Western Alamance Grad Leads Savannah Bananas to National Entertainment Success

Jared Orton spent the summer of 2012 as an intern for the Burlington Royals minor-league baseball club. Fourteen years later, the 2009 Western Alamance High School graduate is president of the Savannah Bananas, a touring sports-entertainment franchise with 4 million fans on the waiting list for its 2026 tour, which includes dates at Yankee Stadium, the Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, and Neyland Stadium in Knoxville.

The demand is not incidental to the Bananas' story; it is the story. Every game the franchise has staged since owner Jesse Cole launched it in Savannah in 2016 has sold out. The 2025 Banana Ball World Tour covered 40 cities and 25 states, including 18 Major League Baseball stadiums and three football stadiums, drawing over 2 million fans. In 2024, the organization eclipsed 1 million fans on a 26-city tour that sold out Fenway Park, Nationals Park, and four other MLB venues.

What Cole and Orton built is less a baseball team than a choreographed entertainment company that uses a diamond as its stage. Banana Ball strips away slow at-bats and replaces them with rapid-rule tweaks, staged skits, dancing players, and a senior citizen dance troupe called the Banana Nanas. Cole debuted the format with a 2021 one-city tour to Mobile, Alabama; after viral traction in 2022 brought national attention, the organization left the Coastal Plain League entirely and committed to full-time touring. A University of Virginia Darden School of Business professor began studying the franchise in 2025, comparing its barnstorming entertainment model to the Harlem Globetrotters.

Orton's path to the president's chair ran directly through Alamance County. He earned a sport management degree at Belmont Abbey College, returned to Burlington as a Royals intern in 2012, and rose to assistant general manager by 2014. That local front-office foundation preceded his move to Savannah and his eventual rise to leading one of the most in-demand live sports properties in the country.

"We're just trying to have fun and create unique things for people," Orton said. The philosophy extends to ticketing: the Bananas sell directly through a fan lottery at face value, converting manufactured scarcity into sustained demand. That 4-million-person waiting list functions less as a logistical problem than as proof of concept.

For students at Western Alamance weighing careers in sports, Orton's résumé is a usable template: local internship, small-college sport management program, minor-league front-office experience, lateral move into a high-growth entertainment brand. "What we've tried to do is stay true to what we do," Orton said. "Let's stay super fun." The 2026 tour, with NFL and college football stadiums anchoring the schedule, suggests that formula is still scaling.