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Sports management programs build out international focus

Looking to expand their reach beyond the United States, schools and their respective sports management programs have turned their attention overseas for new educational opportunities.

Creating partnerships with other universities, sports organizations and companies, schools have begun to establish their brand across the world with the hopes of attracting international students and providing current students the opportunity to learn about sports business on a global scale.

Here is a sampling of what some of the top sports management programs around the country are doing on the international front.

University of Massachusetts-Amherst

For more than five years now, the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, part of the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has expanded its reach beyond the United States.

UMass established a program aimed at sport management students at Uninove, a university in Brazil. The program involves a weeklong, intensive immersion program in sports management hosted by UMass. Students from Uninove travel to Massachusetts for a week in the summer where they spend five days in the classroom learning about U.S. perspectives on sport management.

“It’s typically anywhere from 15 to 20 students each year,” said Steve McKelvey, an associate professor of sport

UMass professor Steve McKelvey lectures students in Japan.
Photo by: UMass
management and associate department chair for external relations at UMass. “In addition to the students coming up, usually at least a couple of the sport management professors from Uninove [come up.]”

Students tour the athletic facilities at UMass, the basketball hall of fame in Springfield, and Fenway Park and the facilities of the Boston Red Sox. Following the tour, students have an opportunity to attend a Red Sox game as well.

“This summer they’ll be coming up in August,” McKelvey said. “They get credit for this trip, it’s part of a course they’re teaching and the tour here’s the culminating experience.”

In addition to its partnership in Brazil, UMass has a program, announced this past January, with the Japan Professional Football League and Japan’s Ritsumeikan University. The J-League and Ritsumeikan have a joint program where they invite 30 to 33 students to compete for 10 executive-level positions across the 53-club, three-division league. UMass offers two online courses at Ritsumeikan: one centering on sports marketing in the fall, and one on sports finance in the spring.

“We build in video interviews with our alumni that are in these different roles to kind of round out the theory that we deliver,” McKelvey said.

A member of the UMass faculty travels to Kyoto once a year to give two days of lectures at the university to augment the online courses. Once the program concludes, the J-League selects 10 students to place into jobs within the league.

Ohio University

For the last six years, Ohio University has sent undergraduates to the University of Bayreuth in Germany for a three-week global consulting project as part of one of the school’s international programs it offers to sports management students.

Students travel to Germany and meet with students from Bayreuth and get to know them and their culture. They then collectively work on consulting projects with Adidas, whose headquarters are just up the road from Bayreuth.

Ohio and Bayreuth each send a professor to each other’s campus to teach for extended periods as part of the program.

“We’re looking at all kinds of different programs with them where our undergrads would spend two of their four years in Germany,” said Jim Kahler, executive director of the Center for Sports Administration at Ohio University.

Ohio also is part of the San Diego Sports Consulting Project. The three-week program based in San Diego involves students from Ohio, Iowa, DePaul and Deakin, a university in Australia. The first week of the program is a “boot camp” on Ohio’s campus in Athens.

“In that boot camp, we teach them the basics of consulting,” Kahler said. “We do mini consulting projects, then when we get to [San Diego] it’s a pretty packed schedule.”

In San Diego, students meet with clients such as the San Diego Padres, Competitor Group and Aztec Sports Properties. They then have two weeks to work on their projects and present to their respective clients at the end of the program.

Columbia University

The sports management program in the Columbia University School of Professional Studies continues several international programs it’s created over the years. One of them involves a partnership with one of the most storied soccer clubs in the world, FC Bayern Munich.

The program, announced in August 2015, offers students two courses: one in the fall and one in the spring. The first has students develop a social media strategy to help build the Bayern Munich brand in the U.S. Students learn to take quantitative and qualitative analyses and apply them to social media strategies. The second course involves students creating an integrated marketing plan for Bayern Munich’s U.S. tour, which occurs during the summer.

“The relationship with them is fairly comprehensive,” said Vince Gennaro, director of the master of science in sports management program at Columbia. “We had their executives on-site to lecture in our classes. We’re also looking to bring the story of the European Club model … into the classroom and have them be a part of the lessons we’re teaching.”

Columbia also has a partnership with the Instituto Superior de Derecha y Economíca, or ISDE, in Madrid. Students can earn a master’s in global sports law from ISDE along with a master’s in sports management from Columbia.
 
Gennaro said students can earn both degrees in 16 months.

The third international component Columbia offers is in partnership with Opta, a division of the Perform group out of the U.K. Opta provides in-match and player-performance data for cricket, soccer and rugby. Through the Opta alliance, Columbia offers an Analytics of Global Sport course focusing primarily on soccer analytics.

This year, the course included a case competition where students were required to build a roster for a Major League Soccer expansion team.

“We had executives from the MLS … they were the judges in the case competition,” Gennaro said. “Students got to learn analytical tools and techniques and apply it to the Opta data set, and then have it all culminate in the case competition [in] which [they] had an opportunity to present and network with industry executives.”

University of Oregon

In September, second-year sports MBA students from the University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center will travel to Asia for two weeks, a trip that the program has been taking for 15 years, establishing its reputation for global reach. For the second year, undergraduate students in the school’s sports business concentration will have the option of spending that same two-week span in Europe. The program introduced that trip for the first time last year, splitting time between Germany and Amsterdam, visiting Adidas’ global headquarters, Nike’s European headquarters, FC Bayern Munich and the Sportfive sports marketing agency.

“Moving forward, it’s time to get really crazy thinking about more aggressive global programming,” said Whitney Wagoner, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center. “Could that be distance learning under the brand of a U.S. program? Could it be more exchanges of students going back and forth? Can we be more aggressive on faculty and thought-leadership exchanges with universities abroad? It could be any or all of those, all the way up to a version of the world where we have branded satellite campuses, with a partner … on the ground, beaming faculty from Eugene in and out.

“I think we’re going to see folks get much more aggressive in really delivering content around the world because, frankly, there’s a huge need.”

Senior writer Bill King contributed to this report.

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