Mary Pink first pulled the trigger on playing “Sweet Caroline” in 2006, she said. The associate athletics director for marketing was experimenting with songs to play between the third and fourth quarter of important games — something to give the crowd a boost.
She doesn’t remember how she stumbled upon the song that would alter Cyclone fandom for the next decade. It’s been a music staple with other teams, most notably the Boston Red Sox, but Pink said she didn’t have Fenway Park on her mind when she pressed “play.”
“It grew organically,” she said. “It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, I saw this game.’ I had never been to a Boston Red Sox game.”