Day Five of the 2020 Virtual Conference is now in the books! In addition to our day-to-day instructors, students received valuable insights from a variety of professionals in the sports industry.
Click below to each student’s name to read their experiences from the fifth and final day of the Sports Business Classroom Virtual Conference:
BIG THANK YOU to the technical staff for always being readily available. In a virtual conference your assistance is so imperative. I didn’t need much assistance luckily, but I just wanted to acknowledge you all for an incredible week.
BIG THANK YOU to Albert Hall and Larry Coon! Albert’s teary eyes in the wrap up lets me know how much this means to him and that displays the level of genuine care he has for this event. Even more so the students. It felt really good to just hear someone be so invested in people who are simply trying to find their way in this business. Larry’s guidance throughout the week was so assuring and helpful. He really loves to see others succeed and his willingness to be available to everyone is just a pleasure to be a part of. The generosity towards others to share knowledge that we all need really makes you feel empowered. And you want to make him proud because of his genuine energy. Not it mention, because of him I am now much more familiar with the CBA and salary cap!
Jeff Fellenzer is hard to put into words. I genuine person, extremely intelligent, and gives a level of kindness and generosity that is rare today. His endless help to provide job prep was great and I took so many notes. I will certainly stay in contact with him moving forward as well as everyone else on staff that gave their time this week. Beau is just a legend and the knowledge he poured into us this week you can’t even put a price on it. His humor, wit, insight, and delightfulness to teach us made the experience so enjoyable. I can’t wait to connect with him again with a few questions and just say hello!
Dave DuFour, Wes Wilcox, Seth Partnow were outstanding leads in helping to understand scouting and analytics. This is where of my interest lies as I love diving into player breakdowns. Ultimately being a scout would be great but any way I can get into analyzing players would be a dream. I know it will happen, so this prep was extremely necessary. Charles Dube-Brais gave excellent insight to how team analytics work. The common NBA sets and concepts were a pleasure to grasp and I loved every bit of his session. THANK YOU TEAM!
The common theme am amongst all of our guest speakers today was “put in the work.” Nothing is handed to anyone and good work is well respected. Your opportunity will come because people who do good work get opportunities, just be ready when your number is called!
Our mock free agency was a success (based on the feedback) and I loved every minute of presenting our work to the panel. My team was great, and we will so prepared that I think we were a little too prepared with wordy slides (lol). Overall, I won’t forget it and I know this experience is a launchpad towards my goals. What a week! See everyone soon!
The last day of SBC began with a deep-dive into the media side of the industry. The group heard from Mirin Fader, Jeremy Levin, Jeff Siegel, and Kristen Ledlow. Each speaker provided in-depth details on their career path together with insight into the practical realities of their day-to-day responsibilities. For me, the main takeaways were to approach your profession with humility, empathy, hustle, ingenuity, and patience. Following the media lectures, each student group delivered presentations on their free agency assignments. I was beyond impressed by the quality and thoughtfulness of each team, which is a testament to both the participants and SBC mentors. Overall, SBC has been an unforgettable experience. I am typing this now at almost 1am after spending hours from when the course officially closed still speaking with my classmates and instructors. I look forward to keeping in touch with everyone and am grateful to Hallpass and SBC for all the work they did to make this event happen. I’m already excited for Vegas in 2021!
The first three days of the Sports Business Classroom provided incredible content. Days four and five were a plethora. Or maybe a cornucopia? Honestly, that does not do the 48 hours justice. It was more like a bucket of salary cap proficiency, networking and career development competence along with high level basketball celebrity expertise dumped over your head like a waterfall. To add to that imagine being concurrently shot directly in the mid-section by a fire hydrant’s worth of inter-class competitiveness, in the moment team building, and high pressure applied knowledge.
Ladies and gentleman, days four and five of Sports Business Classroom!
I can only assume my fellow classmates and contributors to this daily SBC summary project have performed their duties; comprehensively summarizing the events that detailed the structure and amazing happenings of SBC days four and five. I would like to take this time to comment on the Mock Free Agency project assigned over the last two days of the classroom.
I want to begin by stating that Mock Free Agency was incredibly well conceived. It was made even more impressive by the short time frame in which the organizers had to develop, organize and implement the project. The owner objectives helped guide the student run teams decision making. Having to take into account both oncourt success and financial oriented objectives and use them to guide personnel decisions is basketball operations 101. Removing trades and the drafting process from the
proceedings helped to better focus learning objectives related to CBA rules and analytics driven evaluation.
Last, but possibly most important, the break out sessions created a learning environment that proved conducive to better understanding the classroom material and an opportunity to network in a remote learning environment. Taking in the amount of information provided in the SBC is challenging. Being asked to do so in a remote learning environment just increases the learning curve. However, creating groups allowed the students to bounce the information off of eachother in a productive way; not only promoting better comprehension but also bolstered inter-student relationships and more personalized learning with experts in the field.
Given the great success of the project there is always room for some improvements. The following are simply suggestions related to the possible continuation of the remote SBC model as it relates to Mock Free Agency and possibly other aspects of an NBA season.
Issue #1:
It is difficult to build a team in free agency without knowing who that team drafted with their first round pick. A lottery pick will, in all likelihood, impact the top of a team’s rotation and in turn free agency priorities and decision making. A first round draft pick in the 20 to 30 range will have a lesser impact on a team’s strategy in free agency.
Soulution #1:
Incorporate a predetermined lottery and mock draft from a highly regarded mock draft website. In this scenario, team by team mock draft is difficult due to two reasons. The first issue is time. The time allocated to a mock draft is too cumbersome for a project such as Mock Free Agency as currently constructed. The teams do not have the time to adequately scout a draft, create a draft board, etc. The second issue is obvious. Only potentiel cap space teams are represented in the actual picks. Bringing in people to represent those individual teams adds a layer of unneeded complexity.
Issue #2:
Restricting the inclusion of participants to those teams with the possibility of cap space was a good decision. However, the lack of the acquisition power, specifically related to the availability of the Non-Taxpayer and Tax Payer Mid-Level Exceptions depressed the free agent market. While student run teams participated on a level playing field and in the same marketplace, removing that competition significantly skewed downward the offers made and accepted throughout the project. An understanding of actual salary expectations for the bulk of free agents was lost.
Solution #2:
Identify a handful of free agents as full Non-Taxpayer Mid Level exception candidates and require mock player agents to receive an exception level offer from participating
student run teams prior to agreeing to any contract. If they do not receive those offers by a designated time, mock player agents begin signing them to full MLE contracts with pre-identified, non-student run teams. This will help to bolster the depressed free agent market and create an environment in which more realistic offers are required to acquire starting and rotation level free agents. Further, it better demonstrates the value of rotation players in an NBA free agency class and will force student run teams to dive deeper into the free agent pool to accomplish their goals.
Issue #3
Compressing Mock Free Agency into the last two days of the SBC proved difficult to negotiate for some students. Balancing the SBC curriculum with the demands of and the interest generated by the project was challenging. The interest in the project was strong. It is in many ways at the core of why students have interest in SBC in the first place. The draw to work on that project overshadowed some of the other elements of the class because of the time constraints. Also, the lack of time made for a lack of clarity in some instructions of the project that I believe if clarified would have improved the overall experience.
Solution #3:
Clearly, the solution is allocating more time. Moving forward, as was discussed by those who organized the project, spreading out Mock Free Agency over the course of the week would provide the student with more time to allocate to the project. It would also
provide the organizers with more opportunity to direct the students. The basketball and CBA related curriculum was, in part, tailored to the project. Mock Free Agency acted as a cap stone or exhibition project for the course. However, organizing the class into groups earlier and making the project a known focus instead of a fun surprise would aid students in multiple ways.
Students would be better served by making Mock Free Agency a centerpiece of the entire week. As discussed, breaking into groups earlier in the program provides individual students, working remotely, the benefit of having a cohort within the broader SBC class with whom to work; a group in which students can bounce ideas, material and concepts off of eachother. It allows students to distil the large amounts of information conveyed during SBC with peers and in a structure conducive to remote learning. It requires the application of knowledge to a real word scenario in a competitive, group environment.
In closing, Mock Free Agency was a huge success. Moreover, the first ever remote Sports Business Classroom exceeded expectations. The remote learning environment reached people that the traditional, in-person based program did not. Whether for financial reasons or time constraints, many students that I spoke to pointed to the fact that they were able to access this event because of the structure. Hopefully, there is a larger opportunity for SBC and their partners in this remote model to continue accessing
a market I believe to be severely underserved and specifically accessible by the brands of SBC and Larry Coon.
Leave A Comment