In this course, taught by former Associate Dean Dr. Jim Lackritz, students look at issues facing sports organizations through a statistical lens; for example, how to predict concession stand wait times at sporting events or how to evaluate athlete performance. Dr. Lackritz combines his own research in sports business with texts like Moneyball to provide Sports MBA students with the foundational tools for thinking critically about current issues in the sports industry.

Dr. Amy Randel challenges the Sports MBA cohort to think critically about all aspects of interpersonal communication and organization within the workplace, and how varying approaches can affect work performance and cohesion. Students directly apply these skills to the sports industry through the course’s final project in which students provide analysis and offer feedback to a sports organization.

In Dr. David DeBoskey’s course, students learn the Accounting language with the expectation that when they finish the course, they’re capable of making sound financial decisions in management roles. The CFO of the San Diego Padres serves as an annual guest speaker for the class and class projects include financial statement analysis of sports industry sectors of the students’ choosing.

Financial Management I is the first of two courses that expose students to the fundamental principles of corporate finance, taught by Professor Frank Ryan. This course discusses how managers use financial statements, engage in financial planning, value cash flows, understand risk, make long-term investment decisions, and how to make both long- and short-term financing decisions. Once the groundwork has been laid, students apply these principles to analyze sports business topics such as franchise valuation, stadium financing, personal seat licenses, athlete salaries, and more.

Sports Marketing is taught by visiting professor, Dr. Vassilis Dalakas (@DrSportBusiness), who provides an in-depth introduction to the principles of marketing, and how they apply within the sports business realm. To teach sports marketing effectively, Dr. Dalakas focuses heavily on corporate partnerships and sponsorship in the world of sports, and specializes in fan behavior and the fan experience using real-world examples throughout, including an annual corporate partnerships consulting project with a sports organization.

Sports Economics, taught by Associate Dean Dr. David Ely, uses the sports industry to illustrate the applications of microeconomic principles, macroeconomic concepts, and analytical tools used in business decision-making. Students learn to apply industrial organization theory to analyze sports business models, and related issues when evaluating local markets for teams, and calculating the value of sports franchises. Course discussion topics include stadium financing, ticket pricing, team relocation, player salaries, athlete representation, and arena naming rights deals.

Throughout this course, Dr. Helio Yang shares her broad range of knowledge on topics related to the design, execution and management of operations and supply chain systems. The course teaches students to model solutions related to project scheduling, inventory management, demand forecasting, and queue management. Group presentations for this course provide students the opportunity to research how sports business organizations manage issues related to their operations and supply chains.

Marketing professor Dr. Erlinde Cornelis’ course focuses on sustainability, diversity, and inclusion in sports and marketing, taking a marketing research approach to investigating and solving these issues. The course requires students to think critically about economic, environmental, physical, and social sustainability in sports and business in general, while they simultaneously develop their ability to consume and create marketing insights by understanding and executing the marketing research process. As part of the course, students learn marketing research tools such as Qualtrics and SPSS and utilize these tools in the course’s culminating marketing research projects.

This course features an international excursion to the Dominican Republic led by Sports MBA program director Scott Minto (SMBA ’06). Since 2009, Sports MBA students have studied abroad in the D.R. for part of their summer semester to observe and evaluate the impact that Major League Baseball and its teams have on the country.

Taught by Dr. Joe Belch, Senior Associate Dean and co-author of the leading textbook in Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC), this course focuses on the development, implementation, and evaluation of marketing strategy for sports organizations and companies. Students create a comprehensive Integrated Marketing Communications plan for a sports organization as a culminating project in the course each year.

Taught by Dr. Kaveh Abhari, this course, which serves as an introduction to the field of business intelligence (BI) and data analytics, is focused on teaching students how to use BI tools to understand, analyze and solve complex business problems. The course covers topics such as descriptive, predictive and web analytics teaching students to use tools such as Tableau, Power BI, RapidMiner, Google Analytics, and AWS QuickSight. Students use real life data sets from sports business and develop business reports showcasing their insights.

In Professor Frank Ryan's second course within the Sports MBA curriculum, students build upon the foundation set by Financial Management I. They are expected to understand the impetus behind major financial deals in the sports world, such as stadium financing and franchise valuation. The students also apply their skills by forming management teams and competing in a semester-long business simulation.

Dr. John Francis leads this course, which studies the theories and trends that shape the evolving relationships between sports organizations and their fans. With examples drawn from all segments of sports business, this course is intended to give students a foundation of basic business principles that can be applied to the sports industry.

Dominican Republic Trip

Every year since 2009, Sports MBA students have spent approximately ten days as a group on site in the Dominican Republic. This trip is one of the most memorable experiences of the year for Sports MBA students. The excursion is tied to an academic course in Management and is led by program director, Scott Minto (SMBA ’06). The concept of the trip is to develop students’ global competencies through a complete cultural and language immersion in a developing country. The class prepares extensively for the trip, reading books about Dominican baseball and culture and studying Spanish.