What the puck? The Seattle Kraken have 2 staff librarians

To say Gina Rome and Ashley Hufford have their dream job would be a little misleading — it wasn't a job they knew they could dream of before they had it.

They're librarians for the Seattle Kraken. More officially speaking, Rome is the team's digital asset librarian, and Hufford is the digital asset manager. Both have master's degrees in library sciences.

"We are both, like, real librarians," Rome assured KUOW.

"Legit," Hufford added.

They always assumed their degrees would take them down more traditional librarian paths. And they did for a while — until the Kraken went looking for a couple of, shall we say, more academic types to help them record team history.

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That includes full footage of every Kraken game, plus community events and miscellaneous team lore, like when Climate Pledge Arena was being built.

All told, Rome and Hufford are the keepers of more than 300,000 digital assets, and that's after just four seasons since the Kraken started playing.

"We get half a terabyte of media per home game," Rome said.

According to the file hosting service Dropbox, half a terabyte comes out to about 125,000 photos or 125 movies or 250 hours of HD video or more than 3 million pages of documents. You get the point.

"I can imagine a world where, like, if we didn't exist and we didn't have this system, there'd just be hard drives piling up," Hufford said.

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That's why some professional sports teams have hired professional librarians to manage their digital media. And it's not just hockey. Recent Super Bowl champions the Philadelphia Eagles have a digital asset librarian, too. That's because librarians have the skills to arrange, archive, and access the team's assets in a more methodical way than your average marketing specialist, media editor, or, yeah, a pile of hard drives.

They're not just managing the assets. They're also sorting through them to pick the best of the best for any given need. For the Kraken's Women in Hockey Night, Rome had about two hours to pull a dozen videos for the pre-game footage. The clips you see on the news or in highlight reels, those are the work of Rome and Hufford, too.

If you want shots of kids in the crowd going crazy for the Kraken, they've got you. You want a compilation of Jordan Eberle for his 1,000th game? Yup, they can do that.

"When I'm picking stuff out, I feel hyper aware of, like, I want to create a diverse group, because our fans are really diverse," Hufford said. "Kraken fans aren't a monolith at all. So, being the person that's curating... I want to make sure that we're picking out things that reflect who we are as a group."

"There's a little bit of power there," Rome added, referring to the role they play in the image projected to Seattle and the hockey world at-large.

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It's a fire hose — or maybe a snow machine — of content coming at Rome and Hufford during the season, a constant stream of faceoffs, goals, breakaways, and brawls. "People are always like, 'How do you handle having such a boring job?'" Rome said. "I don't really think my job is boring. It's a little fiddly, but, like, I get to watch hockey all day."

Make no mistake: Rome and Hufford are fans.

They both happen to be from Michigan and big-time Detroit Red Wings families.

"You grow up in Michigan, you don't escape winter and hockey," Hufford said. "It was just a part of my identity."

She recalled playing on a frozen pond on a friend's farm and the majesty of the Red Wings' old Joe Louis Arena, known as The Joe.

While Hufford grew up "in the middle of nowhere" in Central Michigan, Rome grew up in Detroit. And she grew up there at the perfect time for a budding hockey fan.

It was the 90s, and the Red Wings were on a tear that culminated in back-to-back Stanley Cup wins in 1997 and 1998. They also had what was considered one of the greatest regular seasons in NHL history in the 1995-96 season, when the Red Wings won 62 regularly scheduled games, beating the record previously set by the 1976–77 Montreal Canadiens.

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"We were like the center of the hockey universe for a couple of years," Rome said. "So, I learned about the game. I learned about the different players. I learned about hockey superstitions, and being a little kid and being like, 'OK, dad, the other team scored! We've all got to switch places on the couch, or else they're gonna score again!'"

Hockey was something she shared with both her father and her grandfather, "a huge all-Michigan-sports fan."

"My dad was the first person I emailed from my Kraken email account," Rome said. "I was like, 'I did it. I'm here.' So, he's very proud of me. My grandfather is not with us anymore, but his picture's on my desk."

Eventually, the Red Wings and Kraken face off, and father and daughter text through the game, anticipating the outcome. The Red Wings won both matches against the Kraken this season, 6-2 on Jan. 12 and a nail-biting 5-4 on Feb. 4.

"My feeling is one of my teams is gonna win," Rome said. "One team I've loved since I was a child. One team signed my paychecks, which is no small thing."

Rome and Hufford's connection to the Kraken goes far beyond the team paying them, though. It's clear they've adopted the team as their own and cheer them on at every turn (even from the press bridge, where people aren't really supposed to cheer for anyone).

They said it's been an honor to help develop the brand and public image of the Kraken, bringing in new fans, hopefully for life.

"The energy of being in the place where all the operations happen and to know that you're all working toward a goal, to just bring people together through sports, is so awesome," Rome said.

Rome also happens to be on the local roller derby scene.

"I never knew that this could be my life," she said.

And now, Seattle's hockey scene is growing even more.

Just this week, the Professional Women's Hockey League announced Seattle will get a professional women's team this year. Seattle will be one of the new league's first West Coast teams and the eighth to sign on.

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Rome and Hufford spoke to KUOW the day before the announcement, but they were hopeful it was coming.

"That would be very exciting," Rome said, with a sly smile. "People need something exciting to rally around, and sports is such a great vehicle for that."