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| Browne-Sanders |
A college basketball standout at Northwestern who went on to play for the U.S. National Team, Anucha Browne-Sanders has always wanted to work in sports.In fact, she would have gone directly from the basketball court to the sports business arena had it not been for her father's advice to get some "pure business experience" first. It was good advice.
"He told me that once I got that pure business experience I'd be a natural fit for sports," Browne-Sanders said.
So she took his advice and took the first job that was offered to her, a sales job for Eastman Kodak in 1987.
The Kodak job eventually turned into another sales job, this time at IBM's New York City offices.
"I think sales gave me a great pulse on marketing and a sense of business as a whole," Browne-Sanders said.
Then, in 1996, Browne-Sanders got her first taste of working in sports business — as a volunteer at the Atlanta Olympics.
IBM, which was an Olympic sponsor at that time, was looking for internal volunteers to help at the Games, and Browne-Sanders jumped at the opportunity. As a volunteer in Atlanta, she worked as a team liaison for basketball.
A few months after the Olympics, there was a sports job posting in IBM's corporate marketing office. Naturally, Browne-Sanders applied for the job.
"She was so impressive during her interview," said Eli Primrose-Smith, who at the time was vice president of worldwide sports sponsorships for IBM. "I immediately talked to my head of marketing and said, 'I think you need to talk to this woman. She really has the kind of resources and the kind of go-getter attitude that we need.' "
Problem was, Browne-Sanders was pregnant with her third child and was due to give birth in a month. She wouldn't be able to start until weeks after the birth.
Primrose-Smith said the marketing department heads were so impressed by Browne-Sanders that they said "go have your baby and the job will be waiting for you when you get back."
While working in IBM's corporate marketing division, Browne-Sanders worked on the company's Olympic sponsorship efforts during the Nagano and Sydney Games.
"She always asked for feedback so that she could expand her capabilities and make sure she was on the right track," said Primrose-Smith, now vice president of global security solutions for IBM. "She was also resilient under pressure, something that I think comes from being an athlete at an elite level."
After she spent 11 years with IBM, the New York Knicks, who had IBM as a sponsor, were able to lure Browne-Sanders to their team offices. She joined the team in November 2000 as vice president of marketing. In less than two years she was promoted to senior vice president of marketing and business operations. The role makes her one of only a few high-ranking female executives of an NBA team.
"What she's been able to do with the Knicks is bring not only an understanding of basketball and the competitive side of the sport but also a more traditional marketing perspective," said Steve Mills, president of sports teams operations for Madison Square Garden.
Mills said he promoted Browne-Sanders to her latest position in May because he needed someone who had wide-ranging expertise in areas that included marketing, public relations, community relations and basketball operations to focus on the Knicks.
"What makes Anucha stand out is her competitiveness," Mills said. "You see it in everything she does, whether it's her day-to-day work or when she's on the Garden floor playing basketball with the guys from our ad sales group. ... There are a lot of stories about how shocked they were when they first played against her."
