How do you entertain a big crowd at Bank of America Stadium? This man knows
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- Miguel Vargas directs all on-field entertainment for the Panthers and Charlotte FC.
- He transitioned from a 15-year mascot career to lead stadium entertainment operations.
- Vargas manages complex logistics: halftime shows, pyrotechnics, Top Cats and skydivers.
If you’ve ever been to a Carolina Panthers football or Charlotte FC soccer game, you have seen the work of Miguel Vargas without even realizing it.
Vargas, 52, has one of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes jobs in Charlotte sports. He supervises all of the on-field entertainment for both Panthers and Charlotte FC games, from pyrotechnics to halftime shows to Keep Pounding drummers.
And unlike a number of others who work behind the camera in the sports entertainment industry, Vargas has an insider’s perspective on what works and what doesn’t when you’re playing to a big crowd. That’s because he made a living for more than a decade as a fully costumed team mascot, with a performance career that stretched for more than 15 years and five different professional teams.
“What got me into being a performer was seeing the joy that I brought to people, and the energy, and how I could affect that,” Vargas said. “So being on this side of it now, I watch the performers go and do it, and I watch the joy they bring to fans, and I’m happy with that…. We always try for a flawless show, although that’s unobtainable.”
As a mascot performing primarily in the NBA and the NHL for teams like the New Jersey Nets, the Golden State Warriors and the New Jersey Devils, Vargas dunked, tumbled, juggled and clowned his way through more than a thousand appearances. And he got hurt — because eventually, nearly all high-level mascots do.
Said Vargas: “When I was watching the game where (Miami Dolphins receiver) Tyreek Hill went down this year, I looked at that and went, ‘Oh, I know what he did, because that looked exactly like mine.’ My leg kind of folded in half, while I was in costume.”
The injury risk is a known fact in the “mascot community,” which Vargas still considers himself to be a member of and which has elevated his career at several key moments. That career brought him to employment with the Panthers in 2015, just before the start of their Super Bowl season, and kept him here when he added on Charlotte FC entertainment duties once that expansion team began play in 2022.
Vargas is also a member of the Hispanic community and well aware that we are in the middle of National Hispanic Heritage Month. “It’s who I am and it’s what I know,” Vargas said of his Hispanic background. “The best thing was going back to Mexico and seeing where my grandmother was from — being part of that and seeing that lifestyle. It’s something that I’m very proud of.”
Vargas was raised in Santa Monica, Calif., where his mother hailed from. His father was from Texas. “But my grandparents are from a little town in Mexico,” Vargas said. “Some kids go to summer camp; I would go to Mexico for the better part of two months. They had a little ranch out there. So you got up and milked the cows and swam in the pond. It was awesome as a kid, to just be able to get out there and run around with minimal supervision.”
As a child in California, Vargas’ dream was to be a stuntman.
“That was probably from nine years old on,” Vargas said. “So the things I was trying to learn, they were things I could parlay into being a stuntman. Theater. Tumbling. Things like that.”
Eventually, Vargas found more of a foothold in the world of sports entertainment, working in crowd entertainment for the L.A. Rams and then the NHL’s Mighty Ducks franchise in Anaheim. In the late 1990s, he moved to New Jersey and for a while was the mascot for both the NBA’s New Jersey Nets and the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, working for two different teams who shared the same building. He earned an NHL championship ring with the Devils in 2003 and later would become the mascot for the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun.
But working as a mascot is hard on your body. Much like Panthers linebacker-turned-general manager Dan Morgan once did, Vargas wanted to go from the playing field to management. But where to do it? He eventually settled on Charlotte, a place he had no real connections to but which he had visited numerous times when working as a mascot with a better cost of living than New York/New Jersey or California.
“So I got here and started hustling,” Vargas said.
With the help of connections formed in the mascot community, Vargas worked parttime for the Charlotte NBA franchise, the Panthers and NASCAR. There is some hilarious footage of him online when he briefly worked as an in-arena host for the Charlotte Bobcats and is running a promotion where NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski is dribbling and shooting — and I use those words loosely — a basketball.
Vargas also got to work occasionally on TV shows like “Homeland,” often cast as a stern-looking extra (security guard, FBI agent, policeman). Most importantly, he found a wife — he and Sarah Vargas, who works for NASCAR, now have three young children, ages 6, 4 and five months.
In 2015, Vargas applied for and was hired full-time as the entertainment director for the Panthers. His responsibilities include “everything on the ground,” as he said: Coordinating all the pregame and halftime entertainment, with all the drummers, Top Cats, skydivers, Sir Purr appearances, player introductions and miscellany that job entails. (The scoreboards and ribbon boards are not under his jurisdiction).
One of his greatest hits? Country star Luke Combs, well before he sold out Bank of America Stadium on back-to-back days by himself, performed a halftime show for a Panthers game. NFL halftimes are only 13 minutes long, so getting the equipment and the artist on and off the field is a logistical challenge every time.
“It was against Dallas, and Luke Combs was singing his song ‘Hurricane’ as the pouring rain was headed this way,” Vargas said. “He finished in the rain, we got everything off the field, and then there was a downpour.”
One of his frantic moments that turned into a hit? In 2022, for Charlotte FC’s first home soccer game, singer Michelle Brooks-Thompson was to perform the national anthem. After a few seconds, her microphone went out. She didn’t know this, because her in-ear monitors were fine, and she continued to belt out the song.
“There was nothing I could do except listen to the control room go crazy, trying to figure out what happened,” Vargas said.
The crowd, however, started singing the national anthem loudly, to help Brooks-Thompson out. This singalong anthem would become a beloved tradition for Charlotte FC. The national anthem singer now sings the first verse, and after that simply lets the crowd take over.
Charlotte FC eventually had Brooks-Thompson back to sing the first verse at the season opener in 2023 and conduct the crowd for the rest of the song “so she could enjoy what she created,” Vargas said.
As for what Vargas has created?
He gets to see evidence of it most weekends, when either the Panthers or Charlotte FC is playing a home game and his team is trying to help the crowd have a good time.
“We know our focus in the entertainment department,” Vargas said. “We want to have people come in and have a great time and, regardless of win or loss, have them leave going, ‘Man, we had a blast!’ But I will say winning makes everything better.”
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This story was originally published October 9, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
