Sports Business Conversations

Sports business moves pretty quickly. People change jobs, get involved with cool stuff, launch new companies. All kinds of stuff. So it makes sense, every so often, to catch up with a previous guest. This time, we’re catching up with Episode 5 guest Charles Nieves , now of Georgia Tech Athletics . Click here for our original episode (published on Dec 2021.) ABOUT THIS PODCAST The Sports Business C...

I collected baseball cards as kid. I still remember the excitement of saving up that $1 and heading out the drugstore to get a fresh pack. Then carefully opening the wax paper, popping the worst piece of gum ever conceived into my mouth, and sorting through the trove of 15 cards and PRAYING that I’d get a player from the Boston Red Sox. There was just something about having a picture of that playe...

I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that if you’re listening to this podcast, you probably consider yourself to be something of a sports fan. But what degree of sports fan are you, really…? How badly do your favorite team’s losses really sting? For example, does that 1 run loss on the 27th game of the baseball season hurt so much that it forces you to go on a two hour walk to decompress? Proba...

I’ve always loved the expression “Man plans, god laughs”. It’s actually an old Yiddish proverb that speaks to how hard it is to execute a plan when so many unforeseen variables can come into play. Vaunted 21st century philosopher Mike Tyson has a more contemporary version : “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I suspect no one knows more about carefully laid plans going awry t...

Sports business moves pretty quickly. People change jobs, get involved with cool stuff, launch new companies. All kinds of stuff. So it makes sense, every so often, to catch up with a previous guest. This time, we’re catching up with Episode 19 guest, Jenn Todd of the Boston Celtics . Click here for our original episode (published on Dec 2022.) ABOUT THIS PODCAST The Sports Business Conversations...

I’ve got bad news for you. Turns out your TV is pretty dumb. Well, not the TV itself, really. But the broadcast that comes into it sure can be. In this age of personalized experiences and customization, a sports broadcast is more or less one size fits all. Here’s the game, there’s the couch, sit down, and watch. It’s a situation that was just begging for someone to apply a little innovation and cr...

The other day I was looking at all the digital photos and video I’ve stored over the years, and was a little overwhelmed. I’ll bet you know what I’m talking about, right? Things stored in different places. Lack of categorization. Frankly, it’s a total mess. Now, imagine what that’d be like if you were doing it for hundreds of thousands of people... But that’s what sports teams are dealing with rig...

The other day was movie night here at worldwide HQ, so I thought I’d check out “ The Spoils ”, Mike Nicoll ’s monumental documentary about AAU basketball. I’d juat settled in when the film’s protagonist, Etop Udo-Ema, says the following about AAU hoops: “It’s a street game. It’s really just one step ahead of the dope game.” It’s kind of an astounding statement, right? Youth sports being compared t...

So tell me: What’s your greatest fear? Spiders? Heights? The mushroom people monsters from that movie you watched on Channel 38’s Creature Double Feature when you stayed up way too late? Oh, right. That one’s mine…. For most people, speaking in public is their greatest fear. It’s something Rose Lanham, the founder for Players for Good, a quickly growing speaker’s bureau for athletes, knows all too...

A quick question for you. What does studying the effect of smoking bans on bars have in common with convincing basketball coaches that shooting more threes is the key to winning? Absolutely nothing, as it turns out. Well, nothing, unless your name is Ben Alamar . If you’re Ben Alamar, those 2 things are linked at the hip. That’s because when Ben was managing a UCSF smoking study back in the day, h...

Let’s begin this episode with a few questions. First off, do you work in sports? Number 2: would you like to work in sports? Alright, one more: do you know someone who’d like to work in sports? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then this episode is absolutely for you. My guests on the show are Amy Gutierrez and Celeste Gehring , two long time sports media executives who host the qui...

At one point in his career, Lloyd Danzig , the founder of Sharp Alpha Advisors , was pretty confident that there was money to be made in what he calls the competitive entertainment industry. The Supreme Court had just opened up sports betting for states to adopt, he had a solid investing background, had recently earned a degree in data science, and had always loved fantasy sports. So good to go, r...

My guest on this episode, Sivonnia DeBarros , is known as the "Protector of Athletes". A former athlete herself, DeBarros is applying her legal background to help athletes avoid missteps that lead to financial and contractual challenges. And with the rise of Name Image Likeness opportunities for college athletes, she’s never been busier. In our conversation, we go into her inspiring path to becomi...

On this show, we’ve talked a lot about the crazy state of college sports brought on by legalized name image likeness payments to athletes. We’ve interviewed athletes who are reaping the benefits, administrators who are pulling their hair out trying to stay on top of changes, lawyers specializing in related legislation, and entrepreneurs trying to get in on the gold rush. The one place we haven’t r...

This is a difficult intro to do for this episode. I want to tell you all about my guest Jason Romero to draw you in. But I also don’t want to provide any spoilers to our conversation. I just want you to learn about his unbelievable story on your own. Because his story is just that: unbelievable. I promise that when you listen you’ll have a few “oh wow” moments, followed by “wait, what?” moments, f...

There’s been so much change so quickly in sports business that there’s a bunch of stuff that seems normal now that I wouldn’t have even believed possible just 10 years ago. Paying college athletes. Watching games on your phone. Pro teams in Vegas. And there’s online gaming, a market that is currently estimated at about $10B a year, and is projected to grow by 12% annually through the end of this d...

From the outside looking in, working in sports can seem a little glamourous, I suppose. You know what I mean. Multi-billion dollar media rights deals. Major events located in sparkling new stadiums in global capitals around the world. New companies focused on delivering sports in totally different ways mushrooming up all over the place. Yeah, seems pretty sexy. But the success of everything I just...

As we get started on this episode, I want you to take a second and think about the qualities that define you. What are the different things that make you… you? Do you love those qualities? Or are they something you feel like you need to battle? For my guest Ryan Neiswender, it took time for him to learn to love the quality he hated most about himself. But when he did, he reached the loftiest heigh...

If you’re in this industry, you know that Sports business is a really dynamic industry. Change is happening all the time. New trends emerge, different technologies are adopted, audience tastes change on what seems like a minute-by-minute basis… it can be a lot. And nowhere is this more true than in college sports, particularly in terms of name-image-likeness, or NIL. In the last couple of years, t...

This episode’s guest is probably going to make you feel like a slacker. In fairness though? Bonnie-Jill Laflin can make just about everyone feel that way. Santa Claus on Christmas Eve looks like a lay-a-bout compared to Bonnie Jill. We’ll get into her many MANY roles during our chat, but I will say that the first (and still only ) female NBA scout recently added another experience to her already p...

If you have kids who play sports, you know all too well the special kind of crazy that brings to the household. When my 3 kids were younger they tried just about everything: lacrosse, tennis, golf, baseball, ice hockey, basketball, irish dance, football, volleyball…. I think I got everything…. Anyway, suffice it to say it could get a little chaotic. And like a lot of sports parents, an app named T...

Imagine, for a moment, what goes into launching a new business. Think about it. All the excitement, stress, time, details, ideas, and millions of other unknown hurdles that can’t be planned for or strategized about. And when you think about all that, who would you turn to for help? Does your sibling spring to mind? For Mather Wiswall and Ruby George, the sibling founders of the United Grid League,...

Back in the day, if you wanted to call yourself a sports team owner, one of 2 things had to happen. You either had to be born into a crazy rich family that already owned a team, or you had to make a fortune somewhere else and buy the team from one of those previously mentioned crazy rich families. But my guest in this episode, Christopher Zook, wants you to know that’s not necessarily the case any...

Let’s get one thing out of the way, right off the bat: sports and “purpose” have always been intertwined. For all the moaning from the “shut up and dribble” crowd, athletes and sports have ALWAYS provided a platform to shine a light on the issues of the day. Think about it. Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympics. Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their fists in M...

Do me a favor: close your eyes and picture the most famous sports and entertainment venues that have been built over, say, the last 40 years. I bet some of the places that come to mind are stadiums like Camden Yards in Baltimore, Oracle Park in SF, Tottenham Hot Spur Stadium in London or even the Sphere in Las Vegas. One thing they all have in common? They were all designed by Populous, the most l...