Copyright © 2010 The Sport Management Educator. Snowblind theme by c.bavota & Juan Gordillo. Powered by WordPress.
This week’s post is a recycled entry from January. Choosing a college is a very stressful time and with allof the pressure and misinformation that is put on students it does not make the process any easier.
This is my first post on blogspot.com (before I moved to wordpress.com) and I hope you find this blog both interesting and informative. I will be posting informational material in the world of sport management. Please feel free to comment. The first post is on a topic that has been bothering me.
Recently, a number of articles have addressed the topic of how to choose a sport management program at both the undergraduate and graduate level. For example, BusinessWeek published a piece by Matthew Lawyue in August of 2008 containing some very good points about selecting a school (http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/aug2008/bs20080818_920919.htm). According to the BusinessWeek site, Lawyue is a reporting intern and a “junior at the College of New Jersey studying journalism.” Mr. Lawyue effectively quells the incorrect notion that after graduating with a sport management degree one is prepared to be the general manager of the Boston Red Sox. He also notes that “sport management” is much more than simply talking about the score of last night’s game. Furthermore, he gets it right when he quotes Heather Blackburn (Drexel University) and Michael Mondello (Florida State University) in terms of the importance of networking and internships. After that, he really misses the mark.
Obviously, if a sport management program is located in a city such as Boston, Los Angeles, New York or Washington DC there are opportunities for students to gain an internship with one of the Major League franchises. Obviously, Division I schools with sport management programs are ideal places to gain experience. However, he fails to mention that smaller cities and towns have sports franchises as well. Furthermore, students participating in internships at these franchises typically are exposed to more opportunities, more variety in jobs within the organization, and as a result, they gain more experience from the internship. The same is true for a program at a Division III school.
Mr. Lawyue also discusses the importance of the location of the sport management program…is it in business, kinesiology, or education? Mr. Lawyue states, “Which school or department the sport management program is housed in is vital, since it affects what type of basic education you’ll be receiving.” In some cases this is true–but in others it is not. Where the program is housed is not as important as Lawyue leads readers to believe. As with any program, it is incumbent upon the prospective student to closely examine a program’s requirements. In terms of sport management, although a good program has a strong business background, it does not necessarily need to be housed/located in the business department.
In December of 2008, Dana Pake, Corporate Communications Manager for ALL STAR DIRECTORIES, posted a press release (http://educationnewss.blogspot.com/2008/12/sports-management-career-guide-launched.html) titled, “Sports Management Career Guide Launched on All Business Schools.” When you go to the website it is nothing more than an advertisement for the University of Phoenix. Unfortunately, the website is full of the same type of errors found in the BusinessWeek article.
My advice to a prospective sport management student is this:
1. Choose a program that is approved by SMPRC (http://www.nassm.com/InfoAbout/SportMgmtPrograms). SMPRC approval is giving way to the accrediting body COSMA. Until then (approximately 2-3 years), I recommend selecting a school approved by either SMPRC or accredited by COSMA. By relying on the industry leaders, you will be receiving a good education in sport management that best prepares you for a career in the sport industry.
2. Ask questions about where students are doing internships and whether or not they are finding jobs after graduation.
3. Who is teaching the courses and advising the students…is it full-time faculty or part-time faculty? What are their qualifications?
4. Do you feel at home and/or connected with the college/university? Some students want a large, university setting while others want a smaller, more intimate environment.
I hope that prospective students are not swayed by inaccurate information. There are some very good programs across the country–some are located in big cities and others in small towns. There are some very good programs found at large universities as well as at small colleges. There are some very good programs housed in departments other than business and there are programs that are housed within the business department that are not very good. It is my hope that both students and parents look carefully at the programs without falling prey to slick advertising campaigns or inaccurate propaganda.
January 16, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Great advice—especially since many people do not research information found on the Internet thoroughly enough to determine the accuracy of the content or the credibility of the author. You might want to include some details about yourself so readers may learn more about you without leaving this site.
February 4, 2009 at 2:23 pm
The first of all, I would like to agree with the idea how students interning with smaller franchises or organizations because they are living in smaller towns and cities can definitely be a strength, not a weakness. Students with these types of internships will indeed gain experience and exposure to many different avenues of how the business of a professional sports team is run. Just during my first afternoon interning for the Harrisburg City Islanders there were many “behind the scenes” types of activities I was exposed to. I sat in on and provided input for corporate partnership meetings that led to contracts. There was talk of me donning the mascot costume and also informing the team of the benefits of a “maintainance” massage as they will be scheduling appointments with the HACC massage therapy program as a result of one of the corporate partnership meetings. I can already tell that working in this small organization will give me the opportunity to get a taste of many different business projects and to leave some creative input in every one of those projects.
The criteria I used to choose my school of higher education right out of high school was the following. I didn’t want to just be on the soccer team, I wanted to play in all the games. I wanted to study business in the sports world. And I wanted it to be a small more intimate setting as described above. So I chose what is now the division III Mennonite based Bluffton University located in Northwestern Ohio.
It would have been nice to know about the possibility of choosing Sport Management as a major let alone what the SMPRC and COSMA were while I was in high school. I never even heard of it until I attended a college/university fair at Christian school of York. I believe there would be more of a recruiting class of Sport Management students and also less of a turn around in switching majors for freshmen and sophomores if correct inoformation of what the major is about was put out to high school students at a career assembly. I’m amazed sometimes of the amount of misconceptions I get when I tell people that I’m majoring in Sport managment. Most people either think I’m going to be a team medical trainer or a player agent. So I have my explaination ready to go whenever the question of what I am studying in school comes up. Hopefully, now that this area of study is becoming more popular, people will understand a little bit better what it entails.
July 6, 2009 at 10:19 pm
Tim – I’d agree with most of your 4-point pieces of advice, except I’d suggest location of students doing internships and getting jobs is most important. Like it or not (and plenty of sport mgt faculty don’t), we teach in a vocational degree program. Students enroll in sport mgt programs because they want to find a job in sports. The SMPRC standards (and likely COSMA) are focused on content, which is important. But at the end of the day, the mom or dad sitting in my office with their son or daughter really want to “where can I work?”