JANUARY 2006 :: EDUCATION

Take Me Out to the B-School
New M.B.A. Programs Serve as Training Camp for Careers in Sports

By Ronald Alsop
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

More business schools, including some major-league M.B.A. players, are getting into the sports game.

They are creating specialized courses and degree programs to teach students how to make winning moves as managers and marketers in the sports world. The schools hope to give graduates a shot at the growing career opportunities for professionally trained managers in the major athletic leagues, equipment and apparel companies, the media and other sports-related businesses.

"The sports industry is incredibly large and global, with immense business challenges," says George Foster, a professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business who teaches a sports-management class with Bill Walsh, former head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. "A lot of basic business principles are applicable to sports, but our class also covers more specialized issues such as player-owner relations and revenue disparity among teams."

Stanford has expanded its sports curriculum to include customized finance and marketing classes. In finance, M.B.A.s study such issues as sports-team valuation, player salaries and stadium financing, while in marketing, they focus on corporate sponsorship of events like the Olympics, fan loyalty programs, and athletes' product endorsements-including strategies for dealing with players who behave badly.

Analytical Eye

Such schools as the University of Massachusetts and Ohio University have long offered sports-business classes, but the rookies in the field see plenty of demand for more courses. Columbia University expects its course on "the economics of the major North American sports leagues" to attract nearly 75 M.B.A. students this spring, up from its initial enrollment of 58 in 2003. Students at Columbia and other schools also have formed sports clubs to bring guest speakers to campus and organize job-hunting treks.

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School recently moved beyond its few sports-related courses to form a Sports Business Initiative that includes research, conferences and student consulting projects. "We want to be the place doing the highest quality of research and turning out the top-level M.B.A.s with extensive sports knowledge," says Wharton professor Kenneth Shropshire, director of the initiative and a former sports agent.

Sports-industry executives are sometimes the impetus for business-school courses. The new "Analytical Sports Management" course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the brainchild of alumnus Daryl Morey, senior vice president of operations and information for the NBA's Boston Celtics.

"There's growing demand for the M.B.A. skills set at sports franchises," says Mr. Morey, who teaches the course. "A new group of people with money from venture capital, investment banking, private equity and management consulting are purchasing franchises at higher valuations, and they want to bring the discipline of analytical management to the operations of the teams."

San Diego State University has allied most closely with professional sports, forming a partnership with the local Padres baseball club to launch a sports-management M.B.A. last year. The Padres organization, which is seeking M.B.A.s for the front office who were trained specifically for the sports industry, provides guest speakers for the classes and offers internships to students.

In some cases, the schools not only are training M.B.A. students to become future sports-industry managers, but they're also providing executive education for players and team officials. Wharton, for example, is teaching NFL players about financial analysis, entrepreneurship and real estate to prepare them for careers after they retire from the game.

Tough to Crack

Although M.B.A.s realize it won't be as easy to land a lucrative job in the sports field as in finance or consulting, they still aspire to turn their personal passion into a career. Jill Stephenson enrolled in San Diego State's sports-management program to boost her chances of switching from a sports TV-production job to a marketing and business-development career in the golf industry. She fell in love with the game after attending the British Open a few years ago and became "an avid, frustrated golfer."

But she knew she needed stronger finance and accounting skills to break into the business. "Now, I'm looking at sports companies' financial statements and learning how to do budgets," Ms. Stephenson says. She also performed a market-research study for a local golf course to help it determine the optimum prices to charge players.

John Abbamondi, a 2004 Stanford M.B.A. graduate, says what he found especially valuable in his sports classes was "listening to guest speakers like Dusty Baker [manager of the Chicago Cubs] and Billy Beane," general manager of the Oakland Athletics. "I learned how some of the speakers had crafted careers in an industry that's very hard to get into."

In fact, Mr. Abbamondi says, the connections he made with classroom speakers like Mr. Beane led to his current job as director of salary and contract administration for Major League Baseball. He was all set to join a consulting firm but at the last minute learned about the baseball position. "It turns out," he says, "that my Stanford classes touched on a lot of things I deal with in my job, from player valuation to TV contracts."