Amanda Weiner
Fostering fan connections
Amanda Weiner will never forget the experience.
As a 10-year-old, she attended her first New York Knicks game at Madison Square Garden.
When she saw the unique concave ceiling of Madison Square Garden, the Knicks’ home arena, an emotional connection struck her, and she told her father, “I am going to work here.”
She eventually became a marketing manager for the NBA and is now the managing director of global media and ticketing for the USGA, directing a team of 16 whose focus is on the association’s global broadcast and championship digital product portfolio, as well as the strategy, revenue, and operations for all ticketed events.
“I am connecting people, whether it is broadcast or digital or ticketing and getting you through the gates,” she said. “I am connecting you to this great sport.”
“The emotional connection that people have to sports is at the core of why I do what I do. I wanted to serve fans. I wanted to be in that.”
AMANDA Weiner
Throughout her career since graduation in 2003, with jobs at Golf Digest, the NBA and Modell’s Sporting Goods, she has pursued positions in sports that engage with consumers – the fans, casual or avid.
“The emotional connection that people have to sports is at the core of why I do what I do,” said Weiner, who is in her 14th year at the USGA.
A former NBA co-worker recruited Weiner to the USGA for a position in digital media, but left for another job just one month into Weiner’s tenure.
“That opened up a world of opportunity for me,” Weiner said.
She began cultivating business relationships inside and outside the office and soon found herself in unprecedented territory – ticketing. The responsibility came early in the onslaught of COVID-19, and she recalled the fast pace of the operation and her learning curve, along with the pressure of “refunding tens of millions of dollars in tickets.”
“COVID, in a way, catapulted my understanding,” said Weiner. “And it gave me a boot camp in ticketing.”
In her third year running the ticketing operation, Weiner broke new ground with the 2022 U.S. Open at The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts.
For what she called the first “real U.S. Open” since 2019, the ticket crew put a new strategy in place that included market research, pricing best practices, and a first venture into dynamic pricing, as well as new products such as cabanas.
“We legit sold out,” Weiner said, who lives in New Jersey with her husband and sons, ages 8 and 10. “Seeing the ticket strategy from infancy to execution is probably my proudest moment.”
The most recent addition to her job responsibilities is broadcasting and all that it entails, including rights negotiations.
“I got a master class in negotiations sitting next to Jon [Podany] and Mike [Whan],” said Weiner, who was named one of 50 Game Changers for 2024 by Sports Business Journal.
The USGA recently announced an extension of its rights agreement with NBCUniversal and Versant through 2032.
Weiner has also devoted time to a women’s leadership group called Women Connect as a resource for female workers at the USGA. Her role focuses on professional development and networking for those employees.
Candidly and profusely, Weiner loves her job.
“I don’t know if I could ever leave this industry,” she said.
Pete Kowalski
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John Mummert, USGA
