Podcast Alert: Jeff Longo & Patrick Stack – Sports Biz Careers

Transcript

+^

Jeff Longo: [00:00:00] Especially for high school students, you know, there’s sometimes a lack of awareness of all the different roles that there are in the industry, whether it’s analytics or PR or sales, whatever that is. Just simply providing awareness of those opportunities is really important for young people, and then access to the people who are currently doing those roles.

Anne Ristau: Welcome to the Navigating Sports Business Podcast. I’m your host for today, Anne Ristau, executive Vice President of Consulting at Navigate. We started this podcast to showcase some of the incredible people that we get to interact with every day and the impactful work that they’re doing in our industry. We hope you learn something about them.

And something from them in our conversation[00:01:00]

today, I am happy to be joined by Jeff Longo and Patrick Stack, co-founders of Sports Biz Careers. Welcome Jeff and Patrick.

Patrick Stack: Thank you very much, and thank you. We’re gonna talk over each other probably the whole time.

Anne Ristau: I love it. Although we don’t usually have two guests and we’ll see how this goes. But I know you two I think, can make it exceptional.

And I’ll say before we get going that you know, navigate has been partnered with SBC for several years, helping to support your mission of changing the lives of underrepresented high school and college students through the sports business. We love working on our summer fellowship program with you, as well as having team members who participate in the Coaching Tree, which I know we’re gonna talk about.

Just awesome stuff you’re doing. But before we get into Sports Biz Careers, can each of you tell me about your first job in sports? [00:02:00] How you landed it. I dunno. Pat, do you wanna kick us off?

Patrick Stack: Yeah, for sure. Uh, thanks again and really do appreciate the opportunity. So I graduated from graduate school in 2008, which for the listeners that are old enough to remember, that was a challenging time to be alive.

Challenging time for our economy, very challenging time for the sports industry. So I, I actually had an internship with GMR Marketing through some alumni of the graduate program I went to, which was Ohio University. And then eventually that expired because of the economy. So then I was unemployed living with my parents, turned 25, had two master’s degrees and couldn’t find a job.

And then I actually had identified a role during my internship and built some relationships during my internship with someone who went on to work at the Charlotte Checkers hockey team. And I basically got outta my parents’ house, moved back down to Charlotte. From being unemployed and it was able to land a role with the Charlotte Checkers hockey team, which was a cool opportunity.

It was at the time ECHL, which is like the double equivalent, but they had known a year from when they hired me, they were gonna move into the A HL. So it was a great [00:03:00] opportunity for me to join professional hockey and also kind of build something as they were sending. So yeah, minor league hockey is where I got my.

Anne Ristau: How about you, Joe?

Jeff Longo: So, yeah, beat myself

pretty quickly. My undergrad came to an end in 1997 and, and at the time, you know, there wasn’t a plethora of, of, you know, sports marketing programs the way they are now. I was actually a psychology and communications major. You know, I thought I wanted to be a college professor teaching psychology, which is where I eventually wound up just in sports.

And I had a teammate that I played hockey with at Rutgers, who the year before had interned with the New York Rangers and wound up. Securing a full-time position there. And it was the year that the Rangers had signed Wayne Gretzky in 1997. So he sort of came to me and, you know, said, look, we’ve got this opportunity in, go into your silly psychology stuff later.

Why don’t you come and check out this internship? I think you’d really enjoy it. And I had an opportunity to work in public relations intern with the New York Rangers and the world’s most famous arena. You know, one of my, you know, responsibilities at the time was literally to be in the locker room. We [00:04:00] were recording and then transcribing the, uh, you know, the post-game interviews and handing ’em out to the be writers.

So that really dates myself. But, you know, I went from not having, uh, a real knowledge of that. These things even happened to immediately being thrown into it in this really high profile role. And the neat thing is that we’ll talk about early. It, it, it speaks. Almost immediately to Social Capital, right?

Both Pat and myself go got those jobs because somebody who knew us tapped us on the shoulder and said, Hey, you know, you’ve got this work ethic. You’ve done this, you’ve done that. Here’s an opportunity. Why don’t you explore it and see what’s there for you?

Anne Ristau: Social capital timing, although I have to say the businesses started by 2000 graduates and then 2008, I can’t wait to see what the 2020 class will do.

Yeah, because it’s certainly, well, I know it’s not easy to be in those job markets. It is impressive to see what people have done. Okay. How did you two meet? And for those you know, maybe who are listeners who don’t know, talk about [00:05:00] sports biz careers, what you do and, and how it all started?

Patrick Stack: Yeah. I’ll start with the first part, Jeff, and maybe you build on the SBC part, but our paths were kind of inextricably linked, so.

I mentioned, I started my career in minor league hockey and a corporate sales position, like an entry-level corporate sales position. The only reason I got that job was because the team president of that team had left to move on to the New Jersey Devils, and that kind of created a, a spot on the lower on the wrongs.

Everyone moved up. That person who left was Jeff Longo, so we didn’t know each other, but basically in some ways he was, he’s always been blazing a trail for me. And his promotion up to the big leagues kind of created that role for me. So I, I had known about him because he had hired everyone I worked for, and he was kind of connected to how I was gonna look at the role, but I didn’t know him in person.

And so a couple years later when he had left that job and kind of came back to Charlotte and, and to be frank. Started consulting the organization and, and was like, I think I want to be a professor. So it was asking me a bit about my graduate school experience. I was taking grad school and then I was getting his mentorship in my current [00:06:00] role at the Checkers, and then kind of the rest is history.

So that’s initially how we met.

Jeff Longo: Yeah. Forget about the fact that we worked so closely together for, for a few years with the checkers that, uh, it was weird. Always nice to reflect. So at Sports Biz Careers, we provide personal and professional development for young people who are aspiring to get into the sports industry.

So essentially we’ve got programming for both high school and college students, but we focus on awareness, access, and acceleration. So. Especially for high school students, you know, there’s sometimes a lack of awareness of all the, you know, the different roles that there are in the industry, you know, whether it’s analytics or PR or sales, whatever that is.

Just simply providing awareness of those opportunities is really important for young people. And then access to the people, uh, who are currently doing those roles. So, as we talked about earlier, both Pat and myself. Had access through, you know, sort of just life’s relationships, had access to people who were doing those roles.

We provide the access to, to those folks in a more formal matter. And in [00:07:00] terms of acceleration, that could look different for any student. So again, it, it could be simple mentoring and some cases it’s hiring them for our programs, connecting them with internships. In some cases it’s college scholarships, but it’s more personalized as they kind of work their way through the Sports Biz careers funnel.

Patrick Stack: And, and just kind of building on that, like I think our, that’s like what we do. I think our origin story, and I, I know that you’ve probably had a lot of other entrepreneurs on here and I guess I never, we never thought about ourselves as entrepreneurs, but we are, we can own that now. It’s been five years we started something, but, you know, you can’t always trace it back to one conversation.

And, and to be candid, like Jeff and I’s role in getting this launch was. A myriad of conversations over probably six years. We had all, we had both been professionals as we kind of alluded to a bit earlier, and then we both be became professors. So Jeff was a professor at Johnson and Wales. He got me in as an adjunct in 2014, so I started teaching there.

He then got me in full time in 2016. So basically we’re both teaching college kids on how to get access the sports industry and, and obviously [00:08:00] we’re doing what we are in the classroom to support them, but so much of how we approach it was outside of the classroom. Like how do we get these kids jobs?

That’s our goal. Like how do we get these kids jobs? They signed up to come to Johnson and Wales, we’re helping them get on the path by like, we need to get these kids jobs. And over those years you start to have conversations of, did you notice this kid’s having this challenge? And he’s like, yeah, that they are having that challenge.

Did you know if we had that guest speaker come in, like they really got excited about that guest speaker? Yes. They got excited. We were kind of piecing these things together, usually over beers to be frank, and we started to kind of isolate around the same problem that these students were facing, and Jeff alluded to it, awareness, access, acceleration.

It was like, cool, we’re gonna fix this. And we’re fixing that on an individual basis. Like anything else, like we’re sitting down with the student to help them understand things like social capital and why they need to network and how to go through the process. But then you start doing it individually.

You’re like, we should be doing this at scale. Like if, if we could create systems. Not only could we do it, which is obviously one part of it, but kind of getting to some other parts of the conversation today. Other people wanna help us help that kid. It’s not just us. We’re not the only ones trying to help these [00:09:00] kids.

There’s industry professionals that wanna donate their time, that wanna help out, but they don’t know how to access those students. They don’t know when to access those students. Maybe we create a system that can solve some of these problems, and I guess that’s what’s called an organization. All of a sudden we kinda launched it.

So the origin story was really pieced together through our personal experiences and then what we felt as professors and ultimate what what we felt as the industry wanting to get involved in supporting young people and in many ways to be candid. And industry’s always looking for talent and motivated college students to join the industry.

So everyone’s interest were online. There was just, there was just no one bringing that together. And there was like a year where we were doing research, like someone must be doing something like this. Like we were like researching. Everything. ’cause we had lots of imposter syndrome and still do. We’re like, we shouldn’t try this.

Like someone else is probably doing it better than us before we even try it. And then it was like, holy crap. Like no one’s doing this in the way that we wanted to do it. And I think the last thing I would add is when we launched all, everything is about inclusion. So our programs then and [00:10:00] now are free.

So no student ever pays for our program because in many ways the the biggest limiting factor in terms of inclusion is cost then that we saw that as college students. Dealing with the cost of education versus other opportunities, we get involved. So everything is always free. And then once the end thing that we didn’t really hammer home, then I wanna make sure we, we recognize is everything is inclusive from an inclusion standpoint in terms of gender, uh, and ethnicity.

We’re, we’re trying to make sure that the future of our industry doesn’t look like the past, which historically has been led by white men like us. And that is, was well and good in in terms of how they were trying to build the organization. And I don’t know that there’s a lot of intention around excluding other people.

That’s how I like to look at it. But as we look at the current and the future, there’s not enough representation within the sports industry in the way that it should be in terms of how, what we’re seeing on the field, what we’re seeing on the court. And we saw the challenges that our students who lacked representation were dealing with.

And sports-based careers was a solution to support those [00:11:00] students as well. So. From the start, it was about inclusion based upon no matter how much money you have, you get to be a part of this program. And then two, we wanted to specifically emphasize how we can support those who are underrepresented in the sports industry.

Anne Ristau: That’s awesome. And I think the cost element is not one to be ignored. And I think we’ve seen dramatic progress even last five, 10 years, where all sports Indus internships used to be unpaid, which again, is well intended and they’re small organizations, but it’s certainly. Does only resonate with those, you know, students who can take an unpaid internship.

So I love that. Um, and

Patrick Stack: that was like the, to add on that, that was the saddest thing. We’d work with a student who would maybe work game days and concessions for a sports team, and then we’d be talking to ’em about how they can get an internship and they get offered an internship. And then the internship says.

You have to work for free and then you can’t make sense that a student to say, quit your paying job to go get an unpaid job ’cause that’s gonna help you in your career. That might be the, what the industry would say, but that’s socioeconomically exclusive. I couldn’t look [00:12:00] at, Jeff could look at a student in the face and say, turn down money that you need to pay your bills.

So go work for free. It doesn’t make any sense. So to your point, I think the industry started to to change that, which is great.

Anne Ristau: It is great. Okay. And talk about the launch. Initially you were sports biz camps and you’ve recently rebranded. And maybe some of the initial programs that you started with and where you are today.

Patrick Stack: Yeah. Jeff, back me up on this. We made up sports biz camps at your kitchen table in February of 2019. Yep. We did. It was like, at the time, it was a direct to high school student program, so we were trying to isolate what would be compelling to a parent and a student to come learn about the sports business.

Almost immediately, honestly, another opportunity was, was identified to us, which was corporations would pay for kids to go to these camps. As part of their Phil philanthropic contributions. So that was one thing that came to light. And then secondarily, beyond that, industry started to support our organization, not individuals.

So the sports industry for many reasons, one of which is going back to the talent portion of it, but ultimately we launched in [00:13:00] 2019. 2020 was a really crazy year. We were talking about 2008, but between what happened with COVID and then I think what happened with George Floyd in terms of our larger awakening to some systemic injustices in our society.

Organizations, primarily in the sports industry, said, we wanna support your organization. We see the work that you’re doing, we wanna be a part of that. So the, the pivot from camp, which is really focused on high school kids, became careers because we were really servicing high school and students on behalf of the industry.

And at the, at the end of the day, the final outcome was, we want to get these kids jobs in the sports industry. And if they’re in high school, they might not get it next year, but five years down the line, how did we impact them? And put them on a path towards that. In support of the sports industry. So that was like a big part of the, the pivot.

Jeff, what else would you add there?

Jeff Longo: Yeah, a absolutely a, again, camps was very specific to the high high school program, and as we’ve grown, uh, again, we’ve now hit that five year milestone. You know, one of, one of the amazing things, uh, that we again, sort of been able to reflect on is we’ve now had [00:14:00] students who have started in our high school program have matriculated through our college programs and are working in the industry.

And I don’t think that, uh, envision that matriculation when we first started, but to see how powerful that can be now, where the very students who were initially starting out in that awareness phase are now mentoring the students, coming back through like you’re, you’re seeing that continuum and that it’s, it’s really a career progression and, and not focused on any camp experience.

Anne Ristau: You’ve hit some pretty incredible milestones. In just five years, you’ve supported 2,500 plus students, placed more than 60 alumni and into part-time and full-time positions in the industry. You’ve also taken students. Behind the scenes at more than 70 site visits, whether it’s to stadiums, arenas, or offices.

And as you mentioned earlier, students, you know, don’t have to pay anything for these type of programs. Talk about the, what you’re most proud of on [00:15:00] these milestones, and are either of you surprised by the, the growth that’s happened in the last five years?

Jeff Longo: I think when you talk about surprise, about the growth there, there’s a touch of that.

You know, pat kind of touched on our, uh, tendency towards imposter syndrome. And again, you know, in years one and two, we were sort of building the plane in the air, right? We were learning insights as we went and then making, you know, the, the necessary changes to, to kind of build it. And again, as Pat referenced earlier too.

2020 being our second year going was COVID. So we had to stop in-person programming and all that sort of thing. So interestingly enough, that sort of did two things for us. A, we went virtual and were able to serve almost a thousand students within one summer, which again, wasn’t on our initial plan. And the second one was, it sort of allowed us to step back and say, we’re not doing virtual programming.

What do we want this to look like in two years, five years, you know, 10 years and [00:16:00] sort of go through it. So a bit of surprise in that it wasn’t what we casted in when we first began, and the growth has been great. But on the flip side, as Pat said, the support from the industry and industry people was so evident so quickly.

Like we didn’t have problems at all getting people to come in and support and talk to students. Like we had people raising their hands. And again, the relationship with Navigate is such a prime example of that. There are so many professionals saying, I wanna get involved, I want to give back, I wanna talk to students.

So we did have that insight pretty early on and, and knew that the support was gonna be there. So that part wasn’t surprising, you know? So from a, a support. Standpoint. It’s no surprise that we grew as quickly as we did just because people want to be involved.

Patrick Stack: Yeah. I would add, I think, and I’m not, we’re not proud of this and, but we’ll say it like we didn’t have the vision of where we’re today back in 2019.

Like I, we definitely did not, you know, it’s a [00:17:00] nonprofit, so maybe there’s more rigor around like true profitable ventures where you’re looking at three, five years down the road. This is not set with shame, but it’s also not set with pride. Like we didn’t know what we were doing. We just wanted to help people.

We just felt compelled to serve. And then when you have that spirit, then the structure of it kind of takes shape. And then when COVID happens, you kind of pivot. And then when an organization like Navigate says, we wanna support you, but what you’re doing here, can we do something else different? You’re like, yeah, we’ll figure it out.

And you kind of just build it and test and learn and build and test and learn. Then all of a sudden you wake up and you’ve been going for five years and you supported 2,500 students. So it’s, huh. Like that worked out well. So we’ve been like kind of pivoting and following the current, basically, which I’m really proud of.

As a nonprofit. Maybe we have the luxury to do that ’cause we don’t have investors and stakeholders to, to tell us. We’ve definitely made some mistakes along the way, like a lot of mistakes. But I think we’re proud of that and a bit surprised by the scale of what we’ve been able to accomplish. I, I would say the one thing that I’m.[00:18:00]

That says, course surprised me the most and gets me like, kind of choked up. Not on this podcast, but in other instances I got a lot of coffee in me. You know, our first camp, we support high school students and we invite parents to come on the last day to, to either young people come through the program.

It’s a four day program. It’s a day camp, so it’s not like a, a full summer thing, but they get to see their student and we do their award ceremony and we kinda reflect on what we, we do and it, and we’re proud of the work that we are. It’s really great work. But the, I remember the first time we awarded everybody, we had the kids come down afterwards.

I had parents coming up to me being like, thank you so much. This changed my student. And that like really hit hard. ’cause I never thought about how we were helping a parent help their child. But we really are. And I, I don’t have kids. Jeff has a college student. He’s probably already worried about what she’s gonna do when she graduates college.

So that worry starts in high school. And I, I hadn’t thought through. The true impact that we can make in that and that still kind of gets me was, [00:19:00] was a surprising emotion and byproduct of what we do.

Anne Ristau: It’s really incredible. ’cause I think even the organic way you’ve grown does speak to the demand that was there.

And certainly I know from my colleagues who participate and I’m sure across the sports industry, I think that is just incredibly rewarding to work with young people and have that type of impact. So that’s very cool. Talk a little bit about now where you’re looking five years ahead. Do you have the vision now

Patrick Stack: it’s work in progress?

Is that okay?

Anne Ristau: Okay,

Patrick Stack: so we’re, we’ve grown, so now it’s about sustaining an advancement. So now we have, we have an organization, we have employees, we have bills. We have all those things. So now I think we’re trying to figure out, and, and to be totally candid, fundraising is a challenge. Now where we’re at, you know, when you first get started, everyone’s excited to do it.

There was a lot of, and I, I don’t wanna take this into a political arena, but there was a lot of conversations, support for DEI related initiatives when we launched, [00:20:00] and that is now a political issue. In 2024 in, in modern day. So I think that affects, um, a lot of things related to our organization and, and other organizations.

The larger movement, most of our programming today has been high school students, but in the last two or three years, most of our programming has really become about college students. So I think long term we’re probably gonna continue to invest in programs. Our, uh, short term, immediate future, getting a college kid placed at Navigate, getting a college kid placed at Octagon, trying to be more, probably a recruitment partner in an inclusive fashion that maybe doesn’t exist for those entry level role.

That is a big gap that we’ve seen in the industry. There’s a lot of like executive recruiting. There’s a lot of resources for college students, but there aren’t a lot of resources to connect, like actually connect college students to professionals and to jobs other than job boards. There’s a gap there.

And I think that seems to be where all parties wanna invest. I don’t know. So I think that’s a big piece. Jeff, what else do you think?

Jeff Longo: Yeah, I think when you talk about both the [00:21:00] opportunity and the need, that’s where the need lies. Pat said A student doesn’t just cross the stage for graduation and suddenly have it all figured out.

Right. And in our conversations with students who have recently graduated, there’s still a need to support. What that looks like afterwards. Right? It’s the first time in a, in a student’s life where there that next step is, you know, very nonlinear compared to in the past. Right? During middle school, you go to high school, graduate high school, you go to college, you know, navigating the job world and specifically the, the sports industry is.

All over the place, right? There’s no straight line to success. So what we’re finding is students still have a need for counsel and mentorship and, and sponsorship really in those initial stages of their career. Um, so I, I, I think that, you know, we aim to eventually provide more structured support there.

Certainly, because again, you know, naively when we went, once they graduate, then you’re gonna have their job and away [00:22:00] they go, right? They’re out of the nest. And we’re finding it’s not the case that there’s still a, a, a real need for support. And, and I think that over the next couple years, you know, we, we strive to provide more structured support in that area as well.

Patrick Stack: Yeah. And I, and I, I left it out, but what part of our rebrand to Sports Business Careers is we believe that we’re the inclusive workforce development for the sports industry. And, and that organizations, many of them, nonprofits exist like that in the industry. Like whether it’s STEM or tech. The sports retreat doesn’t have that.

They have a bunch of colleges that people went to, and then people have affinity connections to their alma Maers and those pools of social capital kind of stay where they are. I, I’m a perfect example. I went to Ohio University. My first job was through Ohio University alumnus I’ve hired. That’s great. I love ou.

I will always call about kids remote you. That being said, we need to be helping kids that couldn’t get in ou, don’t live near Ohio University, don’t wanna go to Ohio University. All of that. Social capital has had, has solely resided in those pools that exist through institutions, which is fine, but what we [00:23:00] wanna do is be the inclusive supporter so that no matter where kid goes to college, maybe the kid doesn’t even go to college, they can still get access to Ohio univers of alumni or the state alumni or whomever, because they have a passion to work in the sports industry.

So how do we create that? How do we create our own pool that’s inclusive for everybody that’s free? And I think that’s where the, the opportunity is. It’s like creating that pool, it’s connecting those people because. Student, no offense to navigate if you’re a high school or college student, like you don’t know what Navigate is, right?

You don’t know what Octagon is. You don’t know what, what Endeavor is. Or ca a, the biggest agent and then at Navigate wants to know that student. They don’t know that student because they don’t go to the alma mater of one of the people that work there or don’t live in that market. There’s always gonna be like, there’s a mismatch there.

And if we can create that party for them to interact and get to know one another and be like, oh my gosh. Like I love what Navigate does. I wanna work there and then navigate to say. Oh my gosh, that’s an amazing young person that we nevertheless met less work together. That’s what we need to do in an inclusive fashion.

So that, I think that’s our future is workforce development for the sports [00:24:00] industry

Anne Ristau: and so needed when you have, you know, so many small employers at the end of the day, correct. Across the landscape. And yes, there are some, you know, very big players, but for the most part, whether it’s teams, properties, agencies, or even on the brand side, it is very hard to have that, that meeting point.

What else is new? You have an alumni board, now you have alumni. How are they getting involved?

Patrick Stack: Yeah, so when we launched in 2019 and we’re telling people they should support and they’re like, why? Well, it’s, well, I don’t know, but it’s gonna work. We’re gonna help people, I promise. So 2024, we actually have lots of students that we’ve supported.

We have student success stories, so our alumni board is actually led by the inaugural Navigate, SBC fellow, A general, the name of John Bonnie. Who was the first student that we support as part of our partnership back in 2021. So he’s the president of our board and their role is to represent our mission, right To be there like they’re the physical representation of navigates money, like [00:25:00] literally and support and time created.

That opportunity for John. They’ve been supporting John ever since. And now John is a full-time employee at 2311 racing here in Charlotte. I think he moves down here in a couple weeks. So we need to tell that story to galvanize fundraising around it. We need to tell that story to galvanize involvement from other college students who wanna follow John Bonnie’s path.

And then we need to tell that story to galvanize support from the industry to show that if you donate to us and donate to our mission, we can help create other John Bonnie’s. Support those students and get them placed into your organization. So that’s kind of the function is basically we’ve been doing the work and now we want to take credit for it.

We wanna take all the credit for John Bonnie. He obviously did all the work himself, but we’re taking credit that

Anne Ristau: can’t wait for John to listen. He’s got a lot of good air time on this podcast.

Patrick Stack: He’s, he’s the best. He’s, he, I wanna be his agent. He’s his talent agent for, um, role. Once again, he’s fully employed.

You can’t have him now, but like. As a nonprofit, we don’t make things, we’re not make a wish where we have this really impactful video to show you this one experience that helped that student. But it’s a long burn. In John’s case, it’s been [00:26:00] three years. We have some students, it’s been six years we’ve been supporting them.

So this is like the, the crystallization of how we impact people and hopefully that helps us really become more of a mainstay in terms of workforce development, the sports industry.

Anne Ristau: I think John could do a video.

Patrick Stack: John’s done a lot of videos. He’s gotta do more. John’s done a

Anne Ristau: lot of videos.

Patrick Stack: Yeah, we gotta then that’s a, we gotta get him involved more.

But yeah, he’s gonna be doing a lot of videos.

Anne Ristau: How can our listeners help? Jeff, do you wanna go first?

Patrick Stack: Uh, why don’t you go first? This is all. You could tell there’s like a rep parte there. Usually I’m first to speak ’cause I’m annoying and then I feel bad about doing that. So then I’m like, Jeff, why don’t you go?

But he is, he doesn’t like being put on the spot. So

Jeff Longo: I like provided color commentary.

Patrick Stack: Yeah. So a couple different ways, but I’ll start with the first and most important is we’re nonprofit. We need funds. So for your listeners out there who ambition towards starting a nonprofit, the thing I would tell them is you get into it by giving, but most of your time is spent asking.

So we’re asking for financial support. So individual [00:27:00] contributions go a long way towards funding our programs. So we put on free of charge to students. We actually are launching a campaign right now. It’s our starting five campaign because this is our fifth year starting five sports. We’re behind it. So there’s a way that you could contribute towards that specific campaign, which 90% of those dollars go directly into programming for our students.

We need 10% to keep the lights on. And that programming is supporting high school and college students, giving them a chance, helping ’em access awareness, access acceleration. So aspiring towards careers in the sports industry, getting access to people in the sports industry, and then do whatever we can to help them accelerate through some of their individual challenges.

So if you go to our website, sports biz careers.org, there’s a ton of information about our organization, what we’ve done, where we’re going, and ways you could support the starting five campaign. Um, our goal is to raise $50,000. We’re about a fifth of the way there, so we definitely need the support. So fundraising would absolutely be a huge piece.

If you can’t make an individual contribution, maybe your organization can, maybe you have assets that we could raffle off, whatever, but [00:28:00] we can’t continue to service our students at no charge without getting financial support from individuals and organizations in the sports industry.

Anne Ristau: I do feel like I need to make it explicit.

But you both also have jobs.

Patrick Stack: We do. Yeah.

Anne Ristau: Yes.

Patrick Stack: This is a side hustle that doesn’t provide us any money. Yeah.

Anne Ristau: Is incredible to see that impact and I, you know, I couldn’t agree more on being able to plan more than, you know, a couple months ahead as you’re looking to continue to grow. Alright, we’d love to get to know you a little bit as well.

Couple rapid fire questions to close. See, I don’t know. Maybe we go Pat, Jeff. Current favorite sports team to watch.

Patrick Stack: Oh, I am a proud, I, I sighed initially ’cause we’re, we’re turning the corner. But I’m a proud Cleveland Browns fan, so I would say the Cleveland Browns we’re

Anne Ristau: Wow. Getting there. We didn’t see. I always find a way to bring Michigan in.

I’m from Michigan, cold blue all the way. My husband’s from Cleveland. He hate a great guy. Loves the Browns.

Patrick Stack: Yeah, I know. Congratulations, I guess on cheating your way [00:29:00] to a national championship. Really proud of you.

Anne Ristau: Uh, all right, Jess, to you

Jeff Longo: for me, it’s the New York Rangers, the New York Rangers and the New York Rangers.

Uh,

Anne Ristau: wow. Passion.

Jeff Longo: We’ll be getting over the top here sometime soon.

Anne Ristau: Best career advice you’ve ever been given?

Jeff Longo: For me, I, I think it’s that, the path to success and it involves people. I learned that early on in my career. I, I wish even a little bit earlier, but what, whatever your definition of success looks like, it’s gonna involve people on relationships.

Patrick Stack: You have a thousand pieces of advice I’ve gotten from some amazing mentors. I think one thing that maybe wasn’t explicitly said, but was observed was this concept of really social capital like you are who you hang out with. I think there is a misnomer with young people particularly. They think that like, that’s just nepotism.

If you get to know someone and they just help you like that, all, that’s all. It’s nepotism. It’s like privilege, which in many instances it totally is. But in a lot of instances, who, you know. Maybe opens up a door for you, but you still have to step through. If you get an application stack, you still have to crush the application, crush the [00:30:00] interview, like you still have to deliver.

And I don’t think a lot of young people know that, but ultimately who you hangs out with is like also what you learn. If you hang out with smart people, you’ll get smarter. If you hang out with dumb people, you’ll get dumber. There’s that quote that I love to include in presentations and Jeff has seen this.

If you hang out, the chickens are going to clu. If you hang out with Eagles, you’ll soar. You are who you hang out with, with really good advice. I got,

Anne Ristau: that’s a great quote too.

Patrick Stack: Tom, Mike. I didn’t make it up. I stole it from someone else. FYI.

Anne Ristau: That’s okay. It’s all good’s. All a good metaphor. Who is your personal hero?

Patrick Stack: I had the good fortune when I was a professor to lead back to back study abroad programs to South Africa, and I was teaching leader, servant leadership at the time, and obviously was like, I used Nelson Mandela as like a, a barometer for what a leader is in terms of servant leadership and in particular, a, those experiences changed my life going to South Africa.

Being part of that, but two, learning more about his leadership style, which was really rooted initially as he was an activist. He was someone who was pushing people. He eventually went to jail for being an activist, [00:31:00] obviously. And then the rest of his crew was about listening and compromise and solution-based conversations and bringing people together.

And then honestly, he’s like on record is talking about the power of sport and uniting individuals and communities and, and sport has transcended a lot of that in South Africa through a lot of the strife ahead. So I always just think of him like as the kind of person who had a mindset that he was going to bring good into the world and bring people together, appreciated sport and was willing to be passionate about compromise, which I think now in this day and age, unfortunately, is not really appreciated, like compromising and trying to bring people together.

I think everything is going divisive and more divisive, and I think that’s a really short term solution to a larger problem.

Anne Ristau: That’s a great one. How about for Jeff? You’re picking Nelson Mand.

Jeff Longo: He’s, he’s Nelson Mandela as well. Yeah. Nelson. So good that he we’re, we’re both. That is really good.

We’re both Nelson

Mandela guys.

Yeah, we’re both Nelson Mandela guys.

Patrick Stack: Could I share a PSA for how much we appreciate and [00:32:00] navigate before we go? Absolutely. So I. We were initially introduced, like I’ve known AJ since I was in graduate school and he used to always come back to OU and always and make time for students there to try and help them and support them.

And it made time for me when I was a free agent in 2008 trying to find jobs. So AJ has always been such a generous individual in his time and I really appreciated that when we initially created this relationship, it was through, uh, one of our other co-founders, Sam Rene. A number of his former students had worked at Navigate, so Bailey and Matt, and like they saw what we were doing and they wanted to help and, and in many ways Navigate saw what we were doing and wanted to help, but didn’t really know how we were gonna help and how it was gonna work together.

So they really built a lot of trust in us. So I, I guess I just wanna say thank you to navigate for having the right mindset in terms of seeing challenges individuals in our, our industry is facing and wanting to solve it, and then trusting us to be stewards for that. That’s step one. Step two is I did additional support.

So many people from Navigate have volunteered at our camps and our programs or supported the fellowship. I would say probably 95% of your employee [00:33:00] base has lent their time, which has gotta be a record amongst our supporters. So thank you to that. And then there’s a specific moment, I won’t use specific numbers, but I remember getting a call from Bailey a couple years ago at the end of 2021, where we have an existing relationship and navigate so believed in our mission that.

They wanted to make an incremental donation and I was literally brought to tears ’cause it was like an uns, it was a unsolicited ask. It was basically, we see what you guys are doing and we wanna help you and we believe in what you’re doing and, and here’s what we can do. So just going above and beyond in all those ways we’re, we would not exist if the organizations like Navigate didn’t wanna rally support for what we do.

So. I just wanna say thank you to, to you. Um, you joined a great team. I know you’ve been there for 10 months, you’ve already figured that out. But just to really from top down, from AJ and Jeff, down to everyone that we’ve worked with. Some people do it because they’re like, looks cool. Other people do it because it’s really the right thing to do and you guys are definitely doing for the right thing to do.

So thank you.

Anne Ristau: Pat and Jeff, thank you so much for being here today, but I think even more importantly, thank you for everything that [00:34:00] you’re doing. There clearly is a huge need for it and your passion for it, your start from just wanting to help people to all the time and energy you’re putting into it today.

It’s incredibly impressive and unmistakable. This is Anne Ristau with Navigate, joined by Jeff Longo and Patrick Stack. Thank you so much for joining us on the Navigating Sports Business Podcast. Please stay well.