Regina Lyn on stage with Cynthia Nixon at Black Tie Dinner
Regina Lyn Pierce came to Dallas with a purpose; 20 years later she is seeing her determination pay off in ways she never imagined
TAMMYE NASH | Managing Editor
nash@dallasvoice.com
When Regina Lyn Pierce moved to Dallas from Houston in 2003, she came here with a purpose. True, the fact that her girlfriend, Paula S., was moving to Dallas provided the initial impetus for her own move. But, Regina said, there was way more to it than that.
“When I moved here from Houston, it was very intentional — I was very intentional — that I would make a change and move toward the entertainment field,” Regina said. “I wasn’t going to be just following my girlfriend. I had a goal, and I pivoted then from working in sales and marketing in the oil and gas industry into entertainment.”
And she hasn’t looked back since.
The first stop on her new career path was KTCK Sports Radio — The Ticket — where she worked in promotions and as a brand ambassador. And then, “on a chilly January day in Frisco, I walked into a restaurant area at the Dr. Pepper Ballpark [now Riders Field] and auditioned to be an on-field host for the Frisco RoughRiders,” the city’s minor league baseball team. That audition turned into a job she not only loved, but one at which she excelled.
During her years with the RoughRiders, Regina moved from the field into the upper reaches of the team’s marketing department, helping to create some of the team’s most successful promotions.
“I booked and created the Dude Perfect Night for the Frisco RoughRiders,” featuring the Frisco-based trick-shot collective,” she said. “It had the highest attendance record [12,067 fans] and fastest sell-out in RoughRiders history.”
She was the first promotions person to create a “Grease Night” promotion for a MiLB team, and, as MiLB’s Benjamin Hill said, “I think that the RoughRiders — and in particular promo mastermind/RoughRiders senior director of game entertainment Regina Lyn Pierce — did the industry a service, by setting a template that other teams can follow for a 40th Anniversary Grease promo in 2018.”
Regina Lyn and Paula
Through her job with the RoughRiders, Regina said, “I met and worked with Didi Conn, Dirk Nowitzki, Dak Prescott, Jason Witten, Matthew McConaughey — even Jose Conseco, who took over my desk to find the right softballs. … My goal had been to work in entertainment. I didn’t go into that trying to work in sports, but I am extremely grateful to the opportunities it gave me.”
But despite how much she loved her job and how good at it she was, it had its drawbacks. For one thing, the job was very demanding of her time. But the biggest drawback, Regina said, was that she didn’t feel like she could be out as a lesbian in her professional life. And that caused stress at home.
“I was very happy in my work. I was an on-field host, vice president of entertainment and the host of Riders Insider on Fox Sports Southwest. My job was my Cinderella slipper,” she said. “But [Paula] couldn’t be part of any of that. When it creates division and resentment in your relationship, it’s not worth it.
“I was very good at separating the professional from the personal,” Regina continued. “When I left for work, I put the personal stuff away. But I didn’t even consider what that was doing to Paula — me being gone 14 hours a day, two weeks at time, telling her don’t post anything on social media, don’t take any pictures.
“I don’t have a problem with using they/them pronouns now because for years I played the pronoun game. I used they/them at work to stay in the closet,” she said. “But I didn’t think about what it was saying to Paula for me to do that. I didn’t think about what it was saying to my community.”
So she took off her Cinderella slipper and went to work for a vendor on the sales side of marketing in sports. But that was not the right move, she said.
“I thought it would be good. I was still working within sports production, working for a company that created video board content, LEDs — everything you see on a board or a screen in a sports arena,” Regina explained. But she felt she lost the respect she had worked so hard to earn over the years.
“That job was the first time I thought, ‘Being a female in this industry blows!’” she recalled. “When you work directly for a team, you are respected and appreciated. But when you go to work for a vendor, nobody wants to talk to you anymore. Even people you’ve known for years are like, ‘Oh God, here comes that sales girl!’
“I was talking with a man at a conference once [when working for the vendor], and he said,’ You don’t know who I am? Of course, you’re just some girl who doesn’t know anything about sports, but you’re cute so they thought you’d do well.’”
The job did, however, give Regina the chance to come out professionally and start bring her two worlds together. “I gave it a few years, but then I decided I would have to come out professionally, because it was just time,” she said. “It was time. It was way over time. I didn’t want to do that [stay closeted] to myself or to Paula anymore.
“Then one day, my boss and I were sitting in an uber, on the way to an appointment, and he noticed my ring. He said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever met your man.’
Regina Lyn at Dallas Cowboys game
And I said, ‘You’ve never met my woman.’ And he said, ‘Oh, ok.’ And that was that,” she said.
The job with the vendor also gave her the chance to work from home a lot of the time, and working from home gave her the opportunity to start looking for ways to get more involved in her LGBTQ community. To do that, she turned to Brad Pritchett, a man she had met when he started working as an on-field host for the RoughRiders and the only person at that job to whom she had come out.
When she met Brad at work, Regina said, “I was pretty sure he was gay. And I didn’t want him to feel all alone there, like I did.” So she started dropping little hints. We would be talking about the weekend, I would say something like, ‘Oh, my girlfriend and I did this.’”
It didn’t take long for Brad to catch on, and when he became involved in Black Tie Dinner, he encouraged Regina to do the same. But she was still closeted then and just didn’t have the time to make such a commitment.
But once she changed jobs and was working so much of the time from home and was out at work, volunteering was much more feasible. So in October 2019, she contacted Brad, who set to work to get her involved as quickly as possible. Three weeks later, she made her Black Tie Dinner debut as both a volunteer and as host of Dallas Voice’s DVtv video segment on the dinner.
“Before the year ended, I was officially a board member,” Regina said. “Then COVID happened, and I spent 2020 as a board member on a lot of Zoom calls and not having an actual dinner, but then having the first Black Tie Live program on television.
“The next year, in 2021, I chaired the Public Relations Committee, and we spent a lot of the year not knowing if we’d be able to have a dinner that year or not.
We didn’t know until June or maybe July.”
That was also Brad’s first year as Black Tie co-chair, and he and his junior co-chair Terry Loftis decided that it would be a good idea to start early to choose someone to step up as junior co-chair in 2022 when Brad would take Terry’s place as senior co-chair. They reached out to Regina.
“I was like hey, I had a six-year plan with Black Tie Dinner, and this is not part of the plan,” she declared. “But nobody else stepped up to the plate. So I did it.
Regina Lyn with two of her coworkers at Black Tie Dinner
You’ve heard the saying ‘fake it til you make it’? I know we aren’t supposed to say that anymore. But that’s what I did. And we raised a record-breaking $1.5 million that year.”
But while she was helping break fundraising records for Black Tie Dinner, Regina’s dissatisfaction with her job had continued to grow. She had stuck it out through 2022, but as the new year dawned, “I knew I needed to find a new job. I knew it would be tough, but I knew I had to do it.”
So she texted Brad and Terry to ask for leads. The same day she sent that text to Brad, he heard from a friend, an attorney, who told him they needed “a marketing superstar.” Brad told them he had just the person.
“My first response when Brad told me that was, ‘a law firm? Ewww, no.’ But I am really glad now that I didn’t follow my first instinct. A week later I had an interview with two of the people I work with now. One of them lives in Frisco, and I said, ‘I used to work in Frisco.’ And she said, ‘Yes, I know,’” Regina said.
As it turned out, that woman and her husband were close friends with the general manager of the RoughRiders, and she had already reached out to him to ask about Regina: “He told her, ‘No red flags from me!’ And I got the job.”
So Regina started 2023 with a new job in a new field — handling marketing for the Dallas offices of the law firm Barnes and Thornburg, LLP — and a new position as senior co-chair of Black Tie Dinner. And she continued to work freelance producing events in the sports industry — all as an out and proud gay woman.
“It was very scary at first to come out,” she said. “I used to say that I was absolutely terrified of the doors that would be closed to me professionally if I came out.
But in reality, it has been great.
“Paula told me once that I came to Dallas ‘guns a’blazin.’ She said, ‘You were fearless.’ Now to finally be able to take that fearlessness and that energy and that drive and to marry it with being out professionally and with Black Tie Dinner — to be able to post photos with my girlfriend at Pride and not being afraid, to be able to work for Dallas Voice — it’s just been an unbelievable pivot in my life.
“I love being able to be part of Black Tie Dinner,” she continued. “I love having the chance to educate myself even more about our community and what our people have been fighting for for so long that made it possible for me to come out professionally and not be afraid.”
Regina Lyn with her friend Connie Mclain at a RoughRiders game
As Black Tie officially wrapped up another record-breaking year this week by distributing $1.75 million to its beneficiaries and announcing Lilianna Villareal as junior co-chair with senior co-chair Dustin Vyers for next year, Regina said she is ready to transition to her own new Black Tie role as a member of the advisory board and head into 2024 “guns a-blazin.”
“I will be on the advisory board. I have a full time job, and, on a freelance basis, I will be producing five college baseball tournaments, producing the Dallas Rugby in-house show again and I will be with the Dallas Cowboys again,” she said.
“I am not political,” Regina continued. “I know a lot of other people are carrying that weight, hauling that load. We all have our time, and we all have our different talents. For me, using my talents on the Black Tie board has been life-changing.
“But it’s not about me; I don’t really matter in all this,” she said. “It is about our Black Tie beneficiaries. The work they are doing is why we can all come together and even be in that room for the dinner. It’s the work individuals who were not afraid like I was have been doing all along. And the goal is for no one to be afraid to be themselves anymore.”
