Where marketing, partnerships, and AI meet. Sports-formed.

02 · How I got here

Sports management at James Madison University, business minor, graduated 2022. While I was there I ran operations for the Maxwell Football Club. Most of the work was invisible. Centralizing SID and head-coach data across Division I football, coordinating ballot outreach for the coaches' votes, producing the Maxwell Award ceremony, and designing the Player of the Week graphics that ran on Maxwell's social. Small staff, national footprint. That contrast was the lesson. A brand travels when the work behind it travels.

Alongside Maxwell I led marketing for Prep GridIron Logistics across the Interstate 20 Classic Games and The Honor Bowl, both run in partnership with FloSports. And I spent a week at the BMW Championship at Caves Valley as Corporate Venue Captain on the 16th-green skybox during the 2021 FedExCup Playoffs, leading a team of twenty-plus volunteers and running on-site hospitality for the BMW-invited C-suite. Five days of executive conversation between food refreshes and tee-time logistics. The week I learned what corporate hospitality actually looks like up close, and how much of partnership work happens in the room rather than in the deck.

The week of that tournament. Running into NFL coordinators. Don "Wink" Martindale among them, coming off the green. Watching the Evans Scholars Foundation caddie-scholarship program work the field. That is when I knew. This is the industry.

Then a master's in Sports Industry Management at Georgetown, with a summer in between at Wasserman on the Brands & Properties team, supporting Nationwide's NFL portfolio out of Brooklyn. I sat next to people who treated sponsorship like a P&L and partnership like a craft. Account leads who pushed me to think commercially and made room for me to do it. The work that summer ran across the proprietary athlete-evaluation scorecard that would later inform the Saquon Barkley signing, the Walter Payton Man of the Year platform across a dozen-plus NFL team partnerships, and the Nationwide Invitational hospitality program. That summer is where sponsorship strategy stopped being academic and became the work I wanted to do for a long time.

After Georgetown I went into the commercial side most early-career marketers never see. Joined Miles Ahead Sports Marketing as one of the first three hires standing up a college-NIL agency from scratch, building outreach systems and the partnerships pipeline. Then a year carrying a B2B sales number at MemoryBlue, across two campaigns: A/B-testing platform Eppo and the Stepful campaign that ultimately hired me. I'm at Stepful now, sourcing enterprise health-system partnerships, running ABM-style campaigns out of the NYC office, and selected as the team's AI Champion. I built two custom GPTs (Open Role and Sales Signal) that colleagues across the BD and marketing org adopted and use day-to-day, and shipped a Q2 dashboard that turns careers-page intelligence across fifty-eight health systems into prioritized outbound.

The Stepful work is real partnership work, full stop. Enterprise health-system partnerships are partnerships: account research, executive discovery, valuation, activation, measurement. Few early-career partnership marketers have carried a sales number or shipped production AI tooling alongside the strategic work. I've done both, and I'm still building. Curiosity, daily reps with senior stakeholders, and shipping new tools is the mode I work in. The craft transfers cleanly to any brand-side team running a real partnership portfolio.

Now I'm putting all of it to work.

03 · Why this work

As a kid I went to every game I could. That's the honest origin story. The pull toward the business side started in college. Sports management classes, a stack of internships, and a real curiosity about why some brand-property fits work and others fall flat. The summer at Wasserman on the Nationwide team is where it locked in. Sitting in the room while account leads built a six-point case for a partnership before anyone briefed creative was the moment it stopped being abstract. Audience overlap, philanthropic alignment, regional credibility, category fit. The parts most fans never see. The parts that decide whether a partnership pays off.

The same logic applies to almost any brand work. Data-driven, audience-first strategy. Brand integration. Sponsorship and partnership measurement. ROI analysis under finance and legal review. Sports is just the category I find it most interesting to apply, and the one where I've built the most reps. But the skills move. The brand-side teams running real partnership portfolios across financial services, beverage, QSR, lifestyle, and tech all run the same playbook. Figure out what the brand is actually trying to do. Match the asset to it. Build the case. Measure the result.

The framework is the easy part. The harder part, and the part I'm most interested in, is being the person partners, agencies, and executives trust to pick up the phone when the deck slips, the talent agent stops returning emails, or the activation has to be re-scoped on a Friday. The portfolios that work are the ones held together by people who do the unglamorous work of staying in touch.

04 · How I work

I care about the commercial side of partnership work. How a partnership gets valued. How brand-property fit gets modeled. How ROI actually gets measured. How audience data turns into activation. The work I want to do sits across sponsorship strategy, partnership marketing, and brand integration, with a measurement layer that holds up under finance and legal review. I write things down constantly because it forces me to find the gaps in my own thinking. Fast on AI-augmented research. I'd rather get a rough draft in front of someone than wait until the deck is perfect. People I've worked with describe me as curious, low-ego, decisive, and quick on the feedback loop.

Most of the job is people. Cold outreach to senior stakeholders, discovery calls that have to land in five minutes, hosting client executives on-site at activations, and building the kind of working relationships that outlast any org-chart change. The deck only matters if the conversation around it does.

The AI work isn't recent. Summer 2023, at Wasserman, I was selected for the AI capstone team. One of eight intern groups, each assigned a strategic topic for the agency. We built a forty-slide framework called AI: The Future of Sports Technology. I co-led the team and authored the AI Overview and Market Analysis sections. We presented to Wasserman employees and executives in August 2023, well before most agencies had anything operational running. The Stepful GPTs (Open Role and Sales Signal) came eighteen months later. The throughline is the same: figure out where the leverage is, build the tool, hand it to the team.

Capabilities

• Sponsorship strategy
• Sponsorship valuation
• Partnership portfolio management
• Brand-property fit modeling
• Athlete and talent integration
• Endorsement strategy
• Sponsorship activation
• On-site activation and hospitality
• Sponsorship measurement & ROI analysis
• Audience-first strategy
• Account-based marketing
• Go-to-market strategy
• Pipeline development
• Executive outreach and discovery
• Client and partner relationship management
• Cross-functional stakeholder management
• AI workflow design
• Custom GPT development
• Brand storytelling

Tools I lean on

• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• ZoomInfo
• Gong
• Custom GPT design
• Claude
• n8n
• Excel (advanced)
• Photoshop