The First Day of Summer

Headstands

We are in the middle of our third week here at MSBA. After a depressing Oklahoma City Thunder loss the previous night, I was ready to start my day off right. With our fitness program going along the lines of the book written by Brett Stewart, 7 Weeks to Getting Ripped, we do our workouts on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Today we ran to Chelsea Piers, and executed our workout on a playground about one mile away from the dorms. Some of the guys headed back around 7:30-8:00 to get ready for work and eat breakfast, but I hung around with Ben, Mary Beth, and Rachel to do some additional ab workouts as well as a little yoga. We ended up taking a couple sweet pictures (while doing yoga poses) with the west side of the New York Skyline in the background. After all that was finished, we ran back to the dorms.

As the title reads, it is the first day of summer, which meant it was going to be a hot one. I made my walk to work a quick one to avoid staying in the heat too long. I got to work with a couple of things on my agenda for the day. First thing I do every day is read the Morning Buzz on Sports Business Daily – which is what many of our guest speakers have recommended us doing to stay up-to-date on the industry we are working in. Also on my agenda for the day was to write a blog post about streaming in the sports industry (which I will post on here when it is complete) for the Platinum Rye Blog as well as to work on my project for the 2014 Sochi Olympics.

As an intern at PRE, my first job is to help my coworkers with anything they need. When I walked in, the first thing they had me do was research the top 20 projected NBA draft picks and who their agents are. After that, the other intern (Luke) and I had to research a company to see what athletes endorse their products. When 2:30 p.m. usually rolls around we turn on the UEFA Cup, but unfortunately there were no games played today, so Luke and I went to Mark’s (speaker from Monday) office to sit in on a call with a major athlete. This was an incredible experience because although there were no negotiations happening during the phone call, it was interesting to see how they were vaguely talking about the terms, but more-so continuing the communication to ensure a smooth negotiation process for the future.

I was wary of what tonight’s guest speakers would bring to the table, but I was quite pleasantly surprised by the Law Panel that MSBA put together for us. Jared Bartie, David Denenberg, and Jim Johnston gave us a point of view from the sports industry that I have never had before. Whether it was talking about the new collective bargaining agreement in the NBA and how it affected television and media rights or talking about how arbitration works and how in most cases it is avoided in the sponsorship and endorsement fields was extremely profound.

There was an event on the roof top of the dorms that Joshua and I went to check out, but with no NBA Finals game tonight, and heat exhaustion from the day – I think I’m going to call it an early night. 

NYC from the roof top of the New School Dorms