There’s a corgi at the Rockford Rivets’ front office.
His name is Milo. He comes to work every day. He ran into the camera equipment during the interview. He has a cone on his head — recently neutered, not thrilled about it — and he is wearing it like a satellite dish pointed directly at chaos. When things settle, his owner looks over at him. “He works here,” she says, straightening things out. “He’s our Director of Team Morale and Pawsitivity.”
She spells it out: P-A-W-S.
It’s a good line. It’s also completely true. His owner is Hanna Snedecor. She is 25 years old. And she is the General Manager of a premier summer collegiate wood-bat league baseball team.
Say “General Manager of a baseball team” to most people, and a certain assumption forms. Back office, a big desk, phone calls about trades. Maybe Brad Pitt staring at a spreadsheet. That image belongs to a very specific and very rare job. There are only 30 of those in the world. Hanna Snedecor has a different one, and in some ways, a harder one.
The Rockford Rivets play in the Northwoods League, the largest summer collegiate baseball league in the world. College players come in over the summer to stay sharp, get reps, and get seen. The teams are real. The baseball is real. Except the front office isn’t in the player-acquisition business. They’re in the small business business.
“Very often,” Hanna says, when asked how many times she has to explain the difference between her job and what people think. “There’s even some people that don’t even know we’re here”. Rivets Stadium — located right across the street from a Culver’s in Loves Park, Illinois, not exactly a landmark most people have circled on a map. But she also means the job itself. The Northwoods League GM doesn’t get on the phone with agents. She gets on the phone with sponsors. She doesn’t manage the roster. She manages ticket sales, marketing, concessions, stadium operations, community partnerships, promotional nights, sponsorship fulfillment, group bookings, and thirty other things; she probably hasn’t eaten lunch yet because of today. “How much of this job is planning versus controlled panic?” I ask. “I feel like I’m constantly in a state of controlled panic,” she says. Then, catching herself: “But no, I’m not, I promise.” She takes a moment, ” I would definitely say there’s a lot of controlled panic.”
Twenty-Five
You can’t even rent a car in the United States without crazy extra fees until you’re 25. Most rental companies still charge young drivers. The reasoning, vague as it is, has something to do with maturity, judgment, and responsibility. It’s all about the math of the risk. Hanna Snedecor became the General Manager of a baseball organization at 25. She graduated from Carthage College in Kenosha in 2019, stumbling into sports management through a course her freshman year, an intro class that changed the direction of her life. Hanna was offered an unpaid internship with a Prospect League team in the spring that COVID shut everything down. Then a paid one with the Kalamazoo Growlers, where she found confirmation on what she was supposed to do. She stayed late at every game she could to pepper the GM with questions. Learned that in this industry, you pull tarp, you answer phones, you scan tickets, and you get hot dogs for people. You wear every hat there is.
She applied to the Diamondbacks right out of college, made the final round, and was told no for one reason: she needed sales experience. To get it, she came to the Rivets as an account executive, selling tickets. Admitted upfront, she didn’t know how to sell. They gave her a shot.
From there: Director of Community Affairs and Promotions. Launched a successful reading program for local schools as Assistant General Manager. And then, in October 2025, GM. Partly because another team in the league offered her the position first, which is how Todd (Kolosso), the owner, found out it was time to make it official. “He was like, ‘You know I’m gonna make you that after the season, right?’” she says, laughing. “And I was like, wait, no, that would have been nice to know.” She’s aware of where she is. She’s still getting used to being the top dog. “I know I’m the GM,” she says, “but I don’t think I’ve fully embraced that. Like, I am the GM here. It’s definitely a really cool thing to say. Especially as a woman in this industry.”
“I’m getting to create those memories for people and create those relationships.”
What the Job Actually Is
On a game day, Hanna’s brain runs about 30 tabs. The five most critical: sponsorship fulfillment, customer service and tickets, food and beverage, stadium operations, and away team and umpire needs. The step count on Fourth of July — the biggest day of the year — runs somewhere between 35 and 50,000 steps. “Can you walk the next day?” I ask. “Yeah,” she says. “I have to, because I gotta do another 30 to 50,000.” No worries, she’s got the shoes for it. Problems get solved in two ways. Some things are by email: scheduling makeup games after a rainout, following up with a disgruntled fan, and confirming contract details. Other things require physical effort: someone gets hit by a foul ball, a fan situation has escalated past what the staff can handle on their own, or the tarp needs to go down immediately. The Rivets’ tarp comes in two halves, and if you miss the window, you’re flooding the infield. None of this is what people see from the outside. From the outside, minor league and independent baseball looks easy — fun, even. Small park, cheap tickets, kids chasing foul balls. What they don’t see is that someone spent 12 hours making that look effortless.
The Northwoods League has some teams that bring in the money. Teams with full staffs, big budgets, and coaches who’ve been there for a long time. And then there are teams like Rockford — small staff, not flush, scrapping for legitimacy in a market that for a while didn’t particularly like the Rivets. “When Todd (Kolosso) bought the team, it was kind of a new regime,” she explains. “Rockford was not a very liked organization.” Hanna was walking into damage control from day one, fixing a reputation she had no part in breaking. Add that being 25 thing, add to that being a woman in a room full of older men at league meetings. The cliques are inevitable. The gatekeeping is subtle, but it’s real.
“There are some people,” she says, choosing her words carefully, “you can tell that they definitely had their prejudices.” She has been told — “well, you don’t know this yet, because you’re so young” — in ways that were less about the information and more about the reminder. What kept her grounded was finding her cohort. A couple of the league’s younger female GMs formed a loose alliance — talking through the same problems, swapping ideas, and trying to create value for fans. Baseball is small; the sisterhood inside it is smaller. “It’s going to get better,” she says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
“For the next 10 to 15-year goal, it’s definitely to own a team, something like this one day.”
There’s something the big leagues have lost in the pursuit of larger things. The MLB gets plenty of love, and it deserves it. But the sport’s grassroots are fraying. Contraction has hit the minor leagues hard. Ogden. Billings. Beautiful ballparks, smaller crowds. Teams that were once affiliated and housed star prospects are now something else. The economics of affiliated ball have pushed teams out and left communities missing what they had.
The Northwoods League isn’t affiliated. The players aren’t under contract to an MLB or Indy ball organization. They’re college kids from Stanford, Purdue University, and the University of Hawaii, who want to play summer ball, stay sharp, stay visible. Some will get drafted, some won’t. What’s present is a summer of baseball played in real ballparks with the intimacy that upper levels abandoned long ago. You can actually smell the grass, you can see their faces, you can hear them.
“The stars on the field for us today,” Hanna says, “are going to be tomorrow’s stars for the MLB. That’s a really fun selling point — to get people to come back, and then they can say they knew them before they got big.” Max Scherzer, Ben Zobrist, Chris Sale, and Juan Pierre. Before they were MLB’ers, they were college kids in the Northwoods League. You can watch a kid go 3-for-4 on a Tuesday night in Rockford, Illinois, and think: I was here before it all happened.
The Rivets are hosting the Women’s Baseball World Cup next summer, six national teams and Team USA are included, because the Rivets won the bid. It’s been a year and a half in the making. It’s going to be, in Hanna’s words, a very long summer. She can’t wait.
The Real Boss
Milo is off the leash now, more or less. The cone is temporary. The bandana is coming. There may be a paw print autograph card — that idea surfaced mid-conversation, and Hanna liked it. He is going to say hello to as many fans as he can who walk through those gates this summer, and he is going to be an icon; they already know it. I asked him, “Who’s the boss?” during an earlier part of the interview, where he was actively trying to take over directing duties or giving his best impression of a Hollywood diva. “Is it him or is it you?” “It’s him,” she said. “Does everybody else know that?” “Yeah. It even says it on his website description. He makes sure everybody knows the boss is him.” This will be his first season. The fans haven’t met him yet. They’re going to love him.
The Rockford Rivets open their season on Memorial Day weekend. The Women’s Baseball World Cup comes to Rivets Stadium July 22–26. You don’t want to miss any of it!
Purchase your tickets here! Go Rockford!
Women’s Baseball World Cup info: Click here!
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