Whitney Wagoner was back home in Oregon, a freshly minted MBA in her back pocket and seven years spent working in corporate marketing at the NFL under her belt, when the director of the sports marketing program at her alma mater asked her to meet him for lunch.
“And here I sit, 13 years later,” said Wagoner, who this week will be introduced as managing director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, replacing Paul Swangard, the person who recruited her to the Oregon faculty over that fateful lunch.
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Whitney Wagoner’s role will include fundraising and industry and alumni outreach efforts.
Photo by: JACK LIU / UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
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“Life happens when you least expect it,” said Wagoner, who taught sports marketing and sponsorships and eventually added responsibility for undergraduate sports business curriculum at the university. “I love teaching. I love mentoring. I love being real with the students, offering them a realistic, pragmatic view of what it is to work in sports.
“I was built for this job.”
Wagoner’s role will differ significantly from that of her predecessor, thanks to a revamping of the department that will divide Swangard’s previous responsibilities between two full-time staff members.
Wagoner’s focus will be external, building industry involvement and engagement, managing alumni relations and fundraising. Management of the MBA program will be handled by Craig Leon, who previously served as outreach coordinator for the Warsaw Center. The university will hire an undergraduate program manager to replace Wagoner. It also will soon begin a search to add a professor of practice from the sports industry.
“While Warsaw was one of the first programs of its kind and remains among the best, the world is changing and the idea that this is an interesting career path is not a secret anymore,” said John Hull, assistant dean for centers of excellence at the Oregon business school. “There’s far more competition now. So I think it’s time to up our game as well, to take our rich tradition and amplify it.”
The search for Swangard’s replacement began in November, when he informed university administrators that he would step down when his contract expired at the end of the academic year, opting to pursue opportunities in the broadcast career that he exited at the behest of program founder Jim Warsaw. A national search that brought together alumni and other program supporters yielded several high-profile candidates, Hull said. But none brought the combination that Wagoner offered.
“Whitney is just a dynamo,” Hull said. “High charisma. High energy. She knew [program founder] Jim Warsaw. She knew the building and how it operates. But she also had industry experience. The combination was just overpowering.”
Wagoner, who received her undergraduate degree at Oregon, interned at the NFL, starting off answering phones. She spent seven years at the league, rising to become a corporate sales and marketing manager. After completing an MBA at NYU, she intended to make her way back west. That move was hastened by the terrorist attacks of 2001, Wagoner said. Wagoner thought she would take a few months off and then look for another sports job but decided to try teaching at her alma mater.
While she will assume Swangard’s title, the role will be a new one for the program.
“Paul had such significant internal operational responsibilities — we’ve used the colloquial ‘keeping the trains running’ — that there really wasn’t time to do much more than that,” Wagoner said. “The role I will be stepping into has virtually none of that. It allows me in the director’s chair to spend time outside the building.
“We had been underperforming in some key areas. There are key constituents we have never been able to manage in the way we wanted because we didn’t have the bandwidth to free someone up. Those relationships could bear fruit in a way that quickly could be transformational.”
