Marc Cornstein is the Founder & President of Pinnacle Management Corp. (PMC). The New York agency focuses solely on representing basketball players in the United States and overseas. Its website and blog are infrequently updated (someone needs to tell Cornstein that the main image on his homepage is a broken image), but perhaps that is due to Cornstein’s focus on his large list of clientèle. That list includes names like Samuel Dalembert, Nenad Krstic, Beno Udrih, Aleksandar Pavlovic, and Darko Milicic. Upon going to Cornstein’s clientèle page, I now realize that the links for his players are broken as well. Okay, it’s time to hire me to re-do your website, Mr. Cornstein!
But I digress. Cornstein was recently interviewed by amNewYork about his life as an agent. Here are some of the parts of the interview that interested me the most.
What do you do for the players?
The thing most closely associated with sports agents is contract negotiation, or finding a new team if you’re dealing with a free agent. You deal with draft eligibility too. We help with draft planning, estate planning, marketing and endorsements. We actually do anything aside from coaching – finding a pediatrician, a car, anything. Obviously, things like estate planning can be difficult and technical, so sometimes it is recommended that players visit an estate attorney in Daphne, AL, for example, to receive legal guidance. Planning estates is an important thing, so it’s always recommended that the players get the best support that they can. As a sports agent, we can help with this, but estate attorneys will have a much better idea of what they’re doing. Those players living in the area of Columbus, IN, may well decide to reach out to attorneys at Coriden Glover who have expertise in estate planning amongst many other areas of practice too which they could make use of depending on what legal matter that they need assistance with. However, we can help players with most aspects of their lives.
What’s the hardest thing about being an agent?
Recruiting is always tough. It is so competitive. There’s a lot of competition that will stop at nothing. You can be really good, but if you don’t have clients you can’t go anywhere.What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever had to do for a client?
We’ve had to ship pretty big and potentially dangerous dogs overseas. We once had a case when a player asked us to go spread rose petals all over his girlfriend’s apartment.
