Being with family and friends.

The excitement of the game.

The fireworks and everything else happening off the field.

Growing up in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C., area, Kristen Simon remembers going to her first minor league baseball game in nearby Bowie, Md.

She was "just in awe," she recalled this week.

"I never experienced anything like it. I remembered thinking, 'Someday I have to do this,' because it just hit me how innovative minor league baseball is."

She didn't have an inkling, at least not then, that one day she would be the one handling the game-to-game details for fans on behalf of a professional baseball team.

But that's the role Simon took on last fall when the Lancaster Barnstormers' general manager, Vince Bulik, was promoted to vice president of business development.

That means Simon is now overseeing preparations for the 2012 season and will be overseeing operations before, during and after the 70 baseball games at Clipper Magazine Stadium this summer.

The 33-year-old Simon is the only female assistant GM or GM among the eight teams in the Barnstormers' Atlantic League, and she is one of just a handful of women in a similar post in all of minor league baseball. Despite the "assistant" in her assistant GM title, Simon has the game-to-game responsibilities of making sure everything is running smoothly at the ballpark.

"I've never really thought … of trying to make a name for myself just for being a female," Simon said in an interview this week, another busy one for her and others working for Lancaster's minor league team. "There's nothing else I'd rather be doing.

"I have 12 years of experience … in minor league baseball so far, so I'd like to think I've been through a lot of different things and various situations."

Simon is a mix of enthusiasm, outgoing friendliness and good old-fashioned hard work, and those are traits that make her perfect for the job, Barnstormer officials say.

Anyone who watches Simon go about her job can "identify how passionate she is, and how great she is at paying attention to the details," said Barnstormers' radio announcer Dave Collins, also the team's baseball information manager.

"And I suppose like in any business, there are so many details in this business that the customers don't see," Collins said. "People probably don't have a concept of how many things you do, how many hours you put in, and (Simon) is doing a lot. … There's a tremendous amount on her plate."

The number of women general managers or assistant general managers in the minor and major leagues, while still small, has been growing in recent years, baseball watchers say.

Among them is Kim Ng (former assistant GM for the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers, who now works for Major League Baseball), and Pam Gardner, who before she resigned earlier this year was president of business operations for the Houston Astros and was one of the longest-tenured female executives in Major League Baseball.

Closer to Lancaster, the 12-team Eastern League has no female GMs, according to webpages for the teams. But there is a woman assistant GM just up the road with the Reading Phillies, Ashley Peterson, who's in her 13th season with the team.

Even as recently as the late 1990s, Simon said she remembers not being able to pursue a sports-management degree at a college in her home state of Maryland.

She wound up going to West Virginia's Shepherd University, where most of her fellow sports-management students were men.

She then went back to Bowie's ballpark to begin her baseball career, starting as a marketing intern with the Bowie Baysox, a Baltimore Orioles' affiliate.

Before coming to Lancaster four years ago, Simon had spent four years with the Camden Riversharks, a fellow Atlantic League team, including the last three as assistant general manager.

Her goal is to strengthen the Barnstormers' place in the Lancaster community while also "building a promotional schedule that everyone can enjoy and making sure the fan experience is the best that it can be," she said.

At the minor league level, GMs and assistant GMs don't trade players like they do in the major leagues.

But they do everything else, from managing the game-day staff, such as parking-lot attendants, ticket-takers and ushers, to making sure a fireworks company is set up and ready to go when a pyrotechnics night is scheduled.

In conjunction with the stadium operations manager, Ed Snyder, Simon oversees 150 game-day and full-time employees on a typical night at the ballpark.

But it takes everyone pulling together to make things work, Simon emphasized.

While people are reporting to her, she never forgets that "they're here because they love to be here. … One of the coolest jobs you can ever really have is to work for this team.

"We get to put on a show every night and put smiles on people's faces, and we get to win fans and win baseball games. You can't beat it," she said.

Simon lives in the Exton/Downingtown area. Like all married Barnstormer employees, she needs the support of an understanding spouse to work the long hours she does at the ballpark.

It helps that Simon's husband of five years, Ed Simon (account manager for Asian World of Martial Arts, based in Philadelphia), is a fellow "sports fanatic," she said.

She's a Baltimore Ravens and O's fan, while her husband likes all four teams from Philadelphia.

doconnor@lnpnews.com