An Intern(al) Look at Becoming a Sports Agent

I’m finishing up my third week with Dynasty this week and getting into the swing of things at school. This week was no different from the last. Work, work, work. It was a busy week. But thats OK. I like being busy because it means that I am working towards my two goals for this semester: 1) finishing law school and 2) landing a job in the sports industry.

I first want to thank Jorge for his comment after my first post in this series regarding www.surchur.com and www.addictomatic.com. After looking at both sites, I found that Addictomatic was much easier to navigate and more user friendly. The site allows you to type in a name and get results from different sources on the web. You can then bookmark the page for easy recall.

This past week I’ve made Addictomatic pages for all of Dynasty’s clients. Every day or so I bring up pages for clients and look to find any news that may have developed. This week it allowed me to find that Tom Smallwood was named Kegel Bowler of the Month for December 2009 by the Bowling Writer’s Association of America. I also use it to keep track of how Dynasty’s bowlers do each week.

Using a site like this is beneficial for anyone thinking of becoming a sports agent. As an agent, a giant task of yours is to promote your client. It makes your job a lot easier to promote your client when you can type his name into a search engine and get tons of information on him.

In addition to researching Dynasty’s clients, I had the opportunity to draft a press release with another Dynasty intern for a new client signing this week. This was good exposure for us. If I ever decide to have an agency of my own, press releases are an important way of relaying information about a signing. In order to write the press release, we looked up as much information as we could about the client. In addition to just his stats, we also thought it would be good to mention his off the field work as well. Image is everything in sports and any way we can promote a positive image of a client, the better.

I also finished up my assignment of compiling contact information for Japanese league clubs. Google Translate was very helpful in completing this task. These contacts may become important as Dynasty tries to find homes for its free agent baseball players.

Once I was finished here, I decided to continue looking for sponsors for Dynasty’s bowlers. Besides one or two potential sponsors, I’ve limited myself to the bowling industry. I need to expand my search into other areas to find companies that best suit Dynasty’s clients.

That’s about it for this week. I do want to leave you with a thought. In my first post, Rick asked if I could provide insights into breaking into the sports agent industry. I will leave you with a suggestion. Don’t be afraid to contact someone. The worst that could happen is they don’t respond or tell you they cannot help. The way to begin to develop a career in this industry is to network. I started law school with an idea of becoming an agent or at least landing a job in the sports industry in some capacity. Through the powers of the Internet and email, I was able to at least have conversations with some people in the industry. Perhaps these conversations will lead to friendships and potentially that coveted first job. So don’t be afraid to just email and introduce yourself.