Farrell Sports Business Podcast
Interviews with unicorns from sports business and their unique stories, dreams, ideas, insights, innovations, flops and career paths. Get a unique perspective of the inner workings of jobs working in sports beyond just pro sports leagues. Hosted by 30-year sports business veteran Matt Farrell, President of Farrell Sports and CEO of Bat Around.
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Episode 18 of the Farrell Sports Business podcast - Host Matt Farrell talks with Steve Dittmore, Dean of the College of Education and Human Services at the University of North Florida. He discusses the dilemma of making the choice between starting your career immediately or getting a master's degree sports industry. He shares his own career path, from working in sports information offices to the Olympic movement, and eventually transitioning into academia and calls himself an "accidental academic." Dittmore emphasizes the importance of choosing a school based on the opportunities it offers and advises students to focus on gaining practical experience and developing skills in areas such as data analytics and content creation. He also discusses the evolving landscape of sports and highlights the impact of trends like Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) and the increasing use of data in decision-making.
Farrell Sports Business (00:00)
On this week's Farrell Sports Business podcast, we're going to dive into the question for young students who want to work in sports. What college should I go to? What should I major in? Should I get a master's degree and really dive into the pros and cons of that very career and life defining moment that many people go through. As always, feel free to like and subscribe, especially if you're watching on YouTube to this podcast.
I'm the host, Matt Farrell, and today's guest is one of those rare people in sports who has a tremendous blend of being a practitioner with a lot of experience working in Olympic sports, college sports, who's also pursued his PhD and higher education and has become a dean. He's a published author.
and is now the Dean of the College of Education and Human Services at University of North Florida. Also is a contributing and assistant editor at Athletic Director U, so a published author
Today's guest, Steve Dittmore
Farrell Sports Business (01:24)
So we're going to go into the topic of really career and academic decision making, what to do as an undergrad, what to do as post -grad, whether that's work or at further education. But I want to talk about you and really set the table a little bit. Can you talk about your current role at the University of North Florida?
Steve Dittmore (01:48)
Sure, I currently, and I've been on the job here for a little over 30 days now, I serve as Dean of the College of Education and Human Services. And essentially what that means is that I'm the person that helps go out and procure resources for our college, help to do the work that our faculty are passionate about, help create an environment for student learning, and really kind of be the...
the face, I guess, in a lot of ways of the programs that we have here in teacher education, sport management, educational leadership, counseling, and so forth.
Farrell Sports Business (02:27)
So we won't count years, but we've known each other a long time. What was your general path to get here and to this role?
Steve Dittmore (02:39)
Yeah, you know, it's funny. I consider myself to be an accidental academic.
I did not go to college thinking I wanted to work at a college and university, at least on the academic side. I I went kind of similar to your path through sports information offices in colleges and universities, got a master's degree while being a GA in a sports information office at Drake University. Got into the Olympic movement and was really happy working in the Olympic movement. Fortunate life to work at USA Wrestling after interning at the USOC, work at USA Wrestling for a number of years.
Worked at the Atlanta organizing committee for a year and a half spent three and a half years almost in Salt Lake on the organizing committee there and really Thought you know, this is a great career. I'm able to see the world. I'm at high -profile athletic events. This is this is wonderful And I'll tell you it goes back to I remember this moment exactly when I decided
wonder what it would be like to be a faculty member. I've always enjoyed lifelong learning. I've always enjoyed being a student. when I went to college, which mirrors a little bit about when you went to college, sport management programs weren't a thing, really. They were not. Most sport management programs have emerged from PE programs. As the number of physical educators needing to be hired has declined, sport management programs have kind of grown in their space.
Farrell Sports Business (03:53)
Yeah, that's right.
Steve Dittmore (04:05)
I remember thinking I was in the Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver, Colorado. My wife and I were there. Yeah, absolutely. So we were there on a vacation, long weekend. We were in Salt Lake at the time and I picked up this book.
Farrell Sports Business (04:10)
know it well.
Steve Dittmore (04:20)
And the book is by Frank Kirkpatrick. I think that was the name of the author. It's called And The Walls Come Tumbling Down. And it was the story of the 1966 Texas Western, now Texas El Paso basketball team that beat Kentucky. And if you're a historian, you know that that was an all black starting five basketball team playing an all white Kentucky team with Adolf Rupp as the head coach. And I was like, this is just fascinating. There's so much about sport.
its impact on our society and what it has done, all I've ever known is kind of the business side of things. I'd love to get a broader perspective and I'd love to be able to do this for a living where I could read and write and research and just basically somebody's gonna pay me to show up to teach people about sports and sport management. I thought this would be great. So I decided I'm gonna study.
take the GREs, the GMAT, whatever I needed to do. I researched doctoral programs that were focused on sport management. Wound up at the University of Louisville, got my PhD from there. Went to East Stroudsburg as kind of my first tenure track faculty job. Left there in 2008, went to Fayetteville, University of Arkansas. Got tenured, made full professor, started moving into administration and you know.
Several years later, here I am at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville as Dean of a College of Education and Human Services.
Farrell Sports Business (05:50)
Well, it's just such an impressive path of Louisville, Arkansas, your early days Drake and Baldwin Wallace and even doing some things with NYU. And then you're also, well, I won't speak for you, but my sense is you love to write, you like to publish, and you're also an assistant editor on athletic director, you.
Steve Dittmore (06:08)
do.
Yeah, I mean that's been a really rewarding experience and I'm really fortunate to have been actually at the University of Louisville at the same time Matt Roberts who owns and runs Drive -In Company which is the D1, D2, D3 ticker family of...
of products and they have athletic director you and he reached out to me and we had a conversation about 2017 or so when they wanted to start this vertical called athletic director you and the focus was these are going to be thought leadership pieces that would allow athletic administrators to make informed decisions in their day to day job and we know athletic administrators intercollegiate athletic administrators are are busy. We know that they're probably not going to sit down and read a 20 page peer reviewed journal article that's full of a bunch of statistical jargon and literature reviews.
and things like that. And the concept was, how can we adapt academic writing for a practitioner audience and really distill it down into 1 ,500 to 2 ,000 words in which
The highlights are what are the takeaways? What are the managerial implications of what the study found and things like that? And so I started reaching out to my sport management colleagues, hey, I saw you got this article published. Would you be willing to contribute that in a practitioner focus? And so we built that. It also allowed me, in Avenue, then, to write more thought pieces that were grounded in research, grounded in empirical evidence.
But I didn't have to write a full peer -reviewed journal article. mean, the life of a faculty member in some ways is challenging because your whole career is predicated on making tenure and all that. And to do that, you need to have a number of peer -reviewed publications in most places. And that process could be anywhere from 12 to 15 months by the time you submit an article. It goes under review. Revisions come back. You submit the revisions. It gets accepted.
six months later it's in print. And so that whole process is really laborious. And this allowed me, I was at Fortunate, where I was in my career, it allowed me to ground things in empirical evidence, but get immediate feedback and immediate publication of these things. And to me that is...
That's what's been very rewarding about that relationship. And so through that, you know, I've studied a lot about the evolving nature of intercollegiate athletics and the different ways that universities use athletics. You know, we all think about the power for now, I guess, conferences and the multi -million dollars that they bring in and all that sort of thing. But there are a whole lot of the universities that use athletics really as a way to keep the lights on and drive enrollment. And so they add sports teams in order to create
roster spots that tuition paying students come in you you're on the roster you might play you might not but you're helping to keep the enterprise afloat
Farrell Sports Business (09:15)
I feel like you have this really impressive blend of your work in the Olympic sports from Atlanta in 96, Salt Lake 2002, the continued things you've done even with Special Olympics.
that really weaves that experience in with higher education. And I just think you have a unique perspective as we transition to talking about people as they're at probably in the early days of their college education and those forks in the road
Steve Dittmore (09:37)
Thank you.
Farrell Sports Business (09:49)
let's maybe start with that first step in, want to work in sports and I've always, I've always been a proponent is I, it doesn't matter to me what school you'd go to. Don't get too fixated on that, but
picking a major, what are the first steps? What are the first building blocks?
Steve Dittmore (10:08)
Sure. Yeah, I think I agree with you. It doesn't matter necessarily what school you go to. I might throw a caveat into that that says I think that you should a prospective student should choose a school based on what sort of opportunities might exist with that institution. you know, you can go a student can go to a large school with a, you know,
30 ,000 to 50 ,000 or so student population. That just makes it harder to get those experiential opportunities. And to me, if you want to work in sports, and you can validate this better than I can, having been a practitioner longer than I was, it's about showing what you can do. It's about having a resume. It's about having a portfolio that you can advance and say, is what
value I can bring, this is the experiences that I've had and all of that. And so the larger universities, obviously there's more sports, perhaps more opportunities, but there might be more competition. So sometimes I think going to a smaller school is
a little easier and that's based on my own experience having been an undergrad at Drake University where you know there's maybe four thousand students in Des Moines, Iowa and I was able as a freshman to get in and really develop relationships and you know wrote for the student paper then started working in the athletic department all that stuff by the time I was a junior. time I'm a senior I'm basically running the you know running certain sports softball and some of the other kind of
Olympic -related sports, know, the media operations for that stuff. to me, that was a great opportunity for me, and it felt comfortable to me. And I think that's something that everybody else has to examine, is what type of an environment do you want to be in? Going to... You know, there plenty of resources, places a student can go and look at sport management programs. And I'm, you know, I'm an advocate for sport management programs.
Yeah, I'm also somewhat of a pragmatist, and I'm like, well.
For a long time, sport management, as the program started, Begg borrowed and stole from other disciplines. They borrowed from marketing, they borrowed from organizational behavior theory, they borrowed from communications theory, and kind of applied those things to the sport enterprise. Now that sport management programs, trace it all the way back to the early 2000s when they kind of got, really got some footing under them. Now over last 10 years, we've developed unique theories about
sport and you know sport marketing concepts things like berging basking in reflected glory and corphing cutting off reflected failure and how you as a fan react to certain situations and stuff like that those are things that are kind of more unique now to sport that make us different I think students also need to be aware of what the market looks like and what are the important topics right now in the marketplace
We know everything in this society now is moving toward data, right? It's how do we look at performance, athlete performance? You think about baseball and spin rates and all these other sorts of things. Soccer players are wearing those vests that track how far they run and all the movements that they do. And all of that is just creating data.
And how do you translate that? How do you use that to a competitive advantage? Well, the same thing's true, of course, for marketing, ticket sales, fundraising, whatever other things that drive revenue. So the goal is get a lot of clicks, get a lot of engagement on social media. What sort of things are going to move those? Everything's data. So students need to have an understanding and an appreciation for how data fits into that. And so I think if I were to advise a perspective,
you know, like a high school junior or senior, someone that's looking at going into college as a first time, first year student. I'd say look at the courses, look at what you're going to be taking. Don't worry about what you're taking freshman year, but look at what you might be taking by the time you're a junior in the course offerings that they have on the books and where they want to go with what they're offering. And then also look at kind of where their experiential opportunities exist. What partners do they have? Yeah, everybody wants to work in the NFL or the NBA or something like
that. That's great. But you can get just as valuable experience working for a double -A minor league baseball team as you can for those other things. And you might actually, to your point earlier about the careers in sport, you might actually learn what you like, what you don't like. You know, go work at a double -A minor league baseball team, pull tarp, be there for rain delays, be there for all that stuff, and you find out pretty quick that maybe working in sports isn't really what you thought it was, right?
Farrell Sports Business (14:49)
now.
look beyond the name of the school and look what is unique about it. It sounds like is what you're really just saying, keep your eyes open for what curriculum looks like and what their network looks like.
Steve Dittmore (15:04)
Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah, I agree. you know, of course I'm going to be biased and put in a plug for UNF, but you know, we have strong relationships. One of our biggest partners is the PGA Tour and TPC. I mean, run, our students run the merchandise tent at TPC every year, every March. They're the ones that are there on -site managing and running that.
Farrell Sports Business (15:19)
Yeah.
Steve Dittmore (15:37)
you know, we do have an agreement where we take students to Super Bowl and things like that. So a number of universities do that. It's not unique to UNF, but, you know, look at what some of those opportunities are for a student. Yeah, you can go to, you know, got good friends at, you know, still, you know, University of Arkansas, Florida State. You can go to those places and get good experiences around a major intercollegiate athletic.
But those are really kind of smaller communities. Where else are you going to go in Fayetteville or Tallahassee other than working for the university athletic department? There's not a ton of other options in those markets. So I think sometimes to your point, Colorado Springs with all the governing bodies and all the other associated sports events, you've got minor league baseball and things like that, there are opportunities there. And think students just have to be open -minded to see those.
and not think, I need to be at this school because it's a well -known brand.
Farrell Sports Business (16:40)
So when I came into this conversation somewhat thinking, picking a school and a major, how we want to work in sports is, and I use the term to you when we talked prior to recording, this is an evergreen topic. And in a good way, you kind of cautioned me a little bit about that. I'm curious as your perspective of what's happening in the landscape.
Steve Dittmore (17:07)
I mean, think what a person needs to understand about sports and just about our society in general is that things are evolving pretty quickly and things change. as we were talking, I used the example of Clemson and Minnesota and some other power force schools that are now seeking to hire an individual to manage that $20 million of revenue share that they now have for their athletic.
athletic programs for their athletes. And so you're starting to see, well, that's really a business function. That's like an allocation. That's almost like being a capologist for an NFL team or an NBA team, somebody that's trying to manage and look at, all right, how do we get, how do we keep 400 student athletes happy and we've got X amount of money to divvy up? You look at something as simple as, you and I both got our starts in media relations areas, right?
Farrell Sports Business (18:01)
Yep.
Steve Dittmore (18:01)
I recently talked to communications folks for a Major League Baseball team and was chatting with them. don't even, most media don't even go to a press conference anymore. They don't go after the game down to a press conference. I you think about this, we did this all the time, right? That was the only way that you could get access to the coach or the players was go to a press conference. No, what they do is they still sit up in the press box.
But because COVID created this environment where everything was on Zoom, the team now still brings the coach and the manager, the players in, and it's just zoomed up and it's just streamed up into the press box and they just get their quotes from there and don't even bother to go down and ask questions. So all that's changed. And so what does that mean? That means that they don't need as big a footprint to have an interview room. That means they, because they don't have as many people going there and they can repurpose that space for other things. And they start looking at
hospitality opportunities, know, and other ways for them to engage with their partners, the people that are gonna bring in revenues for them. know, athletic departments are great about this now trying to create spaces that kind of mirror what you see in pro teams, you know, those clubhouse seats or those premium seats that have food and drink and stuff like that. And so it's a very dynamic.
space in that regard I think. Certainly NIL changed everything at the collegiate landscape as well. So it's very dynamic. Yes you still need a facility. Yes you still need somebody to turn the lights on and you have to have event managers and ways to get into a venue whether it's a ticket or a credential. All those things are still the same. But there's a lot of other areas where there's growth and I think programs that are recognizing that.
that are building out some capabilities, some specialties there, might have an advantage. Think about this technology that we're having right now where you and I can have this conversation on some website and you can record this. That didn't exist five years ago, really, did it? I don't know. No.
Farrell Sports Business (20:11)
So I'm going to paint a scenario and you know it's coming, so I'm not putting you in a bad spot, but I'm a student. I just graduated from Inecollege USA. I did two good internships while I was an undergrad. And now I've got a job offer for an entry level job at a professional sports team. And I've also been accepted to a good grad school that might have some
specialization in sports. I would almost like to pick your brain a little bit to argue both sides. Why would I do one? Why would I do the other? And you almost have to play a little point counterpoint amongst yourself here, Steve.
Steve Dittmore (20:46)
Yeah.
Yeah, think so here's what I would say to that and it's something that I've talked to students about over the years and maybe I need to evolve a little bit on my own kind of interpretation of this but for a long time, know, long time, 10 years ago. 10 years ago what I would tell a student was where do you want, what is it that you really want to do? Do you want to work at a pro environment? Do you want to work at a college? Do you want to work at a business? You know, some sort of fanatics or some other sort of
you know, sport related industry, right? And if they told me college athletics, my advice to the student always was you should go and be a GA and get the master's degree. And it wasn't because you were necessarily going to acquire a whole bunch of new knowledge, but it was because everybody else that works in that environment, because college athletics is embedded in higher education, everybody else already has a master's degree.
So you're at a little bit of a competitive disadvantage if you start looking at job descriptions and things like that where it's a bachelor's required, master's preferred. You're putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don't have that. And that's unique, I think, to college athletics. And you see more and more athletic directors, particularly at the lower levels, the Division IIs, the Division IIIs, and even somewhat conference commissioners. You see a lot of people now that have terminal degrees that might have an EdD or a PhD.
You know, of my former, still really good colleague and friend, who was one of our doctoral students that I mentored his dissertation at Arkansas, he got his doctorate, became an athletic director, and now is deputy athletic director at a SEC institution. You know, and he just wanted to be able to not be disqualified from anything. He didn't want...
there to be a reason that someone would look at his resume and say, you don't have this. So he had all the different experiences. He had all the academic credentials. So I think that's kind of the advice I would give to someone if they want to go to college athletics.
Farrell Sports Business (23:09)
Certainly if you want to teach or if you want to be faculty at some point, you have to.
Steve Dittmore (23:12)
Well, sure. And that gets back to the Division III and the Division IIs. You see a lot of athletic administrators that also are teaching maybe in a sport management program or some other kinesiology type program at those smaller schools. You see a lot of overlap there. The pro teams, though, it's a little different, right? I mean, there's not as much grounding in education. It's about how can you add value? What can you do on the revenue side of things?
And back to that example that you gave, the ticket salespeople will hate me to say this, but you you got to decide is that the kind of entry level position you want where you're making 30 outbound calls a day or whatever the number is that you're being asked to do, right? And to try and sell. They're great jobs to get your foot into the door and work at a professional organization and try to...
If you're competitive and you want to show your worth and how you can do that, great. I've got another former student of mine, she works at Oklahoma City Thunder, got in on one of those things and has just blown the doors off. She's done a great job and she's moved it up and all that. But that's not for everybody. So you have to assess, where is it that I really want to do? Do I want to be able to say, I work for the Denver Nuggets?
this is great, go to work every day at the arena, all that, or do you want to have a different perspective on things? Or are you going to have a different perspective on things? That's tough to say at 22, because your things evolve. I I'm a product of this, you're a product of this. You change who you are and what you think you value.
Farrell Sports Business (25:03)
So if I said it back to you, if I really wanted a college athletic, just to put it in simple, return on investment of time, resources, if I wanted to take a college path, continued education, really, you're going to see the return on something like that. Pro, you may or may not. Is that?
Steve Dittmore (25:25)
I think you, yeah. On the, yeah, so the pro thing where I would say that someone should focus is statistics, economics, analytics, data science, those sorts of things, because that's what the pro teams, I think, are hiring, right? I mean, you know, so many of this, ever since Moneyball came out, so much of this has been about analyzing numbers and data. So I think if a student went a
traditional sport management route and wanted to work for a pro team but also wanted to get a graduate degree that's kind of probably where I would steer them.
Farrell Sports Business (26:03)
you hit on this a little bit of any other hiring trends or educational trends that you're seeing. You mentioned data, but anything else that you're just seeing of like, yeah, that was not really a path five years ago.
Steve Dittmore (26:21)
Well, so I think the NIL stuff has really created an environment where athletes are their own media, right? And they've got their own brands to manage. there is a place for, you know, I got a college -aged son, you've got college -aged kids or thereabouts, right? They're probably more adept at social media than you and I will ever be, right?
Farrell Sports Business (26:33)
Yeah.
Steve Dittmore (26:47)
Although you're on TikTok, so you got one up on me. I'm not even on TikTok, right? But just they know that stuff. It's endemic with them. mean, they've grown up with that. It's ingrained in them. And I think for those students that are interested in working with athletes and helping grow those brands and helping do that, you know, get a camera, get some sort of
equipment, do the shoots, do the things to help an athlete create those those contents. mean, you and I were talking before we started recording about watching the Olympic Games, right? This the past games in Paris. I didn't know anything about Alon Amar before this, right?
She's wonderful. She's tremendous. Yeah, it's part of my daily cleanse is to go whatever goofy stuff she's doing or her sisters are doing and all that sort of stuff. It's just, it's great. But that has to be intentional. And not every athlete has that skill. But if somebody else has the skill as a content creator but maybe doesn't have the athletic ability, there's a marriage that could be had there.
Farrell Sports Business (27:45)
You
Yeah, you just look at the US team alone and my math is not going to be precise, but 500 plus athletes, what, 25, 20 % of them come home with a medal, but you're still competing with hundreds of your own teammates versus 10 ,000 athletes in the games. And whether it's a, whether it's her or the muffin man, you know, or whatever it might be, the really smart ones figure out a way to differentiate and
present themselves in a unique way.
Steve Dittmore (28:30)
Yeah, absolutely they do. they figure, I mean, what she did in terms of the getting around the IOC rules by turning over her Instagram to her family and all that, that was clever. I liked it.
Farrell Sports Business (28:42)
Yeah. was there a piece of advice you got in your path along the way that still resonates with you today? Or that advice would be as good today as it was then.
Steve Dittmore (28:54)
Yeah, so.
I'm gonna tie it back to the question that you had previously about, you know, do I go into grad school or do I do this, right? So I had, I was in a graduate program and I had two classes left in my graduate program and USA Wrestling had this opening and I'm interviewing with, you know, our good friend Jim Shearer and...
talking to him and I was like, I really want to do this. And I left two credit, two classes short of my master's degree. And I was like, okay, I'm going to finish this. I'm going to do it. I took one class while I was working at USA wrestling. was actually through the university of Northern Colorado. used to bring classes down to air force academy. And I took a class there, transferred those credits back in. Then I got this opportunity to go work in Atlanta. I hadn't finished that last class. I had this opportunity to go work in Atlanta.
And it's coming up. It's the spring semester 1996. And my advisor from Drake calls me and says, hey, you're one class short. If you don't finish it now, the clock runs out. And I was like, I just don't have the time. The Olympics start July 17, 1996. I can't spend my evenings in a class. So I talked to.
to my boss and somebody else that you, I think you know, the late Bruce Dorsak. you know, I explained this to him and he told me, no, finish your degree. You will never know when you need it. True enough, there's no way I get into a PhD program without a master's degree. And if I hadn't finished that class, I would never, I would not be here right now.
Farrell Sports Business (30:48)
I have a similar story. I was in, soon to coming in to be a junior at Arkansas and I was working in sports information. I was working with the swim team. I was offered an internship with USA Swimming that took place in the fall semester. It was maybe a little less competitive to get that internship. I, and I went to the swim coach, Martin Smith, a Brit,
at the time and I was him and in hall and I'm like, Martin, I, I don't know what to do. I've been offered this internship, but I would have to take a semester off of school. would leave you and the swim team hanging from a sports info standpoint. And he looked at me, he goes, you dumb ass take the internship.
Steve Dittmore (31:28)
Right.
I didn't know what the rating of this podcast was. I didn't know if I could go down the dumbass route or something worse, right? But yeah.
Farrell Sports Business (31:38)
But yeah, that was one of those.
Steve Dittmore (31:45)
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, no, you know, so I guess maybe that piece of advice is listen to whoever your mentor is in that situation, right? Yeah.
Farrell Sports Business (31:46)
Do it dummy.
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