For students, the importance of networking and relationship building while studying for a postgraduate degree can be critical to their prospects beyond graduation. To paraphrase one course leader’s recent summation, in an industry such as sport which is relatively small and highly inter-connected, connections can be key to success and those who haven’t actively built a network can struggle as a result.
The benefits of networking may seem obvious, but it is more complex than just a case of sending out a few requests on LinkedIn accompanied by generic introductory greetings. Guiding students towards meaningful network building is an aspect that many institutions have invested significant time and resource in, and this is reflected in the scores some have achieved in the networking-related metrics within the Postgraduate Rankings survey. It is perhaps reflective of the importance of these measures that the top courses globally have generally excelled in these areas.
Programmes were scored on aspects such as Industry Network, Alumni Network and related measures such as Professional Mentorship/Advocacy. SportBusiness spoke to some of the organisations that scored best on these metrics to understand how they met students’ needs in these areas.
The highest overall scorer on the Industry Network measure was the University of South Florida’s Vinik Sport & Entertainment Management Programme. In terms of networking, the importance of this is instilled in students from the start of the programme, with guidance on the subject beginning with orientation. Course professor Dr Janelle Wells, told SportBusiness: “Networking is relationship building and the key is to invest in relationships. Relationships are an investment, so yes, it takes work, it takes intentionality, and it takes authenticity.
“Understand that networking is an ongoing process, not an isolated event, so let’s help our students build foundational skills. Our students’ success comes from consistently leveraging faculty and programme contacts, making new intentional contacts, and following up to stay in touch deepens the relationship.”
In order to provide students with the opportunities to develop their skills in this area, events such as networking dinners are held, while class trips are centred on relationship building. An example of this was the 2022 trip to Las Vegas, during which the students visited organisations such as Encore Beach Club, Caesars, UFC, Dolby, Allegiant Stadium, HyperX and the programme partnered with Women in Sports and Events (WISE), to coordinate a networking event.
Dr Wells added: “We create the opportunities to sharpen their skills, and most importantly, practise their networking skills in a supportive and collaborative environment. We recognise not everyone is comfortable meeting new people or taking the initiative to introduce themselves, or know how to add value to a relationship, so we help students gain the confidence through our PowerPlacement curriculum.
“Partners from across the world constantly applaud our students’ appreciation and ability to do the simple yet meaningful things such as initiate conversation, send a personal thank you note, or have an agenda for an informational interview.”
Emphasis is also placed on creating opportunities for students to interact directly with industry leaders and put networking skills into practice at Columbia University. The flagship event in this sense is ‘Elevator Pitch Perfect’, which sees students provided with the chance to present their scenario-based ‘Elevator Pitch’.
Columbia University’s Laurajean Holmgren, deputy programme director, sports management, indicates that the industry figures involved in the event see real value in it and welcome the opportunity to network with students, stating: “There are some industry leaders that have been really keen to come back the following year, loving the opportunity to help students in a creative way, because they feel like they’re truly giving back. For students, the purpose is to learn different styles of interacting and networking. What I say to you, I might need to tailor it differently to someone else, because we have different shared connections. That event is one that from the industry leader standpoint, it’d viewed as something that is really valuable.”
USF students on a trip to Las Vegas in 2022
Alumni Networks can be central to mentorship
The Vinik Sport and Entertainment Management Programme also scores highly on the Professional Mentorship/Advocacy measure, an aspect the course leaders place a high level of focus on, particularly leveraging its alumni network for this purpose.
Both peer and professional mentors are provided to students throughout the course. The professional mentors are comprised of the alumni network and aligned to students based on the suitability of factors such as profession, career experience and lived experience. This is even taken further with students assigned an alumni mentor for specific projects within classes.
For the organisers of the MBA/MSA Sports Administration degree at Ohio University, there is a lot of emphasis placed on its ‘Ohio Family’ moniker, referring to its community and alumni network. This is given additional substance by the results of this year’s survey, which sees the programme top the Alumni Network metric with a near-perfect score of 99.29.
An aspect of the course which leverages the alumni network particularly strongly is the ‘Executive Mentor Programme’. This sees incoming students offered the opportunity to peruse the course’s alumni directory and select five names that they would like to approach to be their executive mentor for their next two years of study. The course leaders also look to enhance this opportunity for its students by inviting a number of the current executive mentors to campus in the autumn to interact with the current candidates, also awarding one of the group with an ‘Executive Mentor of the Year’ prize. Executive director of Ohio University’s Center for Sports Administration, Matt Cacciato said: “We see the executive mentor programme as something that is incredibly unique, it allows people upon entering the programme to align with those that are in the field, in roles that are matched to their interests. It has proved to be incredibly valuable. Students and their mentors develop relationships over their two years in the programme, communicating on a regular basis and meeting in person.”
The weight carried by the ‘Ohio Family’ moniker is perhaps best exemplified by the fact the current executive chair of its 19-strong Alumni Advisory board went through the programme and met his wife in the process. The couple now have two children who both graduated from the programme and are now working within the sports industry.
On how the strength and depth of the alumni network developed, Cacciato said: “As the programme and the size of the classes grew, and the prominence of our earlier alumni and their careers developed, they naturally look back to their experience and they stay in touch with their classmates. We aid that with the publishing of alumni data and also hold alumni events in cities across the country, at various conferences and larger sporting events.
“For instance, around our men’s and women’s collegiate basketball tournaments, with the support of our sponsor, we organise structured alumni receptions that gather our graduates from multiple years. In Minneapolis last year, for our women’s Final Four event, we had a gentleman who graduated in 1971, who’s been present in the Minneapolis market for a long time, meeting graduates from just the previous year, so it literally was a 50-year span of graduates that were represented there.”
Overall global leaders UMass also flourished in the Alumni Network, Industry Network and Professional Mentorship/Advocacy metrics, topping the last of the three listed worldwide.
Will Norton, graduate program director and senior lecturer, Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, UMass, detailed the course leaders’ approach to networking and how interaction with industry is woven into its curriculum: “Who you know is important, but it’s equally important who knows you. This two-sided exchange is promoted via experiential learning coursework that gives students the ability to create industry-level deliverables to our more than 3,000 alums working in sports today.
“We run three-month long consulting practicums for our second-year MBA/MS students, which allows for tremendous growth and on-the-job training. We take real-world industry challenges and create independent studies from them. Our graduate mentor programme is a tried-and-true networking platform, from which career-long connections are made.”
Alumni steps up in response to pandemic
Across the institutions mentioned above, in-person visits and events seem to be central to the support provided to students in regards to networking. This raises the question, how have course leaders mitigated the impact of the pandemic in recent years and retained the same level of opportunity for its students when it comes to networking and mentorship?
Norton says: “While live events and physical get togethers were certainly put on hold for a time, we activated our alumni network during the pandemic, first putting an “All Call” out on LinkedIn, asking alums to step up for students in need. We were able to match students with a variety of mentors during the remote semester and bring them closer to sports industry stakeholders to ask questions about an uncertain future hiring period. Many alums stepped up and offered remote projects, internships, and shadowing opportunities to create networking as a practice.”
The theme of alumni stepping up and recognising the need to redouble efforts to support current students in the circumstances was also present at Ohio University, not just in regards to the pandemic, but in relation to wider societal issues.
Cacciato added: “Our alumni knew that our inability to get out and travel could hamper the programme and stepped up proactively in a lot of areas. Even away from the classroom and looking at some of the challenges that we saw in the summer of 2020 with racial and social injustice, our black alumni stepped up proactively. They collected and organised themselves and came to us as a group and said, ‘How can we help? How can we better assist you in helping students understand some of the some of the challenges, how can we reach across racial lines, gender lines, and make this a more meaningful and ultimately rewarding conversation for the Ohio family?’
The aforementioned Elevator Pitch Perfect event held by Columbia University has been held digitally three times since the onset of the pandemic and the course’s leaders actually saw benefit in some of the scenarios and features prompted by the event taking place in a virtual context. Holmgren explains: “On virtual meeting software, the use of breakout rooms and the chat feature was really interesting. It allowed us and students to think about the different mediums that exist to communicate and how we could leverage them. Many of our faculty remarked that our students had great conversations through the chat feature, so we promoted that as a way of building a brief personal branding statement for students to introduce themselves in that context.
“We definitely used the breakout rooms. When we brought in people from the industry, we put them in breakout rooms with students for 10 minutes. They loved that interaction. You’re seeing the faces, you’re seeing the names and they become really ingrained in the mind.”
Ultimately, the array of perspectives presented above underlines the importance some of the most prominent institutions in sports management education at the postgraduate level place on supporting students with developing industry relationships, leveraging alumni networks and on providing meaningful mentorship opportunities to candidates. As Norton summarised: “The dynamic pace of sport management forms an incredibly close-knit community, and accessing that family unit is one of the primary selling points we talk to prospective students about.
“Postgraduate study is a chance to lean in to the sports family, and build your own inner circle that will support the rest of your career. The world of sports is small, and networking with prominent industry leaders can often help secure a distinct leg up in entry-level and mid-level management roles.”