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Saturday, August 22, 2009

follow-up to How Badly Do You Want to Work in Sports, part 3

I was speaking with an Ohio University professor yesterday about this topic and how students often waste the precious time they have to speak with a sports industry professional by asking them questions to which they could find the answers on the Internet. He summed it up quite well. He noted that students do this because it is easy, particularly Ohio University students because our network is so willing to speak to students. He said, "That alum (executive) will talk to the student and congenially and happily answer his questions, but the executive won't ever remember the student as he might if the student asks thoughtful and insightful questions."

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

How Badly Do You Want to Work in Sports, part 3

This post is going to address two topics: primarily research and a little bit of networking, the second of which I know I have written about multiple times. In this post I'm going to address how they are sometimes tied together, whether people realize it or not.

I frequently get emails asking for advice about where to look for a job or help getting a contact into somewhere I've worked. Often when people contact me, I'm their first stop on the research path. This is incredibly annoying! Often, I will talk with people who tell me they want to work at New York Road Runners, for example, yet when I talk to them, they haven't even looked at the NYRR website. I don't mind giving them information on things that are really only available from talking to someone who has worked (or is working) in an organization, such as what the culture might be like or what the leadership style of a department VP might be. What irks me is when people don't even take the time to figure out on their own who the organizational leaders are or ask me questions such as whether I know if NYRR has any open jobs. Check the damn website! If there isn't a staff directory, which there isn't on the NYRR site, there are press releases and photos and videos and Flickr links and Facebook links, and on and on. You can find out a lot of information there. I even had one student (not one of mine) ask me if I could recommend where in New York City he should apply for sports jobs, not even a specific area of sports, which still would have made it a bad question, but narrowed down a bit. I, and others in his network, are not the "job bank of New York City" to start naming off organizations. This was someone I had talked to once and now he was asking me to be his personal scout. Not gonna happen! Now, if he had said something like, "I'm looking at NYRR, Korff Enterprises, the US Open, Madison Square Garden, and Eventage and have read up on each of them. Do you happen to know anything about those organizations?" That's a different question. It shows me someone who is trying to help himself and find a job but needs a little help versus a person who wants someone else to find a job for him. It would also have been different if this were someone I had talked to more than once. That's just the cold hard truth.

It is the epitome of laziness to not research the basics of an organization. As an example, if a student told me that she wanted to work for Under Armour, and then I asked her what she would say to Kevin Plank if she ran into him in the lobby at a conference, I would often get blank stares and the question, "Who is Kevin Plank?" People in sports are willing to help you, but you have to be willing to help yourself and do a little bit of work before you talk to them. When she gets around to answering my original question--what would she ask Kevin Plan if she ran into him in the lobby at a conference--she would likely answer with something pedestrian, such as "I would ask him how he got the idea to start Under Armour." Read an article for that! It's pretty well documented why he started the company. It's even on the "About Under Armour" section of their website. This is a fictitious example, though admittedly not too fictitious.

Another area is when you are applying for jobs. If the position states that it reports to the general counsel of a football team, for example, guess what, most pro teams have a staff directory listed on their websites. Here is an example for the Kansas City Chiefs. Mouse over "The Team" and the drop down has a link called "Coaches, Staff, and Execs." I wonder, though, how many people would address their cover letter and resume generically to the HR manager or generically to "Attn: General Counsel," assuming they send their resume directly to the Chiefs in addition to applying online (discussed in previous blog posts).

The synopsis is: Don't waste peoples' time, and just as importantly, don't waste the opportunity you have to speak to them with questions you can find answers to on the Internet, in a book, or in a magazine. Leave them feeling like they just talked to a person who is a young sports business professional rather than an unpolished student.

Sunday, August 9, 2009

How Badly Do You Want to Work in Sports, part 2

The job market for sports has generally always been tough. Now, as with the general job market, it's so much worse. Honestly, how hard are you searching for your job or how hard are you willing to search? Are you graduating in May and planning on waiting to start until January (bad idea) to start your job search? If you don't find a job immediately, are you going to take something else outside of sports and continue looking? Or are you willing to take an internship? Or are you going to sue your school for not helping you find placement and sue because of the stress you've had to go through for a whopping three month job search (see article)?

Here's the reality. The sports job market, hell, even the market for sports internships, flat out sucks right now! I have a friend who is a facility manager in Colorado. He had an open coordinator position (entry level) last month. He was getting resumes for this job from people who had been managers and directors and lost their jobs. One of the interviewees for the my book (A Career in Sports: Advice from Sports Business Leaders) is now CEO of a major sports franchise. He talks about how he interned at Madison Square Garden after grad school and thought he was on this way, then couldn't find a job for eight months after that internship. He sent out over 400 resumes (pre-email) during that time. He took two jobs not in sports so he could pay his bills, but he never stopped looking for a job in sports. I don't think most people now would send out 400 resumes via email today, but that's the type of commitment that made him an NHL team president by the time he was 40 years old. A story I've told many times, and even written about here, my classmate, Kevin Abrams, is the assistant general manager for the New York Giants. After grad school, Kevin worked internships for two years with four different organizations at about $500/month before he was hired as a salary cap analyst by the Giants. Not many people have that kind of persistence.

There are opportunities for people who are persistent. In regards to the student suing her university, I think it's a cop out, personally. I don't care what a college tells anyone, it's not their responsibility to find graduates a job. Maybe a technical school, maybe, but not a college or university. A college education is similar to a hunting license. It provides you an opportunity to bag an alligator (for the Floridians) or a deer or whatever, but it doesn't guarantee you one. Education should be for the sake of knowledge. There are things you can learn to help you increase your likelihood of snagging that gator, but no one is going to find it for you, show you where it is, prepare the capture method, snag it for you, and let you walk away with the proverbial prize. They'll teach you how and give you the opportunity, but the rest is up to you. If you give up after the first or second or third or fourth (or more) attempt, you really didn't want it that badly anyway.

Saturday, August 1, 2009

How Badly Do You Want to Work in Sports? part 1

This is a question that every person considering a career in sports should ask herself: How badly do your really want it? Are you willing to be persistent in your contacts, to the point of being just shy of annoying?

I think I might institute a new personal policy. I might wait until the second or third time that someone contacts me for advice to get back to them, to see if they're persistent. I know, this flies in the face of what I've written before about the need to get back to folks within 24 hours, but I don't care. This is a separate issue for me.

Being persistent is one of the things that it is going to take to be successful in sports. If someone provides you a contact and you email or call them (and I've found with students it's either one or the other, because god forbid they do both) and that person doesn't get back to you after your first or even second contact, do you give up or do you push on? Do you leave a voice mail message saying, "I know you're incredibly busy, but my schedule is flexible. If it is easier for you to speak before or after traditional business hours, I'm available during those times, too." And then even suggest some days and times.

Last semester, I contacted a friend of mine who works at the USOC, someone at the director level no less, to see if he would mind speaking to a student who had applied for a summer internship at the USOC. The U-S-O-C! Pretty major sports organization. He said that he would. I provided her his contact information. When I asked her about it a couple of weeks later, she said she had left him a voice mail, but hadn't heard back from him. She said she was going to call him a second time. Whether she did or not, I don't know, but I do know that she didn't get the internship at the USOC. Could he have helped? Who knows? More importantly, who cares?! This is a new contact to add to her network that could become an acquaintance in the sports world. Like it or not, the sports world requires a network and it requires persistence. If you're not willing to be persistent, it may be a good idea to think twice about what you want to do.