As a consultant to clubs in Major League Baseball and president of the Society for American Baseball Research, Vince Gennaro is known best for his work analyzing team payrolls and developing methods of player valuation, applying the same sort of analytic approach that he demanded while in senior roles at PepsiCo. But his appointment as director of the sports management program at Columbia University’s School of Continuing Education may offer a chance to have an even greater impact on the place of analytics in sports. He spoke recently about the opportunities that the analytics boom is creating on the business side of sports franchises.
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There are an awful lot of people out there with graduate sports management degrees who haven’t been able to find employment [in sports]. I think that has a lot to do with curriculum and what we’re teaching, or not teaching, these students.”
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Photo by: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF CONTINUING EDUCATION
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On matching graduates with needs: Given my background and connections in the sports industry, I worked backward by talking to prospective employers about what skills they’re looking for. One of the real changes in sports business today is that the business is flush with information and data. If students can’t come out of a program and be able to make a contribution to that right out of the blocks, we are not really doing our job. One of the things we’re building is our students’ critical thinking skills. The ability to process information and data.
On adding a full-time degree path: We’ve added a full-time cohort which will allow us to take ourselves beyond this 60-mile radius that we have now. We draw international students that can now get a visa. We’ve brought in 30 part-time [students] and 20 full-timers this fall for our first full-time group. Two are from Russia. One is from Hong Kong.
Everybody wants to be Billy Beane: I work hard to explain to people that that’s a different animal [on the personnel side]. I’m not saying we can’t have lectures on those tools. But it’s more on how they morph to the business side.
From soda to shortstops to sponsor metrics: I come from an environment in PepsiCo where I ran a billion-dollar business using tools like this. … These are tools that have been around in industry for a long time but found their way into the sports side [of franchises] first. Mark Shapiro came up through the baseball side. He has professionalized the whole business side [of the Cleveland Indians] by bringing people and tools from the baseball side to the business side.
