AUSTIN, Texas — The world of sports business — or sports biz, as they call it — is incredibly alluring, but notoriously cutthroat and hard to crack. Hordes of passionate fans crave to work for their favorite team, league or sports agency, yet businesses looking to protect their bottom lines mean an extremely limited number of actual jobs.
Many of the sports industry's leading minds are gathered here this weekend for the first official sports component to the annual SXSW festival, called SX Sports.
The stories of how they cracked the industry are inspiring, intimidating and downright random — all at the same time. We cornered some leading sports brains in SXSW's lobbies and corridors to find out just how they made it in the sports biz.
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Read on to hear how three luminaries — Kevin Cote of the Golden State Warriors, Amanda Vandervort of Major League Soccer and Will Yoder of the leading sports agency Octagon — got where they are today. Who knows; you just might pick up some tips to make your own dreams come true.
Cote oversees the day-to-day digital operations — everything from web content, to email, to social media, to mobile optimization, to digital video production, to arena wireless infrastructure — for one of the NBA's most popular teams.
His story, in his own words: Once I figured out I wasn't going to play for a pro sports team, the next best thing was to work for one. I'm lucky that I knew I wanted to do it at that age, so from that point I just tried to figure out the path to get there.
My first day at Santa Clara University — actually before I ever even went there, when I was just visiting the campus — I went to the athletic department and told them I was interested in interning or getting my foot in the door however possible. I got a job working for free, which led to about six or seven other jobs working for free in the athletic department.
I worked for a booster club. I drove the athletes to the airport in a van. I was the PA announcer for baseball games. I worked ticket sales, media relations, marketing — pretty much every facet of the athletic department to try to find out what I was really passionate about. Those different roles helped me meet a lot of people from around the industry in the Bay Area.
I got a part-time internship with the San Francisco Giants while I was still in college. Then that led to a full-time internship doing media relations with the Giants, also while I was still in college. So I was spending my senior year driving up to San Francisco from Santa Clara everyday. I'd get a lot of late-night calls from my friends, who were out and about while I was at a baseball game. But I was at a baseball game, so I was happy.
That eventually led to an opportunity to do a full-year internship with the Golden State Warriors. Then I went back and did another full-year internship with the Giants, which finally led to a full-time job — an actual job — back with the Warriors, on the digital side. At the time it was called e-marketing, but really only included email and some database marketing. Since then it's expanded into what it is today.
So it was something I always wanted to do, but I never thought I'd be doing anything related to tech or digital — it wasn't something I went to school for or anything like that.
Vandervort oversees all of the Major League Soccer (MLS) social accounts, while also working closely with the league's digital PR, ad sales, editorial and executive teams.
Her story, in her own words: Before anything, my passion is soccer. I played college soccer at the University of Wyoming. After that I decided I wanted to learn about educational technology, something else I loved. I found a school, the College of New Jersey, that had an excellent soccer program. So I was a graduate assistant for that program and studied adult-learning strategies; this is in the early 2000s.
I became the head coach at NYU in Manhattan, then moved to California, where I briefly worked at a startup. Then I helped to launch the Women's Professional Soccer (WPS) league and helped run their online presence. I was laid off from that in June 2010, when the league downsized.
For the next year, I did social-related consulting for the University of Utah, the American Youth Soccer Organization and others — all very soccer-specific, though. During that same time I was also consulting for and getting my feet wet with MLS, helping them build and define what would ultimately become their social media strategy. Then they brought me on full-time after we'd worked together a fair amount already.
I wouldn't call any of the jobs I've had in sports business taps on the shoulder, though. They've all been developments through relationships and proving my passion and energy can be beneficial. When I left WPS in 2010, it happened to be a time when MLS was really looking to build a social strategy, and I was lucky enough to be in a position to help them do that.
Yoder handles all things digital for one of the world's top sports agencies, from setting up social accounts for new clients, to working with brands on deals for clients, to helping build internal products that yield new insights on players.
His story, in his own words: Even when I was a kid, sports was what I wanted to do for a living — I just wanted to be a second-basemen for the Baltimore Orioles. But when I went to college at Ohio Wesleyan, the first thing that jumped out at me was sports media. I went to school for a journalism degree, kind of realized where that industry was going, and thought I'd focus more digitally.
I started my own website, TheNatsBlog.com, and really learned a lot through that about curating audiences and building traffic, and fell in love with the digital space. I interned at some local TV stations, helped create our school's first online newspaper and did our school's first online football broadcasts. All that helped me learn a ton about how to build audiences and how to think digitally.
After school, I interned with the Columbus Blue Jackets in their marketing and PR groups. I learned about their digital operations, but more importantly learned a ton about how pro sports really work. It's not always as grandiose as it looks from the outside. If a trade happens, maybe it's because one general manager has a great relationship with another one, not that things simply couldn't have happened any other way. A lot of people don't realize that sports organizations are just organizations of people — people with relationships.
After a that I went back home to Washington, D.C., and worked full-time for a web development shop for small businesses. I did some coding to help build their sites, but helped more with online strategies to get clients more customers. I still wanted to keep a foot in sports, so also worked part time for the Bloguin sports blog network, kept running The Nats Blog and actually got it credentialed with Major League Baseball. I also worked briefly as a game-night intern with the Washington Capitols.
Fortunately, after working really hard, someone referred me to a job at Octagon and really advocated for me. So what I was tell people is, if you work really hard and impress a lot of people, the job you're going to find isn't the job you're looking for. It's going to find you, if you impress the right people.