How Veterans Can Break Into Sports: Show Them, Don't Tell Them
Creating a portfolio of work that showcases how your skills translate in sports
If you are new around here, here’s why I started writing.
After a break, we are back with the last of the three topics: how to build a portfolio of work to showcase your skills at work in the sports industry. For the first post on networking, refer back here, and the second post on translating experience, read here.
Taking Inventory & Mapping Your Goals
Through the first two steps of networking and translating your military experience, you should have a solid idea of where you want to go next, and what you need to do to get there. Those conversations and self work should provide a roadmap on what those consist of, but here are a few ways to consider when it comes to ‘show them, don’t tell them’.
Education and Training
Consider pursuing a degree in a relevant field: Degrees in business, with a focus on sports management, sports marketing, sports medicine, or sports science can open doors. Many universities offer programs tailored to different aspects of the sports business - my recommendation is to always start with business and make sure you have a solid baseline. With this, make sure you are paying attention to graduation outcomes, where alumni work, and how the career services is set up.
How this looked for me was pursuing an MBA, then taking classes that were relevant to what I wanted to do. I focused mostly on entrepreneurship and analytics classes to make sure I was well rounded when it came to business plans and strategy. Within those courses, I asked professors to write my papers and do my final projects on sports topics, which allowed me to build a natural portfolio.
For example, I took a corporate bankruptcy class and found public bankruptcy documents from a sports team for my final project. I spoke to my professor and he allowed me to select a team as my company as long as they had documentation. Rather than choosing a tech company or another option, I saw this as a way to build out my understanding and analysis of team revenue and what’s at stake during a team bankruptcy, including ownership groups, team relocation, and other decisions. This became part of my overall portfolio, while also allowing me to complete a project for school.
Another way to gain education and training is through online courses and certifications: Online courses and certifications can be a flexible way to gain specialized knowledge and skills, especially if you do not have the time or ability to go back to school. Make sure these have alumni connections or online communities as well, so you can build a network while pursuing a certification.
Internships & Projects
Seek internships with sports teams or organizations: many sports teams, both professional and amateur, offer internship programs. These opportunities can provide hands-on experience in various roles, from marketing to operations to coaching. Some of these pay, while others do not. I spent a lot of time working on unpaid projects and internships, and while they were great for building my experience, I also know that they limit the candidate pool to those who can afford to work for free. This is not an article to go deeper into this issue in sports, but do what works best for you in this category. It’s possibly more lucrative to build out a few different projects on your own for free than provide unpaid labor to a sports team. Teams should pay their interns.
I do think that volunteering is beneficial when it comes to local sports events, marathons, or sports-related charities. Volunteering not only builds your experience but also helps you network with people in the industry. These one off opportunities will help you build a portfolio of experiences where you can touch on real operational experience, but also understand how your military experiences match up with everything in practice.
How did this look for me? I ended up taking on an internship with Texas Athletics while I was pursuing my MBA. While it was a ticket sales internship, I learned everything that goes into putting together a positive game day experience, from selling tickets, renewing season ticket plans, answering questions about parking and other game day questions, and hearing complaints about the play on the field or court (which the response was, “Coach so&so is doing his/her best to prepare the team”. We used Salesforce, so I learned how to log calls and navigate the backend stadium manifest on Paciolan, ultimately gaining an understanding of how a football game gets sold. I was the oldest intern in the room, but it gave me great exposure to how ticketing actually works. This helped me put together a customer renewal strategy, as well as build a basketball ticketing modeling, both items that I kept in my portfolio to get a job in sports. And, now, as an added benefit, I help my friends navigate renewing our season tickets (the dream!).
How could you apply this to any role? Let’s use operations and security as an example. When you attend sports events, what did you notice? Was it easy to go through security, did you wait a long time, or did you have issues pulling up your ticket? How would you streamline that process?
What about social marketing? Was there something a team did that you felt really performed well or resonated with an audience? Feel confident in your ability to talk through the ideal scenario in a paper or presentation, and test it out next time you attend a sporting event or scroll your feed. It doesn’t have to be something official to get you started on this process and to start thinking through how to leverage your experience (even as just a fan) into portfolio items.
Build the Portfolio
Once you have relevant experience, you can start building a portfolio. This portfolio should be easy to navigate and can be hosted digitally, on social media, or as a PDF. My portfolio allowed me to showcase that my resume was supported by work and projects that gave me exposure to the sports industry, and translated directly to the roles that I wanted to pursue.
My recommendation here is to create a table of contents that makes it easy to navigate, as well as short projects descriptions. This makes it easy for someone that has limited time to pull up the projects they want to look at and what might be most relevant to your roles.
Your portfolio should be a living, breathing document that you update as more opportunities come your way. I still maintain all my main projects in a folder and showcase my work through LinkedIn when it goes live. Don’t be afraid to share your work, it goes a long way in building your personal brand.
Thanks for reading!
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