Shining from the side
UWM alum defines her own r
Most of the jobs Tyra Eiland has held have one thing in common: They didn’t exist before she asked to make them. The first time it happened was when she was a student at UWM. Eiland had attended a Milwaukee Bucks basketball game and was intrigued by the master of ceremonies, who worked the crowd and ran on-court games and promotions with the fans. She wanted that job, so she approached the UWM Athletic Department and asked to do the same thing for the men’s basketball team. “They came back and said, ‘Well, we’d love to have you, but we’d have to pay you,’ which is the best situation to end up in,” Eiland said. “The announcer would still do all the reads and sponsorships. I would do all the in-game promotions. If there was a contest between two fans, I was the one to facilitate that on the court.” That was the 2013-14 season, when the Panthers made it into the first round of the NCAA Tournament. Eiland was there through it all, traveling with the team and gaining experience. Then she put it to work for the Milwaukee Bucks – first as an intern, and then, after she graduated from UWM in 2016, as a full-time employee in the team’s community relations department, now called the Corporate Social Responsibility Department. And when the Bucks began expanding, adding a G-League team called the Wisconsin Herd and starting the Bucks Gaming e-sports team, Eiland was granted the opportunity to explore the broadcast space in all new roles. Today, she’s fulfilling, yet again, a newly-created role – this time as a sideline reporter for the Herd and as a gaming correspondent for Bucks Gaming. And late last year, Eiland was offered a fulltime role as talent under the Milwaukee Bucks. “They created the role that I now am in. It’s the Multimedia Content Creator. It’s a fancy way to say ‘broadcast talent,’ in my opinion,” Eiland said. A talent for communication Eiland actually started her college career at another university, but she transferred to UWM because of its proximity to Milwaukee’s sports teams – and hopefully, job opportunities with those teams. She also found a major 4 • IN FOCUS • March, 2020
she loved: Journalism, advertising, and media studies. “UWM gave me the opportunity to major in something I really enjoyed versus something I felt pressured to do,” she said. “Media Studies was not a track that I would have been able to do (at other schools). I was able to study media and public relations, journalism, law, all in that same bucket, and enjoyed it. I was able to do internships that I would not have had access to at other schools in Wisconsin.” That included internships with ESPN and TMJ4’s Morning Blend, which led to an internship with the Milwaukee Bucks and an opportunity to MC for the Lakeshore Chinooks, a minor-league baseball team based in Grafton, Wisconsin. Eiland also had another well of experience to draw from as she began her forays into the sports world: From 201316, she competed in pageants, winning her first title in 2014. As a contestant, Eiland was required to champion a platform. She selected women’s empowerment, creating Tyra Eiland delivers a sideline report during a Wisconsin Herd game. Photo courtesy of Tyra Eiland.
