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Tuesday, August 23, 2011
So You Want A Degree in Sport Management
Failing EffortAre universities' sports-management programs a ticket to a great job? Not likely.
By JOHN HELYAR
September 16, 2006; Page R5 of WSJ
In the past 20 years, college sports-management programs have grown nearly as exponentially as the sports business itself has.
In the 1970s, the list pretty much began and ended with Ohio University and the University of Massachusetts. Today, some 300 universities offer everything from sports-management M.B.A.s and doctorates to continuing-education certificates.
The question is: Are they really the tickets to great sports jobs, or mainly great profit centers for colleges? Sadly, say leaders and graduates of even the elite programs, it's often the latter.
"An awful lot of these are driven by the tuition revenue model; it's a real easy way to fill classrooms," says Paul Swangard, managing director of the University of Oregon's M.B.A. sports-marketing program. "But I feel for a lot of kids who graduate with a sport-specific degree and think it's an asset."
Andy Dolich, president of business operations at the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team and an early Ohio University sports-management graduate, is dismayed by many of these graduates' paucity of practical skills. In a 2004 speech to academics in this field, Mr. Dolich recited a list of schools' egghead courses like "Cultural Formation of Sport in Urban America." Then he let 'em have it: "Our business is very simple: Sell or die! I could not find in any course catalog a curriculum in season-ticket sales, telemarketing or negotiating."
It would be one thing if students graduated from programs and landed good jobs anyway. But the competition for entry-level positions in this field is brutal. The pay is low and the hours are long, but there's a patina of glamour and a lot of sports junkies.
Buffy Filippell, whose TeamWork Online sells job-applicant tracking software to teams, often sees feeding frenzies like the one for an ad for a $25,000 community-relations position at the New Orleans Hornets basketball team. It drew 1,000 applications in a week. TeamWork Online is a part of TeamWork Consulting.
Even at a top sports-management M.B.A. program like the University of Central Florida, a quarter of last year's graduating class wound up taking jobs in other industries. "I've spoken at conferences and broken students' hearts with the truth," says Dan Migala, a Chicago-based sports-marketing consultant. "The supply of jobs relative to the demand for jobs is not in their favor."
Surely this isn't what Walter O'Malley had in mind, when the very man who changed the geography of baseball also planted the seed for this new grove of academia.
In the 1950s, the Dodgers owner was simultaneously agitating for a new ballpark in Brooklyn and a sports-administration program at Columbia University. He believed Major League Baseball clubs needed more college-trained business managers. New York didn't give him the park and he moved West. Columbia didn't start a program, but that O'Malley brainchild moved west, too. A Columbia professor who had come under Mr. O'Malley's sway urged James Mason, a departing protégé, to launch such a program at his new school, Ohio University. Dr. Mason did so in 1966.
An early student of the OU program was Andy Dolich, who received his degree in 1971. That was a big point of distinction on a résumé back then -- the only other such program was at UMass -- and Mr. Dolich quickly landed a job with the Philadelphia 76ers. But as programs proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, a degree's value became severely diluted.
"You had all these students in the classroom because it was a great hook, but you had no substance," says Mr. Dolich. "The industry was rapidly growing, but the people who knew anything about it were working in it. There were no books, no syllabi, no instructors with experience."
Phys-Ed Requirements
And while programs purportedly trained students for careers in sports business, they often had nothing to do with college business schools. They sprang out of, and remained part of, departments that conferred degrees like physical education and hospitality management.
Sports-management students at such places have a strange mélange of requirements. At Florida State University, whose program is part of the phys-ed department, undergraduate sport-management majors must take anatomy and injury-care courses.
"Those prerequisites don't make a lot of sense," admits undergraduate program head Michael Mondello, adding that some things are hard to change in a state university system. What's more important, he says, is that FSU has upgraded its program by reducing the number of undergrads majoring in the subject to 150 from 350 and upgrading full-time faculty to seven from two.
Mr. Mondello believes much of this field's bad rap derives from bad teaching -- too many professors who have been retooled from other disciplines. "You wouldn't see that in the hard sciences," he says. "Why would we do that in this field?"
It's not just that standards are low; they barely exist. There's no accreditation process for sports-management programs. While there is an "approval" rating, conferred by an academic group called the Sport Management Program Review Council, its requirements are light -- a minimum of two full-time sports-management faculty members, for instance. Even at that, just a fraction of the hundreds of programs are currently "approved:" 40 undergraduate, 29 master's and five doctoral programs.
There's a vast wasteland of courses where students do things like chart Super Bowl commercials. And a lot of sports industrialists actually consider these degrees a detriment.
"I want new ideas, not the ideas recycled through sports-management programs," says Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. "This business isn't rocket science, so knowing what everyone else is doing takes about a week to figure out. Coming up with new ideas that no one else is doing is the hard part."
Still, steady streams of colleges continue adding sports-management programs -- though some, in a nod to this genre's excesses, with a difference. Columbia University is launching a night master's program this fall and keeping its first class tiny: 14 students, compared with the 150 to 175 in New York University's three-year-old night master's program.
No rap on his Manhattan neighbor, says Columbia program director Lucas Rubin, but these programs in general turn out way too many graduates for the pool of available jobs. Mr. Rubin says he wants Columbia to stress quality over quantity. "I think the vast majority of these programs are revenue generators," he says. "Students have to be smart consumers."
What to Look For
To that end, students should look for several key criteria to search out the good programs -- which do, in fact, exist.
REAL-LIFE PRACTITIONERS. Has faculty actually worked in this field, or do they look suspiciously like athletic-department retreads?
You want a program with people like Bill Sutton, who moved from vice president of team marketing at the NBA to become associate director of the University of Central Florida M.B.A. program. Ray Artigue moved from the Phoenix Suns front office to the leadership of Arizona State University's M.B.A. program.
REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE. Arizona State's M.B.A. students have done Web-site consulting with the Los Angles Lakers and Seattle Seahawaks. At Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, M.B.A. candidates have consulted with credit-card company Visa on its Olympic sponsorship expansion and with athletic retailer Nike Inc. on its China plans.
FOCUS. Programs that have become known for particular niches may be better than generic ones -- providing their strong suit matches a student's interest. For instance, schools like Baylor, the University of Memphis and Mount Union College (Alliance, Ohio) emphasize sales skills, giving their graduates a leg up in this burgeoning segment of sports employment.
JOBS. Do graduates get them? Are they good ones? That's the acid test of schools' reputations and connections.
"It takes years to develop a relationship like we have with the NBA, and they're still very selective," says Dennis Howard, a professor at Oregon's Warsaw Center. "We might place one or two graduates in the league office in a good year. If someone from a program without a relationship walks in off the street, forget about it."
Academia isn't totally at fault for these programs' failures. The industry itself hasn't invested in or otherwise nurtured the good ones. Many sports executives still like the learn-in-the-trenches model. It's cheaper than hiring an M.B.A. and it isn't hard to pluck a plausible employee out of a foot-high stack of résumés.
Yet with sports now a multibillion-dollar industry, Mr. O'Malley's premise is even more right today than 50 years ago. A multibillion-dollar industry needs less seat-of-the-pants management and more professional managers.
By JOHN HELYAR
September 16, 2006; Page R5 of WSJ
In the past 20 years, college sports-management programs have grown nearly as exponentially as the sports business itself has.
In the 1970s, the list pretty much began and ended with Ohio University and the University of Massachusetts. Today, some 300 universities offer everything from sports-management M.B.A.s and doctorates to continuing-education certificates.
The question is: Are they really the tickets to great sports jobs, or mainly great profit centers for colleges? Sadly, say leaders and graduates of even the elite programs, it's often the latter.
"An awful lot of these are driven by the tuition revenue model; it's a real easy way to fill classrooms," says Paul Swangard, managing director of the University of Oregon's M.B.A. sports-marketing program. "But I feel for a lot of kids who graduate with a sport-specific degree and think it's an asset."
Andy Dolich, president of business operations at the Memphis Grizzlies basketball team and an early Ohio University sports-management graduate, is dismayed by many of these graduates' paucity of practical skills. In a 2004 speech to academics in this field, Mr. Dolich recited a list of schools' egghead courses like "Cultural Formation of Sport in Urban America." Then he let 'em have it: "Our business is very simple: Sell or die! I could not find in any course catalog a curriculum in season-ticket sales, telemarketing or negotiating."
It would be one thing if students graduated from programs and landed good jobs anyway. But the competition for entry-level positions in this field is brutal. The pay is low and the hours are long, but there's a patina of glamour and a lot of sports junkies.
Buffy Filippell, whose TeamWork Online sells job-applicant tracking software to teams, often sees feeding frenzies like the one for an ad for a $25,000 community-relations position at the New Orleans Hornets basketball team. It drew 1,000 applications in a week. TeamWork Online is a part of TeamWork Consulting.
Even at a top sports-management M.B.A. program like the University of Central Florida, a quarter of last year's graduating class wound up taking jobs in other industries. "I've spoken at conferences and broken students' hearts with the truth," says Dan Migala, a Chicago-based sports-marketing consultant. "The supply of jobs relative to the demand for jobs is not in their favor."
Surely this isn't what Walter O'Malley had in mind, when the very man who changed the geography of baseball also planted the seed for this new grove of academia.
In the 1950s, the Dodgers owner was simultaneously agitating for a new ballpark in Brooklyn and a sports-administration program at Columbia University. He believed Major League Baseball clubs needed more college-trained business managers. New York didn't give him the park and he moved West. Columbia didn't start a program, but that O'Malley brainchild moved west, too. A Columbia professor who had come under Mr. O'Malley's sway urged James Mason, a departing protégé, to launch such a program at his new school, Ohio University. Dr. Mason did so in 1966.
An early student of the OU program was Andy Dolich, who received his degree in 1971. That was a big point of distinction on a résumé back then -- the only other such program was at UMass -- and Mr. Dolich quickly landed a job with the Philadelphia 76ers. But as programs proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, a degree's value became severely diluted.
"You had all these students in the classroom because it was a great hook, but you had no substance," says Mr. Dolich. "The industry was rapidly growing, but the people who knew anything about it were working in it. There were no books, no syllabi, no instructors with experience."
Phys-Ed Requirements
And while programs purportedly trained students for careers in sports business, they often had nothing to do with college business schools. They sprang out of, and remained part of, departments that conferred degrees like physical education and hospitality management.
Sports-management students at such places have a strange mélange of requirements. At Florida State University, whose program is part of the phys-ed department, undergraduate sport-management majors must take anatomy and injury-care courses.
"Those prerequisites don't make a lot of sense," admits undergraduate program head Michael Mondello, adding that some things are hard to change in a state university system. What's more important, he says, is that FSU has upgraded its program by reducing the number of undergrads majoring in the subject to 150 from 350 and upgrading full-time faculty to seven from two.
Mr. Mondello believes much of this field's bad rap derives from bad teaching -- too many professors who have been retooled from other disciplines. "You wouldn't see that in the hard sciences," he says. "Why would we do that in this field?"
It's not just that standards are low; they barely exist. There's no accreditation process for sports-management programs. While there is an "approval" rating, conferred by an academic group called the Sport Management Program Review Council, its requirements are light -- a minimum of two full-time sports-management faculty members, for instance. Even at that, just a fraction of the hundreds of programs are currently "approved:" 40 undergraduate, 29 master's and five doctoral programs.
There's a vast wasteland of courses where students do things like chart Super Bowl commercials. And a lot of sports industrialists actually consider these degrees a detriment.
"I want new ideas, not the ideas recycled through sports-management programs," says Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. "This business isn't rocket science, so knowing what everyone else is doing takes about a week to figure out. Coming up with new ideas that no one else is doing is the hard part."
Still, steady streams of colleges continue adding sports-management programs -- though some, in a nod to this genre's excesses, with a difference. Columbia University is launching a night master's program this fall and keeping its first class tiny: 14 students, compared with the 150 to 175 in New York University's three-year-old night master's program.
No rap on his Manhattan neighbor, says Columbia program director Lucas Rubin, but these programs in general turn out way too many graduates for the pool of available jobs. Mr. Rubin says he wants Columbia to stress quality over quantity. "I think the vast majority of these programs are revenue generators," he says. "Students have to be smart consumers."
What to Look For
To that end, students should look for several key criteria to search out the good programs -- which do, in fact, exist.
REAL-LIFE PRACTITIONERS. Has faculty actually worked in this field, or do they look suspiciously like athletic-department retreads?
You want a program with people like Bill Sutton, who moved from vice president of team marketing at the NBA to become associate director of the University of Central Florida M.B.A. program. Ray Artigue moved from the Phoenix Suns front office to the leadership of Arizona State University's M.B.A. program.
REAL-WORLD EXPERIENCE. Arizona State's M.B.A. students have done Web-site consulting with the Los Angles Lakers and Seattle Seahawaks. At Oregon's Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, M.B.A. candidates have consulted with credit-card company Visa on its Olympic sponsorship expansion and with athletic retailer Nike Inc. on its China plans.
FOCUS. Programs that have become known for particular niches may be better than generic ones -- providing their strong suit matches a student's interest. For instance, schools like Baylor, the University of Memphis and Mount Union College (Alliance, Ohio) emphasize sales skills, giving their graduates a leg up in this burgeoning segment of sports employment.
JOBS. Do graduates get them? Are they good ones? That's the acid test of schools' reputations and connections.
"It takes years to develop a relationship like we have with the NBA, and they're still very selective," says Dennis Howard, a professor at Oregon's Warsaw Center. "We might place one or two graduates in the league office in a good year. If someone from a program without a relationship walks in off the street, forget about it."
Academia isn't totally at fault for these programs' failures. The industry itself hasn't invested in or otherwise nurtured the good ones. Many sports executives still like the learn-in-the-trenches model. It's cheaper than hiring an M.B.A. and it isn't hard to pluck a plausible employee out of a foot-high stack of résumés.
Yet with sports now a multibillion-dollar industry, Mr. O'Malley's premise is even more right today than 50 years ago. A multibillion-dollar industry needs less seat-of-the-pants management and more professional managers.
SMA 10101 Fall 2011
Welcome all the new MU Sport Management students to our fine campus. Let's have a great class:)
Best,
Dr.C.
Best,
Dr.C.
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