I GREW UP IN: A lot of places! I was born in Utah, but we moved a lot because my dad was a college football coach.
AS A KID, I PLAYED: Baseball and football.
ON THE HILL, I PLAYED: Football. After my freshman year, we won 39 out of the next 40 regular season games, and were Centennial Conference Champions in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000.
AND I STUDIED: Communication. But to this day, one of my biggest takeaways was before I took a single class on the Hill. At first-year orientation, Associate Dean Barbara Horneff ’84 told us, “We’re not going to teach you how to do a job. We’re going to teach you how to think so that when a bigger opportunity comes along, you know how to take advantage of it.†That stuck with me for some reason, and it turned out to be very, very true in my career path.
CHILDHOOD DREAM: I knew I always wanted to be involved in sports. GrowÂing up in a family where my dad was a college football coach, Saturdays revolved around game day. But I originally thought I was going to get into news broadcasting and that maybe I’d get a chance to cover sports that way.
I REALIZED I COULD WORK IN SPORTS WHEN: I did an internship at a TV station out in Salt Lake City, Utah, before my senior year, and was applying to more TV stations for full-time jobs. Someone encouraged me to reach out to NFL teams because they had broadcast departments.
HOW I BROKE INTO THE INDUSTRY: I spent a year as an intern in a great broadcast department at the Jacksonville Jaguars learning a lot about video editing, production, and storytelling, and then they hired me full time in web video production. That was where I learned web design, HTML, and CSS and got into web and content performance analytics. I moved on to the Chicago Bears as a website manager, which kind of grew into a digital director role as social media really started to take off. That allowed me to really use the interest I had in performance analytics across a broader set of digital platforms. The biggest leap I took was leaving team sports and joining the agency Taylor. We supported brands like Tide, Jordan, Capital One, and Allstate in the digital content consulting realm. I worked with an incredible team of professionals with diverse experiences and skill sets, and learned from all of them. That role really helped me discover greater capabilities in creative, strategy, and organizational communication. And it was at that job that I got connected with the Atlanta Falcons and Morgan Shaw Parker, who was the chief marketing officer for Arthur M. Blank Sports & Entertainment and led the initiatives for the Falcons and the Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The more I worked with her, the more I realized there was an opportunity to build something special there. I joined her team to help lead a digital transformation with the Falcons, and we had an unbelievable run, including winning 14 Emmys on our video team. We had a really outstanding team of creatives and young digital strategists there. Seeing the incredible roles so many of those people have now makes it hard to believe they were all one team at one time. And before I left, we helped convince the organization to invest and build a state-of-the-art broadcast studio. With the Falcons, I got heavily involved in performance and growth marketing so that we could show how great content and digital strategy could help the business with ticket sales and revenue. Morgan was eventually recruited as the new president of the Atlanta Dream WNBA team, and a couple months later, she and I began talking about a role with the Dream and the possibility of expanding the same kind of creative culture we had with the Falcons digital team across an entire organization.
MY JOB IN A NUTSHELL: First and foremost, we need to grow a fan base. What I consider the most important part of my job is to sit in between all of our departments and make sure we have the same objectives, the same priorities, and the same motivations. The idea is to create collaborative teams across the organization where the best ideas win. We need to have people working together and building on each other’s ideas, moving in the same direction. I directly oversee ticket sales and work very closely with the marketing group, but I work with every group here to be sure all of our efforts are aligned and ladder up to the overarching business objects. I’m also working on a business intelligence project with our partner Microsoft to bring all of our data sources together through our CRM to help our leaders make better decisions faster.
Putting together high-performing teams of people is what gets me up in the morning. This is the first time I’ve ever had a role this broad and expansive. That group of teammates I played with at WMC helped me discover that interest.
Dan Gadd ’00, Women’s National Basketball Association
WHAT I LOVE MOST ABOUT MY JOB: I have so much fun working with this leadership group trying to figure out a solution to our challenges. We are a mostly female organization, and we’re very diverse in race, experience, and backgrounds. That brings a lot of creativity, collaboration, and unique perspectives to the forefront. There’s a different level of commitment because we all want to see this succeed. It’s not just a job. And one example of that is that I have two daughters and no matter where I’ve worked before, they haven’t wanted to wear the gear for whatever team I was working for. But now, both wear Dream gear. Any spark of interest in sports from them makes me smile because I know there are so many things to learn from sports. Eighty percent of female business leaders played team sports. So, if we’re able to provide those role models, provide camps and clinics, and keep girls in Atlanta playing sports, we’re contributing to growth in their lives.
THE MOST CHALLENGING PART OF MY JOB: The Dream has been around since 2008, but the awareness of the team has been very low. However, this year, we led the WNBA in sellouts with 12 of our 20 home games selling out. We need to do things that get people’s attention, build great fan experiences, and light that fire under people so that when they walk out of here, they start telling others about it.
WHAT’S NEXT? Putting together high-performing teams of people is what gets me up in the morning. This is the first time I’ve ever had a role this broad and expansive. That group of teammates I played with at WMC helped me discover that interest. I’m still learning every day, and there will be some evolution in this role. Every place I’ve jumped has led to a broader version of what I did in the last spot. That’s a lot of fun, and it’s exactly what Dean Horneff promised us on the Hill.
