going to college anywhere else but MSU.
“I didn’t apply to any other schools,” Montgomery said. “Any correspondence I got from other schools, I just threw away.”
After switching his major from mathematics to kinesiology with a concentration in sport studies, Montgomery first became involved with the athletic department during the spring semester of his sophomore year as a runner, driving golf carts all over campus and delivering packages and other important documents.
While in graduate school, he took just one course per semester for financial reasons, allowing him to take on more roles with athletics.
MSU created a new role for him once most activities were paused in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic as the athletic department COVID supplies coordinator, which mainly involved sanitizing and disinfecting spaces between team practices.
“I was the COVID guy for a while, and that sort of led me into the facilities side,” Montgomery said. “I was doing a lot of the day-to-day internal operations, some with facilities, some with game ops, just wherever they needed me, and still finishing up the COVID stuff whenever that was still relevant. I did that all the way through grad school.”
Montgomery’s administrative operations fellowship after he finished grad school, but he was offered the chance to stick around as an athletic facilities management assistant, and in September 2024 earned a promotion to his current position. He now oversees the student interns in facilities and also works with the custodial staff as a liaison.
Having now spent nearly a decade working for MSU athletics as a jack of all trades, Montgomery still attends as many Bulldogs games as he can, and unlike many people who work in college sports and move around often, he has no plans to leave anytime soon. His work may be entirely behind the scenes, but that is exactly the way he enjoys it.
“I’ve seen big cities and I’ve seen really small towns, and Starkville is a perfect in-between for me,” Montgomery said. “I’ve seen so many friends come and go throughout this department where they’re here for a year or two and then they get a better job somewhere else and they move on, and that’s great for them, but that’s just never been my intention. I’ve always been a big State fan, going to all the games, and now I get to be on the inside of that.”
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