You: You work where?

When the New England Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI, most football experts were incredulous. How could a team with so few stars emerge victorious?

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The win took good old-fashioned teamwork, something the Patriots' IT director, Pat Curley, knows well. Curley's staff of four spent that February day working, and then celebrating, in New Orleans. Curley reluctantly admits she missed the revelry. "I was home sick, but I watched the game on TV and cheered right along with everyone else," she says.

That Curley wasn't lying around feeling sorry for herself underscores how she approaches her job managing IT for the Patriots and for the rest of the Kraft Group holdings - the New England Revolution soccer team, and paper and packaging companies Rand-Whitney Group, Rand-Whitney Containerboard and International Forest Products (IFP). She focuses on reliability, excellence and lots of hard work - out of the spotlight.

"It's not the glamour of sitting on the bench with players," she says. "We're here to support the press boxes, the NFL statistics staff and whoever else needs it. We don't watch the game - we're working."

In fact, she recently got the $1 million voice and data networks for the Patriots' and Revolution's new venue - CMGI Stadium in Foxboro, Mass. - up and running, on time and on budget.

Since joining the Kraft organization three years ago, Curley had worked out of the company's headquarters in Boston. But once CMGI Stadium became operational in May, she moved into an office there. Curley likely won't miss a beat not being at the corporate site - not unless she loses her BlackBerry. She's addicted to it.

"This is like gold," she says, showing off her mobile e-mail device from Research In Motion. "I bring my BlackBerry to every meeting, and even before the meeting is over, I can assign every action item," she says, deftly "thumbing-out" an e-mail. "It's the best time-saver."

The stadium is just the place for Curley, a die-hard New England sports fan. "I've been following the Patriots since the days of Gino Cappelletti," says the native New Englander. (Cappelletti played for the Patriots from 1960 to 1970 and is still the team's leading scorer.) In the summer, she turns her attention to baseball. "I love the Red Sox," she adds.

But the sports connection isn't the only draw for Curley. "Honestly, the attraction of my job is its breadth. It's a dream job for somebody who likes dabbling across various disciplines," a definite plus for someone with Curley's energy and drive. Curley, a business and technology generalist, received her undergraduate degree from Northeastern University and an MBA from Boston College. The job, she says, "requires pure network admin here at the stadium, but I also get to see the distribution end of things with IFP, and the manufacturing world with Rand-Whitney [Group] and Containerboard," she says.

Curley loves the challenge. "I thrive on variety and a nonrepetitive work life," she says. "If you like and need structure in your life, this is not the job for you."

Curley's pride is the network at CMGI Stadium, a 68,000-seat venue.

CMGI's Gigabit Ethernet backbone uses Nortel Business Policy edge switches and a few Nortel Passport core switches, all managed by Nortel's Optivity network management system. CMGI has 80 suites networked together on one LAN and boasts more than 2,000 100M bit/sec ports that can be networked.

The suites are available not just on game day but throughout the week to handle conferences and other gatherings. Suite visitors get Internet access via dedicated T-1 connections, Curley says.

"No other stadium has this setup. It makes it very exciting and very challenging," she says.

Curley's team also designed and implemented LANs to support the various scouting and coaching systems, and more typical corporate applications.

The scouting system is based on Pinnacle's Scorpion, Curley says. "The scouts have notebook computers, and when they go and look at prospects, they check out standard stats and criteria, and register their comments," she says. "Those comments are then uploaded into a central database here so that the coaching staff can see who is available."

The coaching system stores digitized game video that coaches can use to watch certain players or plays.

The football systems eat up a lot of bandwidth and run on a separate LAN from the traditional administrative functions, she says.

"We've designed everything to be separate so that people who need Internet bandwidth, such as the suite users and press, will have access but it won't conflict with or steal our bandwidth. Plus, it's more secure."

Like the Patriots, Curley says the stadium network is poised to be successful beyond what most imagine possible. "People have been hearing this is a spectacular facility," she says. "It's definitely going to live up to the expectations."

Cummings is a freelance writer in North Andover, Mass. She can be reached at jocummings@attbi.com.