MSBC hosts annual conference

Correction (10/29): A previous version of this article misspelled Julie Uhrman and Carver Messick’s names in some instances. A previous version incorrectly stated that Ella Tannenbaum is a Business student. Tannenbaum is a student in the School of Kinesiology.

University of Michigan football helmets and banners adorned the walls of the School of Kinesiology’s atrium on Friday for the 2024 Michigan Sport Business Conference. About 1,100 U-M students, alumni and sports professionals from the marketing, business and fashion industries across the nation gathered to share sports and business knowledge in a series of speeches and panel events.

The 13th annual conference focused on sports in the streaming world, sports law and the evolution of women’s sports. Natalie Gormerly and Annie Skier, MSBC’s first female presidents, delivered the ceremony’s opening speeches. Dannie Rogers, the team reporter for the Detroit Lions, was the conference emcee. 

Keynote speaker Mary Ellen Coe, chief business officer of YouTube, discussed YouTube’s recent partnership with the NFL. She detailed their expansion into the sports broadcasting industry with the development of new subscription packages, like the NFL Sunday Ticket and YouTube TV bundle.

“When you’re partnering with the league, it is a constant push for ‘How do we continue to drive engagement and fandom and growth?’” Coe said. “One of the great things about having this premium content and being a streaming platform, it’s allowed us to have incredible innovation. This is one of the reasons we’re seeing sports content shift in the streaming environment. It’s not just the reach — it’s the ability to innovate.” 

Following Coe’s speech, the conference featured several panel discussions on professional tracks in the sports industry, including “Minority Investments, Major Moves: Private Equity in Sport” and “Capturing the Moment: Careers in Sport Content.” Students had the opportunity to network during the career breakout and partner networking session following the panels.   

In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Kinesiology junior Carver Messick, chief operating officer of MSBC, told the audience about the challenges and benefits of organizing such a large conference. 

“We’re all undergraduate students who balance being full-time students, having a college social life and also putting on a conference with 1,000 attendees,” Messick said. “It’s for students, by students. Mainly, we get to educate our peers through our speakers on the industry and provide them with networking opportunities they wouldn’t already have.” 

The second keynote speaker was Jeffrey Kessler, an antitrust and sports lawyer from Winston & Strawn, who spoke about his work on the National Collegiate Athletic Association v. Alston case, Deflategate allegations and the Women’s National Soccer Team equal pay settlement. The final panel, “Paris 2024 to Los Angeles 2028 Olympics,” featured Frederick Richard, U-M gymnast and Paris 2024 bronze medalist; Gary Zenkel, president of NBC Olympics; Chris Pepe, chief commercial officer at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Properties; and Katie Bynum Aznavorian, chief strategy and growth officer for the United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee. 

Panelists discussed the intersection of social media and sports storytelling by athletes in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Richard said he chose to document his journey from the Olympic trials to Paris on TikTok because he wanted people to know more about who he is as a person. 

“Number one, they had to believe in me and, number two, they wanted to do something different,” Richard said. “They wanted to really get my full story, not to show my gymnastics. And so I got to express that I care about social media, that I cared about film, community, media and being at Michigan, and it made a drastic change because after people watch that, they feel like they know me a little bit.” 

The closing keynote speech was delivered by Julie Uhrman, president and co-founder of Angel City Football Club. Founded in 2022, ACFC is one of the world’s only women-led and founded professional sports teams. Urhman discussed the challenges of founding an all-women professional soccer team. 

“What I had to convince you of is that people watch women’s sports,” Uhrman said. “They care about women’s sports. They will invest in women’s sports. They will show up to women’s sports. … This is an incredible product, but nobody had ever invested in it in the way that it deserved, therefore equal to how you experience it with men.”

Uhrman said that when she found out most sports teams generate little to no profit, she and the other co-founders adopted a new approach to their business model: generate revenue, make a profit and reinvest it back into the community through programs to combat food insecurity and increase access to education. 

“Our mission was to drive revenue,” Uhrman said. “So I‘m a (like a) corporate brand, and I can drive attention awareness for pay equity, gender equity, disability equity in these women’s sports and entertainment as the filter. Then not only can I drive revenue, but I can take that revenue and put it back again.” 

According to Uhrman, this approach leaves a lasting and positive impact on a team’s local community beyond just providing sports entertainment.  

“You’re going to get your 13 games a year, you’re going to get all your game-day assets, but it doesn’t stop at the end of the 90 minutes,” Uhrman said. “We’re going to be in the community. We’re going to be making a difference, and we’re going to be telling them stories on social (media), to your customer base, to our fan base. The partnership is so much bigger than just the football.” 

The end of the conference featured an awards ceremony during which four students from other universities were presented with the BIG Initiative Award. The award highlights student leadership in the sports industry. 

One of the winners, Katherine Cottrell, a senior at Clemson University studying sports communication and marketing, told The Daily that she attributes her winning to years of hard work in the sports communications field. 

“I’ve done a lot,” Cottrell said. “I started in a fan experience role, kind of event operations. Then I started working within broadcast television. I’ve done radio production. I’ve done organizational (communication), so I’ve really tried to kind of take advantage of every opportunity that I’ve had — and this is really just a celebration of that.” 

In an interview with The Daily, Kinesiology junior Ella Tannenbaum, vice president of marketing at MSBC, said the conference emphasizes connecting students with alumni and professionals to provide students with future career opportunities.     

“My hope for all the attendees is that they walk away with a little bit more understanding of what they want to do, and maybe someone that could help them, (something) like an email address they got, or a conversation that they had that they think can really further their career,” Tannenbaum said. “Why we do this at the end of the day, is to help students and to connect people because it really provides a really awesome space for that to happen.” 

Daily Staff Reporter Claudia Minetti can be reached at cminetti@umich.edu. 

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