S and I are just beginning the early stages of looking into non-medical careers in the sports industry. He is not suited to physical therapy careers or anything medical. Anyone have any insight or advice about the business side of the sports industry? He’s a math whiz, so there’s some potential there, and also quite charismatic (don’t know where he gets it from! not his introvert parents!) so sales/marketing/agenting are possibilities. Is it best to pursue a sports management degree in a reputable program (mostly at large state schools that would be OOS for us and possibly quite expensive), or just double major in stats and business and work hard on internships? We have a friend who is an agent who has a law degree, and a friend who does PR who has a regular communications degree. Not sure if it helps to do an actual sports management degree. Thoughts? Open to any all suggestions. Thanks!
Sports management seems like an unnecessarily narrow major aimed at jobs which are willing to hire applicants with other majors, but may be seen as a negative signal by other employers.
Statistics with business and/or social sciences may better allow him to use math talents if he is interested in sports analytics (Moneyball type stuff).
I agree…seems like having a degree oriented toward data analytics that could be applied to sports may be something to consider.
From William Chen on Quora:
Generally, I would say the best two majors are
Statistics - Application and data analysis focus
Computer science - Machine learning focus
Other good majors that put you in the right problem-solving mindset AND have research problems that can prepare you well for data science are
Physics / Astrophysics - data and computation focus
Any social science - very heavy data analysis + quantitative focus
Applied math - heavy computation focus, taking statistics courses on the side
Other majors that put you in the right mindset and attract the data-science kind of people are:
Mathematics
Any other quantitative STEM field
Basically, anything that involves understanding large amounts of data using data analysis, statistical inference, and programming.
Within each of those majors, you should be following a track / course-load that have joint data + programming focus.
My general advice is find the classes you want to take and then find the major that fits those classes best. The major that fits best will vary by school.
My advice is to go with business - the sports management majors I know haven’t faired that well in the job market and have a very narrow focus to find other things
When my son was considering it as a major, he emailed a number of local sports teams, looking for advice.
What he got was a mixed bag. Some agreed with the posters here, that a more generic business degree was the way to go. Others said that the way to go was with the Sports Management degree… the specialization and networking made the degree more valuable,
He did get one phenomenal call from the recipient of one of his emails-- a man at the top of one of the local teams. Mr X spoke with my son for half an hour one night, giving him advice He also offered to mentor my son, told him to keep in touch, and got us two AMAZING seats to a game.
And then my son changed his major to criminal justice, lol.
Go with the advice listed above but also a minor in sports management and arrange some internships in the industry. The classes in sports management “back in the day” were ridiculously easy–a whole class on how to organize tournament brackets I kid you not.
I do have a friend who majored in that at TAMU and he is a very successful professional baseball scout. But he was also a NMF and had a partial baseball scholarship at TAMU so he had a definite IN to the industry.
Just one data point, but one of my daughter’s old boyfriends got a degree in sports management, and ended up working as an auto repair sales rep in a Midas (or maybe it was Meineke) muffler shop. Don’t major in sports management.
My brother has a degree in sports management and he is --a sports manager! He runs a youth league and is very successful. It really is a lot more than statistics, as it is organizing tournaments, marketing, schmoozing, keeping up on rule changes, making things happen and then making them happen again when it snows on the tournament.
Daughter’s roommate graduated with a sports management degree. Most of her work so far has been in marketing for a new professional team.
Another option for ‘sports, not medical’ is journalism/communications.
Here’s another data point: My daughter has a friend who is interested in sports management. She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in communications, PR and sports management. She is a driven young lady who chose to go to school in Chicago, where she could work for some of our local sports teams.
As a high school student she worked at our local Class A minor league baseball stadium as a cashier. From there she got an internship doing pre-game duties, in-game promotions and managed mascot appearances. During her college years, she juggled part-time jobs while attending school: Fan Services, Ticket Sales, Guest Ambassador, Social Media Ambassador, Community Relations for the Bears, White Sox, Cubs and Northwestern. Now she is employed by the Cubs organization, while working on her Master’s in Sports Administration. She is focused and hard-working. The ironic part is the fact that she is a die-hard Sox fan and works at Wrigley.
I’m sharing her story, because there are a lot of young people who would like to work in sports. I don’t believe “just” getting a degree or liking sports is enough. I may be wrong, but I imagine you either need to know someone for connections or you have to make them through hard work outside the classroom. Good luck to your son.
This was my son’s dream. He is two years out of college. He majored in economics and math. He can write code and loves statistics. During college he had a great stats internship with an NHL team (had verbal offer to stay but was disappointed in the pay; hindsight always 20:20, but I don’t think he wanted to stay in his college town anyway.) However, he is not working in this field now. The entry level jobs are hard to find and often very low paying (for a national team.) He is doing very well at his job, is happy, and is able to apply many skills to a different problem.
Does your son live near Boston? Does he know about the MIT Sloan Sports Conference next month? Tickets may be sold out, but it’s worth having on his radar.
My S’s dream job is with Elias Sports Bureau. We briefly considered a new program at Syracuse in Sport Analytics but decided it was too narrow. He will be studying math/stats/data science, depending on what school he ends up at.
We looked at the Sloan Sports Conference but it was sold out by the time we learned of it. Definitely on our radar for next year.
One of my cousins is a stadium manager for a MLB team. I think he was a business major, had an internship, and got hired. I’d say that personality/fitting in with the culture (and standing out because he was so hard-working/dependable) had a lot to do with his landing/getting promoted in this job–so much of what he does is PR. Also, he was extremely knowledgeable about/dedicated to his local team. (Benefit: “behind the scenes” tour for our family☺ )
Research and agressively pursue internships is my only advice.
I think it depends on the school where you are a sports admin major. Many of the programs these days combine the marketing/business/finance issues that you can apply to other fields but they are taught within the framework of sports. If you go to a school where there is a sports admin major as well as business or stats or marketing, the sports admin internships are typically going to go the sports admin majors first because they will know about them first.
Thanks, all! Very helpful info. You have, for the most part, confirmed my hunches, but I think the idea of minoring or focusing in Sports Management is a good one, so choosing a school that is strong in both is wise. I will definitely push him to look at sports-related jobs for his summer jobs.
@bjkmom Kudos to your son for self-motivation. Will tell my son about that as a motivating story.
@LBowie Thanks, will look into the Sloan Conference for future years. We are a few years out.
@simba9 my step daughters boyfriend also majored in sports management and he is a logistics guy for a trucking company – agree
But many people do not work in the exact field of their majors. When my daughter was a theater major, I never expected her to work as an actress, but knew that the skills she learned would help her in expressing her views, giving speeches, etc. She’s now in history, and I don’t expect her to do anything ‘in’ history but that she is learning how to write, how history influences choices today, etc.
Don’t major in sports management expecting to manage the Red Sox or be an agent within a year or two. There are a lot of towels pick up and a lot of just hard work. A lot of the work is not for professional teams but for youth leagues and rec centers. It may be a lot of coaching or setting up charity tournaments. If it is for a pro team, it’s going to be a lot of grunt work at first.
However, an overly specialized pre-professional major may signal to employers of other jobs that the applicant is more likely to leave once a job in that area opens up. A similar issue could affect those with computer game design majors – someone hiring for non-game computing may see such an applicant as one who is more prone to leave for a computer game job.
My daughter wanted to be a math teacher. I said major in Math and then do Secondary Education as a Masters. That way she is set for Math teacher, but also has the math degree if she ever wants to something else.
Wouldn’t that be the usual route for prospective high school teachers: major in the subject you want to teach and add whatever teacher credential requirements are needed?
Both of my sons pursued sports mgmt - with mixed results. S1 is a numbers guy - he majored in finance while working for his university football team throughout college and 2 years post-graduation. Then he got a job in the NFL. We thought he had it made! But the team had a poor season, coach and gm were fired, and his position was gone as the new gm restructured. He had been told that once yiu are in the NFL, you are in, but that did not prove to be the case. Connections are key and he did not have enough. He’s in grad school now for MBA /data analytics.
S2 did a sports mgmt major - but also minors in economics and mgmt. Unable to find a paying entry level sports mgmt job after graduation. Sports teams have all the unpaid interns they can handle. Paid positions are scarce. He is employed in a non sports business mgmt field.
So - two different approaches - neither working in sports, lol. Too many students chasing too few jobs. Recommend business/finance/econ/math majors - do a sports mgmt minor for fun if you like.