Saying Yes When Opportunity Finds You
- Andy Lagunes
- Jul 31
- 5 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
"I like to try out different things," Ian Kelley said. "We have a ton of opportunities here."
When Ian joined Royal in May 2021, he was not trying to build a career here. It was his first EMS job, and at the time the plan was simple enough: get field experience, learn the work, and eventually move toward fire.
"I wanted a job that was more hands on," Ian said, "and something where I could help people."
Instead, Royal kept opening doors. FTO. CCT exposure. Operations. ALS. SAP Center. PayPal Park. Event medicine. One role led to another because Ian kept saying yes when something unfamiliar came up.
Now, as Royal's Event Medicine Supervisor, he is helping build the structure behind a growing events program: the people, training, expectations, and habits that make the work reliable when the venue gets busy.
His first EMS job
Royal was Ian's entry point into EMS, not a place he expected to stay long term.
"I wanted a job that was more hands on," he said, "and something where I could help people."
At first, that was enough. Not a leadership track. Not a title. Just a chance to get closer to the work and be useful to the person on the other end of the call.
That starting point matters because almost everything Ian describes later comes back to it. He was not chasing a title; he was trying to get close enough to the work to understand it.
Becoming an FTO
One of Ian's first expansions at Royal was becoming a field training officer.
The role changed how he thought about his own skills. Teaching someone else meant he could not move past the details he only half understood. He had to slow down, explain the work clearly, and make sure it held up outside his own hands.
"When you get to the point where you train other people," Ian said, "you really end up perfecting the skills that you're working on."
That lesson followed him into the next unexpected stretch of his Royal career, when he was pulled out of the normal rhythm of field work and given a different view of the company.
Light Duty
Ian expected most of his growth to come from the field. Then an injury put him on light duty for a few months.
What could have been a frustrating pause became a window into another part of Royal. While helping around base, he spent more time with the CCT team, went on ride-alongs, listened to nurses, and got closer to a level of care he had not seen much of before.
"It was a super cool opportunity to learn some higher mechanisms of care," he said.
The experience did not replace his interest in the field. It widened the frame around it.
Before that experience, Ian had mostly pictured fire and medic school. Afterward, the picture had more in it.
Being around the CCT team gave him a different view of EMS: more clinical complexity, more coordination, and more ways to grow inside the work than he had expected when he first arrived.
That became the pattern for him at Royal: a new circumstance, a new angle, a door he was not looking for but was willing to walk through. The next one came from inside operations.
Operations
From there, another supervisor encouraged Ian to think about operations.
It was not a role he had been chasing, but by then he had been through enough unfamiliar territory to trust his own way of entering something new: step into the work, understand it from the inside, and figure out what it needs.
That approach stayed with him as more opportunities opened. By the time ALS began growing in Santa Clara County, Ian was already used to stepping into something while it was still being built.
ALS in Santa Clara County
Around the same time, ALS was beginning to grow in Santa Clara County, which was new for Royal.
The program needed attention, coordination, and people willing to build while they were still learning. Ian wanted to be part of making it work.
"It was such a cool, unique thing to have ALS," he said. "I wanted to see it be successful and make sure it had the support it needed to stay and to grow."
That same instinct carried into event medicine, where the challenge was not only clinical or operational. It was spatial, cultural, and live in front of thousands of people.
SAP Center
Ian brought the same approach to event work at SAP Center. He did not arrive and start directing from a distance. He worked the floor first.
"I was just working a lot of the first shifts like I was a regular EMT," Ian said, "just to get the layout, get an understanding of where we're at with everything."
The reason was simple.
"It's hard to lead a position if you don't fully understand it," he said.
That choice, to understand the work before trying to shape it, became the basis for how he thought about building the event team. At SAP Center, Ian's focus was not only getting enough names on the schedule. It was finding people who actually wanted to be there.
"I'd rather find people that I know are really interested in doing this stuff," he said, "because they're going to keep doing it."
He looks for that through small, steady conversations. What do people care about? What kind of work catches their attention? What venue makes them light up a little when it comes up?
If someone loves soccer, a PayPal Park shift is not just another assignment. It is a chance to do the job in a place that already matters to them.
Once the right people are in the room, Ian's focus turns to the quieter work that makes a team dependable.
Leadership people can use
Ian talks about leadership in practical terms.
Not authority. Not a title. Not being the loudest person in the room.
He talks about being approachable, knowing the work well enough to help when something goes sideways, and creating enough trust that people bring problems forward while they can still be solved.
"A good supervisor and leader is a leader that people are comfortable going and bringing up issues to," he said.
That mattered during Royal's early period at SAP Center. The venue had concerns and expectations when the relationship began. Ian and the team worked through them directly, addressing the specific issues instead of explaining around them.
By then, the story had moved a long way from Ian's first EMS job. The person who came to Royal for hands on experience was now helping Royal earn trust in one of its most visible event partnerships.
At the end of that contract year, SAP Center extended its agreement with Royal from three years to five.
"That was a really good feeling," Ian said. "To know that I handled the stuff they had concerns about, improved some things, and then they wanted to continue to work with us."
