The Super Bowl is just around the corner, and sadly, the Green Bay Packers will not be playing in it this year.
But if you can’t wait until next season to see your favorite team, you can always call up UWM alumna Justine Kaempfer.
Kaempfer majored in anthropology at UWM in 2010 and studied sports history at Penn State. She knew she wanted to go into sports heritage, and in 2016, she landed an internship with the Packers Hall of Fame. That grew into a part-time position, and a few years ago, Kaempfer joined the team full time as its Hall of Fame and Stadium Tours Coordinator.
“If I had wanted to work for anybody, of course it would be the Packers. They’re my home team,” Kaempfer said with a smile. “They’re incredibly historic, incredibly successful. This is a huge opportunity. I was very fortunate.”
Now that the team’s season is over, Kaempfer had a moment to sit down and talk about her job, the Packers Hall of Fame, and what the team means to her.
For those who have never seen it, can you tell us about the Packers Hall of Fame?
The Hall of Fame was founded in 1967, and it was just some displays that they had put together across the street when the Brown County Arena still existed. By that point, the Packers had already been in existence for almost 50 years. … The first permanent facility was built in 1976. A group of people who were really invested in Packers history and loved the team approached Vince Lombardi and said, “We want to do this.” He said, “Go for it. Just stay away from my players.”
Then in 2003, with the addition of the Lambeau Field atrium space, the Hall of Fame moved in. It was renovated and reopened in 2015. It’s two floors of everything you can imagine in Packers history, over 100 years of history. In the Packers Hall of Fame, we have about 170 inductees. We also celebrate the Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees in that space, and we have our Super Bowl trophies in the museum.
What else is on display?
The majority of our space is a permanent exhibit space, but our curator will swap out some of the artifacts each year to keep things fresh. We’re constantly working with our team historian to make sure that the history we’re telling is as accurate as it can be.
We’ve recently added some new interactives, have an annual and temporary exhibit, and we have a “current artifacts” case. As the season progresses and historic moments happen or records are broken, our curator works with our equipment team and football operations to get artifacts from the players themselves to put on display. This year, we have Karl Brooks’s gloves from the blocked field goal in Chicago, a Brandon McManus jersey – our new kicker (who) won a couple of games for us – and we have a number of Xavier McKinney’s interception footballs.
As the Tours Coordinator, what is your job?
That’s a great question, because my title doesn’t explain anything I do. I do a lot of programming things, all of our guest speakers and specialty tours. We have tours of the art collection in the stadium that I coordinate. I run our membership program. We have a relatively small staff; most museums do. As a coordinator, I do a little bit of everything – website, marketing, training staff, point of sale, all kinds of things.
What is it like to take people on a tour of Lambeau Field?
People come here and a lot of them talk about it like it’s a religious experience, whether they’re Packers fans or just football fans. It’s the longest continuously operating stadium in the NFL, and so people want to come here and see as much as they can experience, to get down to the field-level and just take in the aura of everything. We see about 120,000 guests a year. The day before a home game, we’ll run over 100 tours in a day.
Do you get to see behind-the-scenes of the team?
We have some interaction with the football operation side, but it’s more of the staff rather than the players themselves. Though, we’ve had an opportunity to work with player engagement and have the rookies come in and do scavenger hunts in the museum to help them understand the weight of what it means to play for the Packers and honor the history of the team and the relationship with the community.
We collaborate with our community outreach team to work with alumni on specialty programs, and on home game weekends we have alumni tours. I’ve gotten to know LeRoy Butler. Or, with Jerry Kramer, another Pro Football Hall of Famer, we were just sitting in the break room and he was rehashing stories. Just getting to listen to them and chat with them is really special.
What makes sports heritage different from a natural science museum or an art museum?
There is a kind of separation of “high” and “low” culture at museums. Sports is very much a pop culture aspect. For us, though, we want to be as accurate as a science museum is, but the sports aspect is really playing on people’s nostalgia and emotions. Yes, we’re documenting games and statistics and scores, but we’re trying to pick and choose things that really resonate with people and honor those moments.
Growing up, sports were always a big part of my family. The ways that we connected were watching football together on Sundays after church, or going to Brewers games and tailgating there. Sports are culturally important. That’s where that anthropological interest comes in, about how they reflect and affect society’s values, and how people become so passionate about sports and their teams. It gives people a sense of belonging and becomes part of how they identify themselves.
How did UWM help lay the foundation for your career today?
My heart was invested at UWM. I became an orientation leader, and then was a first-year mentor. … I studied abroad, so I was at the International Study Center at Herstmonceux Castle, which is now called Bader College. … My senior year, I did undergraduate research with Patricia Richards processing human remains in the osteology lab. I can’t pinpoint one thing that was the most impactful, but the fact that there is such a wealth of opportunity at UW-Milwaukee was huge for me. It’s a big university on a small scale, and it has a lot of heart.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science