Jack Dixon’s new home reminds him of his younger days
Jack Dixon has been living in Starkville for a few months now, and his first impressions of the city give him a genuine feeling very similar to what he felt about his hometown of Georgetown, Texas.
“Starkville makes me think of my hometown back when I was in high school, which now has close to 100,000 people with strip malls everywhere. But when I was growing up, my hometown was about this size, not including the university kids, so it’s been a nice transition. It makes me feel like I’m back at home during the good old days,” Dixon said.
Back in early August, Dixon moved to Starkville to take the Athletic Retail Manager role at Dyehard Fan Supply for Mississippi State, which means he handles a lot of the MSU merchandise for football, men’s and women’s basketball, and baseball.
“Day-to-day, it’s a lot of checking in merchandise, tagging merchandise, and the biggest thing I would say is allocating merchandise out at football. We have different seven locations where we sell stuff. So, when stuff comes in, I have to make the decision of where I want to feature it, and how much goes to each location,” said Dixon. “Of course, we have the Adidas brand, but we also have another brand that we do exclusively with the university, which is called ‘1878.’ Other than that, we make a lot of the stuff ourselves. When we make the t-shirts, we have the generic blank t-shirts, and we design them from there.”
Dixon added that proceeds from the merchandise he sells go directly towards the MSU athletic department, which is something he particularly loves.
Before Dixon arrived in Starkville, he had a stint in the world of arena and indoor football, which is where he met Starkville Dai
ly News General Manager Ron Oswalt.
“The way I got into that was with the Austin Wranglers. I was working for a company that sold two-way radios at the time, and my boss said, ‘Hey, there’s a new arena football team coming to town, call them and see if they need radios.’ So, I did that and sold them some radios. I then volunteered my time to be their radio guy on game day. Within that one season, I became permanentq with them,” said Dixon. “I worked every single game, I was behind the scenes with operations, and I eventually worked my way up into their front office where I oversaw game day operations, but I also was ticket sales. So, I did everything from selling tickets to booking in the national anthem singer. How I got to know Ron was when we had an indoor football team in Austin, the Austin Turfcats, where Ron was the general manager, and I was his game day operations guy.”
Outside of work, Dixon has found a few things in Starkville to do in his spare time.
“I was talking to somebody the other day about trying to find more stuff to do during my spare time. But I really like sitting down with friends, having a couple of beers, and just catching up, because you don’t get to see them all the time,” said Dixon. “I like going out to dinner with friends, and I really like going to the movies.
As far as around here, that’s all I’ve figured out to do so far. I haven’t really found anything else to fill my time, but if I am around a lake and I know somebody who has a boat, you can guarantee that I’m begging every weekend to be on the boat with them.”