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Harvard is well-known in many industries for its recruiting pipeline, but sports business and media has traditionally stood as a notable exception. Despite being a $160 billion U.S. industry projected to reach $300 billion by 2035, the industry has never had a clear post-grad launchpad at Harvard. There hasn’t even been a reliable way for students to meet professionals in the field.

That’s the gap the Harvard Undergraduate Sports Lab set out to close through its Sports Business Conference. This year, for the first time, the team behind HUSL tried to build something that looked less like a student event and more like the beginning of an actual pathway into the industry.

One of HUSL’s most effective tools for bringing the sports business community together and for building meaningful relationships with executives, investors, and athletes is its annual November conference. HUSL's Sports Business Conference, held on Nov. 9 at the Harvard Club of Boston, became the centerpiece of that effort. The real story of this year’s conference began long before the conference's doors opened, in the months of planning, outreach, and quiet work that made it possible.

Panel Organization and Recruitment:

Building the conference’s speaker lineup was a months-long engineering project — one that began far earlier than most students realized. Recruitment quietly started last April, even before Co-President John Thomas Borowitz, who is currently a junior, officially stepped into his role.

“We knew that your high-level named athletes and executives schedule months in advance,” Borowitz said, so early outreach was essential.

The real surge did not begin until mid-September, once the HUSL board returned to campus and began securing commitments from professionals across sports, media, brand strategy, and investing fields.

“That’s when things start rolling,” Borowitz said. “From mid-September until late October, it’s nonstop.”

Senior Co-President Hank Yang approached recruitment from a different starting point — themes first, names second. As he explained, the goal was not simply to assemble an impressive roster of speakers but to decide what students should learn.

“We decided on doing a brand-building panel and a finance panel really early on, and that’s what we wanted to focus on in terms of what we wanted to get across during the conference,” he said.

One of the most significant evolutions in this year’s lineup was the deliberate inclusion of speakers from private equity, consulting, and investment firms — a reflection of how rapidly the sports industry is transforming. Borowitz noted that institutional capital is playing an increasingly central role in sports team ownership, replacing the traditional family-owned model with large-scale investment groups. That trend shaped both the conference’s structure and its speaker invitations.

To capture that movement, HUSL invited a slate of leaders who work in both finance and sports. The investing-focused panel featured Shawn Bryant, managing director at Deloitte Consulting; Kevin LaForce, managing director at RedBird Capital Partners; Deborah Mei, co-founder and partner at Raine; and Anh Miller, principal at Will Ventures.

Collectively, they offered students a window into the mechanics of modern sports ownership — from valuation growth and capital structure to athlete-as-investor models. The panelists emphasized how institutional investment is reshaping everything from franchise governance to media rights and athlete branding, giving students a much more sophisticated understanding of the financial backbone of the industry.

On the branding and media side, the earlier panel, “The Long Game: Building Brand Recognition in the Sports Industry,” showcased executives whose work blends marketing, partnerships, media, and corporate strategy.

Speakers included Andrew McGarty, Global Sports Marketing Director at New Balance; Andy On, Sports Partnerships Principal at Amazon Prime Video; and John Sullivan, Chief Marketing Officer at WHOOP. They discussed how athletes and leagues build commercial identities in an increasingly data-driven, digital-first environment — and how brand strategy now shapes everything from fan engagement to sponsorship models.

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Marketing:

Senior Tolu Ademola, HUSL’s Vice President of Marketing, and junior Reed Trimble, HUSL’s Head of Partnerships and a Crimson Sports editor, were responsible for marketing the conference and securing partnerships and sponsors for both HUSL and the event.

Ademola personally created most of the conference’s graphics — from the speaker announcements to the panel posters to the logistics materials — and kept all of them within a consistent visual style. That consistency supported a larger goal of expanding HUSL’s visibility beyond campus.

“One of the main goals for marketing this year as well was to get HUSL’s name out to other schools and sports business-related groups,” said Ademola

The conference’s primary monetary sponsor this year was The Coop, Harvard's bookstore in the square. As part of its effort to increase its visibility among students, The Coop expanded its role to a fully formalized partner.

The Coop’s presence was visible throughout the event: its logo appeared across HUSL’s publicity materials, it produced the “Coop Scoop” interview segments — short, post-game-style videos recorded with speakers — and it provided custom “Coop × HUSL” sweatshirts as gifts for panelists and keynotes. The company also contributed merchandise for a raffle, including a signed copy of Harvard professor Anita Elberse’s book.

An Off-Campus Conference:

A major turning point in the planning process was the decision to move the conference off campus. In past years, HUSL had packed a Science Center lecture hall, but this year, the board chose the Harvard Club of Boston instead. Borowitz said the choice was about professionalism, both for students and for guests.

The Harvard Club, he explained, had “a more professional feel,” and speakers from industry would feel more comfortable there than in a classroom. Students “felt more inclined to dress nicely and be able to interact with speakers that way.”

The venue also transformed the logistics. According to Borowitz, the Harvard Club handled much of the behind-the-scenes work, from setting up speaker rooms to arranging breakfast and lunch, which made it significantly easier to run the event. That freed the HUSL board members from dealing with logistics, enabling them to shift their focus to acquiring speakers.

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A Homecoming:

For all the polish of the Harvard Club venue and the months of planning behind the scenes, the conference ultimately reflected something more personal, especially for Tai Tatum ’24, the former HUSL founder and president who helped build the organization from scratch.

Tatum returned this year as an advisor, but the moment that stayed with him wasn’t scheduled on the program. It was looking out from the stage and seeing his entire family in the front row — his parents, who attended every conference and corrected his early mistakes; his brother Kylan, who flew in from the UK and helped build HUSL in its earliest days; and the friends who supported him through the long nights in the Science Center.

“Being able to see my whole family in the front row,” Tatum said. “That just gave me motivation to keep going.”

For him, the conference wasn’t just an event — it was a reunion, a milestone, and proof of how far the club has come since its first panels in a campus lecture hall. And for the students now running HUSL, it was a reminder that the pipeline they’re building is also a legacy they’re inheriting.

Correction: December 5, 2025

A previous version of this article misidentified the managing director at RedBird Capital Partners who spoke at the Harvard Undergraduate Sports Lab conference. In fact, he is Kevin LaForce, not Kevin Lorenz.