With another college graduation season all but behind us, now is a good time to address a question I hear all the time from recent graduates:
How do I get a job in sports?
My first job out of college had nothing to do with sports: I was a reporter for a weekly newspaper covering local zoning board meetings. Because of that background, the advice I always give recent graduates focuses on developing skills — sales, marketing, business development — that can be transferred to the sports business.
Others have taken a different route to get into sports. I’ve heard executives talk about taking low-level jobs just to get a foot in the door, then working their way up through an organization.
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Natalie Ravitz, not a big sports fan growing up, started in politics. Her brother Nate, a Knicks and Rangers fan from a young age, began in a low-level sports job. It’s worked out well for both.
Photo by: COURTESY OF NATALIE RAVITZ
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Both of these approaches were used by a brother and sister who are making waves in the business.
Nate Ravitz, who was just promoted to vice president of audience development at
ESPN, got his start by taking a low-level job during his senior year in college and working his way up. Nate’s younger sister,
Natalie, took jobs that had nothing to do with sports — politics and media — before landing at the NFL as senior vice president of communications last month.
Nate said that even as a young boy, he always wanted to work in sports. Natalie said she didn’t share Nate’s sporting ambitions and started exploring a job in sports while working on Capitol Hill 14 years ago.
Natalie got her start in politics. She lived in Washington, D.C., and worked as a press secretary to Sen. Paul Wellstone (D-Minn.) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) before moving to New York to work for the city’s then-mayor, Michael Bloomberg. Eventually she moved over to 21st Century Fox as Rupert Murdoch’s chief of staff.
“Sports was such a big part of what we did at Fox,” she said. “I became more interested in it from a business standpoint but also as a cultural institution.”
Ironically, it was Natalie’s political connections that helped her land a job at the NFL. In January, the NFL hired President Bill Clinton’s former press secretary Joe Lockhart as executive vice president of communications. Though Natalie had not worked with Lockhart, the two had known each other for 10 years.
“We’d always stayed in touch,” she said. “When I knew that Joe was going to take his job, he said, ‘Can we sit down and talk and see if you’d be interested? I think this might be a great fit.’ It was definitely the thing that I was entirely focused on. I passed up on some other things in the meantime waiting to see if this would work out.”
Natalie said she played a lot of sports as a child — basketball, tennis, softball, swimming and golf — but she was not a big sports fan. Her brother, however, described himself as “the typical obsessive sports fan,” staying up to watch Knicks and Rangers games on MSG Network and keeping notebooks filled with statistics of his favorite players.
“He was the kid that was keeping stats and notebooks from the time he was in middle school,” Natalie said. “I remember thinking as a kid, What is he going to do with all those notebooks? He turned it into a business when he was at the University of Michigan. He’s been much clearer about his path.”
Nate’s strategy to get into sports was to start at a low level and work his way up. As a senior in Ann Arbor, Nate took a job writing for a fantasy site called Total Quality Stats, which led to his participation in launching Roto Times. Eventually, he landed at ESPN, where he worked with senior fantasy sports analyst Matthew Berry, appearing on Berry’s podcast.
After a few years, Nate moved over to the business side of ESPN, and his new role has him overseeing the programming of digital content on ESPN.com and the ESPN app.
“I always knew that I wanted to work in sports,” Nate said. “I didn’t necessarily know what that meant. I was most fascinated with the idea of working for a team.”
The Ravitz siblings did not share a lot of sporting memories growing up. Michigan’s football team went undefeated and shared the national title with Nebraska in 1997, when Natalie was a freshman and Nate was a junior. But Natalie remembers at least one shared experience.
“Nate loved Wrestlemania and dragged me to a couple of Summer Slams,” she said with a laugh. “I can’t believe that I’ve been to Summer Slam or even know what Summer Slam is.”
John Ourand can be reached at jourand@sportsbusinessjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @Ourand_SBJ.
