There’s more to career development and preparation than just textbooks, after all
By Matt Brown, Extra Points
Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.
There are hundreds of schools throughout the country that offer some type of Sports Management degree or certification. While they might all be called Sports Management, I’ve come to learn that often, these schools don’t have all that much in common. Some degree programs are run out of business schools, while others are part of Kinesiology, or perhaps other liberal arts programs. They might focus primarily on professional sports, collegiate sports, or community/K12 sports management opportunities. Curriculum could include anything from event management to finance, media to law, and even other disciplines.
Sports Management majors are frequently popular programs for smaller schools to start, especially if they’re concerned about male student enrollment. After all, they typically don’t require expensive laboratory equipment or massive physical spaces, and if you already have an athletic department, you’ve got built in practical experiences for the students.
But the dirty little secret is that while these majors can be popular with students and university administrators, there just aren’t that many jobs in the sports industry, and the jobs that do exist tend to be highly competitive. You don’t need a Sports Management major to potentially sell tickets for the Chicago White Sox, run the local parks department, or serve as a high school athletic director. Folks with completely different academic backgrounds can be successful in those jobs as well.
So it’s critical for anybody designing a Sports Management program to figure out a way to stand out and offer students something different, but also aligned with the skills and expertise that the real world actually needs.
Which is why I wanted to reach out to Abilene Christian. It looks like they’re trying to build something that is meaningfully different with their Center for Sports Leadership and Learning.
Even though, like with many other departments, their story starts in professional sports.
Ben Baroody, the Executive Director of the Center for Sports Leadership and Learning, isn’t a career academic. His career starting in Major League Baseball, first in operations, and then in a variety of scouting and player development roles in the MLB Commissioner’s Office and with the Texas Rangers.
His last role was a unique one in professional baseball. “My job title was Director of Leadership Development”, Baroody told me. “My focus was providing the best resources to develop the holistic individual, to give them a strong foundation, and to help them perform at their best professionally.”
With players, Baroody explained that his work would focus on “how to define a refined sense of identity…how to develop healthy habits…how to help them build a vision not just for their professional baseball career, but the rest of their life.” But the Leadership Development job wasn’t just to help the baseball players perform at their best. Baroody also worked with developing coaches. “We’d work on how we could improve coaches as communicators, how they can create the best learning and development environments, how to build cultures of trust.”
These are particularly important skills to develop across an entire baseball organization, according to Baroody. Many professional baseball players did not attend college, and may be dealing with a variety of culture shocks while also trying to perform at an elite level nearly every day. But many of the coaches in a professional baseball organization may also be young, recently removed from their playing days, and without much in the way of formal leadership training.
“To be a good coach, you need more than just technical expertise,” Baroody added. “You need to be an effective communicator, a mental performance coach, maybe even a psychologist sometimes.” Those aren’t all skills that folks just have, or could be picked up over the course of a seminar or two in the offseason. They need to be cultivated and developed.
That sort of direct and intentional programming, according to Baroody, isn’t common in professional sports.
That’s a big part of what Center for Sports Leadership and Learning is trying to address The Center for Sports Leadership and Learning does offer more traditional course programming. You can enroll and earn a Bachelor of Science in Sports Leadership & Management, or a Master of Science in Sports Leadership. Because the bulk of the curriculum is online, the Center is actually based at ACU’s Dallas campus, rather than Abilene.
But unlike many other traditional programs, the Center also offers professional development services and consulting services for other academic institutions, professional sports teams, or non-professional sports organizations. The major focus on that programming, according to Baroody, is on leadership development, rather than say, the exact mathematical formula to optimize ticket prices.
That could be useful curriculum for undergraduates looking to find their way in the industry, but Baroody also sees such training as potentially very useful for small college coaches, graduate assistants at other institutions, high school staffers, and others. Since coaching usually involves regular travel and weird schedules, a curriculum that is more based around online learning is often a better fit.
“There was some intentionality about creating a sport leadership program rather than a traditional sport management program.”, he told me. ACU wanted to create something different. Which makes sense, because ACU athletics doesn’t have $300 million to attempt to do things exactly the same way Texas and Texas A&M do. They have to look for competitive advantages.
And that’s exactly how Baroody sees leadership development.
“Sport is all about innovation. It’s all about establishing competitive advantages. You can have all the data, all the information, all these tools…but it comes down to peopleutilizing them for effective decision-making. If you can upskill all your coaches, and then all the exponential impact that those coaches have on player skill development and creating a culture…well, then the expected value would be massive.”
This is a useful way to think about resource management in sports, whether you compete in the WAC, the GLIAC, The Big 12, or the AL Central. Plenty of schools are prepared to spend five, six, sometimes seven figures to try to gain an edge in sports science, or strength and nutrition, or better utilizing statistics to improve in-game decisions. That’s great!
But all that wizbang technology isn’t very useful if nobody on staff can translate what they’re seeing on the spreadsheets to what a 19-year-old can understand. All the fancy weightlifting technology can’t motivate somebody to wake up at 4:30 AM to barbell row. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody has figured out a way to automate the technical instruction of sport excellence.
All of that comes from people…people who know how to communicate, to lead and to love, day after day after day. That isn’t just something that people are born with. It’s a skill. And if it’s a skill that you can learn, that means there can be places that can teach it to you.
That’s what ACU is trying to build. Preparing the next generation of coaches and administrators is hard, and there’s an awful lot of competition out there.
But talking with Ben and reading about the center reminds me of a mantra that was beat into my head as a young man growing up outside the shadow of Ohio Stadium in Columbus. It’s a phrase, attributed to former football coach Woody Hayes, and you’ll see it everywhere around campus and around Columbus, even in places that have nothing to do with sports.
“You win with people.”
Anything that teaches would be coaches and leaders how to win with people is worth your time, in my humble opinion.
You can learn how to price your tickets. Learning how to lead is usually much, much harder.
Originally published on June 4, 2025 at extrapointsmb.com
