|
|
 |
 |
August 2004 MBA Students Sign up for Front Office #560
by Cathy Castillo It might be fair to say that the Business School's popular elective courses in sports management got their start at the Shark Tank in San Jose. At least that's where Business School faculty members first discussed the idea. During a lull in the action at a San Jose Sharks game in November 2001, George Foster told fellow hockey fan Jerry Porras he was planning to set up an MBA elective on sports management the following academic year. Porras, who for years had been Stanford's NCAA faculty representative, immediately recommended Foster get in touch with Bill Walsh, the Hall of Fame NFL coach who at that time was working with the San Francisco 49ers. "Bill's response was 'Love to, but why wait until next year?'" recalls Foster. He and Walsh—with an assist from Roni Almog, MBA '02, who had covered the National Football League for the Mexican media before enrolling at the Business School—began planning. Six weeks later they were in the classroom offering a nine-session MBA course in sports business management. "We used the format I'd been using in my entrepreneurship courses," Foster says, including a case for each session with a related guest speaker. Winter quarter Foster, the Paul L. and Phyllis Wattis Professor of Management, and Walsh, a former Stanford coach who has recently rejoined the Stanford athletic department, offered a full 19-session elective, Sports Business Management. In the spring, Foster offered two half-courses, Sports Business Financing and Sports Marketing. The classes are popular, not because hundreds of current MBA students want to work in the front office of a professional football team or baseball league, but because the cases and guest lecturers offer a tantalizing look into some of the stickiest and most highly publicized problems in business today. "It is possible to combine substantive academic content with contemporary issues facing key areas of the sports industry," says Foster. "In many sports, you're managing a group of twenty 17- to 35-year-olds who are being paid enormous amounts of money and whose behavior can be difficult to predict. There can be difficult ethical issues, and the media is hungry. It's a huge industry that attracts tremendous attention," says Foster. There are byzantine financial structures concerning stadiums and player salary caps, broadcast issues that could give a hockey player a headache, and the small business challenges of founding a minor league or running a franchise. The issues are so compelling that Foster, who has written or supervised over 20 sports-related cases; Walsh; and Stephen A. Greyser, who teaches similar sports management classes at Harvard Business School, are working together on a book that will include discussions of nine major areas of sports management. The book, says Foster, will provide faculty at other schools enough content and teaching materials to develop similar sports management courses. One upside of the work in sports management can be seen in executive education. The National Football League has spent two summers at the Business School with executives from the league and its 32 teams and from the players association, all participating in an intensive one-week program directed by Foster and Walsh. "I've been fascinated with the business end of sports for many years," says Foster, a native of Australia whose first sports were rugby, soccer, and cricket. "In the 1990s I was lucky enough to join touring rugby teams and see behind the scenes. I was staying at the team hotels and it was natural to chat with the executives who had lots of time while the players practiced. An important part of my life revolves around sports and many of my friends are in that area." Some of his guest speakers would raise the pulse of any armchair athlete: Brent Jones and Steve Young of the San Francisco 49ers and Chicago Cubs coach Dusty Baker, to name a few. Others have made headlines in the business arena. They include Peter Magowan and Jack Bair of the San Francisco Giants; Brian Grey, general manager of Yahoo! Sports; Charles Hoeveler, MBA '69, founder of US Sports Camps, the country's largest network of summer camps; Tom Shepard of Visa International, who oversees all international sponsorships; and Leo Hindery Jr., MBA '71, who pioneered the Yankees Entertainment and Sports Network (YES Network) that has changed cable sports programming. "They bring in sports figures as speakers only if they have experience on the business side," said Amy Wustefeld, MBA '02, who took the first class offered. A Stanford basketball player as an undergrad, Wustefeld was president of the Sports Management Club as an MBA student and found that the class provided a bonus, introducing her to sports managers she might not have met elsewhere. She did projects for Wally Walker, MBA '87, president and CEO of the Seattle Sonics, and an independent study project on women's sports leagues that grew into a case study. Her connection with Hindery and the YES Network also resulted in a case. "I really got deep into the network without working there," said Wustefeld, who is now a consultant with Bain and Co. "There are only a few times in life that you can sit down with someone like Hindery and share thoughts." |
|
RELATED STORIES A Different Game in College Sports
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
