Over winter break in ISM I finished my Original Work. The goal in establishing a salary cap for the MLB is to improve fairness throughout all the MLB teams, allow the growth of every individual franchise, and improve the economy of the league as a whole by creating more excitement by spreading talent equally throughout the teams. I modeled my salary cap after the 2012 CBA in the NBA. When it was established, it was 90% of the average team salary. Because of this, many teams were over the cap and found themselves in restriction. However, as the cap increased based on Basketball Related Income (BRI), many teams found themselves with flexibility in their cap room. This resulted in increases in minimum salary, as well as increases in average player salary. Ultimately the entire league benefitted. When I implemented this base cap for the 2015-2016 MLB offseason, 16 of the 30 MLB teams found themselves above the cap. Therefore, there were many notable free agent signings that ended up with star players going to different teams because of lack of cap room. However, I decided that in order to promote economic growth in the league, I would make the cap system to where the more money that teams made for the league, the more available money they would earn in their cap for the next year. That way, big-market franchises would have the opportunity to recover from the baseline cap and economic growth would be promoted throughout all franchises. The salary cap accomplishes three main things. One, it promotes fairness across all 30 Major League Baseball teams. Secondly, it allows the smaller market teams to grow into larger markets with the spread of talent. As the cap is introduced to the league, many smaller market teams will have access to star talent that they wouldn;t have access to without the introduction of the cap. When they have this talent, they will have the opportunity to grow their team as a brand, and become one of the “big-market franchises.” Third, it will promote economic growth throughout the entire league. As the MLB teams will be rewarded based on their contribution to the revenue they create for the league, the MLB will see a newfound hunger to make money for the league from each of the individual teams. This will cause a dramatic spike in revenue for the league. Being able to create this project allowed me to learn a lot about sports finance and I am excited to present my findings at the Research Showcase.
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This week in ISM I scheduled my sixth informational interview with Dustin Alban, The Chief Financial Officer of the Frisco Roughriders. If the interview goes well, I plan on asking Mr. Alban to be my mentor, as his work in baseball finance will be of huge help in my original work of creating a salary cap for Major League Baseball. The interview is on Tuesday, December 13th. Also this week in ISM, we watched our speech and wrote an evaluation with the goal of finding what we did right and wrong and what we can do to improve our speech. My speech was fifteen minutes long and this section of the speech was supposed to be around seven. I never thought that I would have the problem of making my speech shorter, but it is better than having to make it longer. I plan to cut down on unnecessary information in the part of the presentation where I am talking about my interviews, as that was the longest part of my speech. Fortunately, once I have mentor, have completed my original work, and have completed my final product, I will know what things that I learned that most greatly helped me throughout my journey in ISM.
This week in ISM I reached out to the Chief Financial Officer of the Frisco Roughriders, Dustin Alban. I am still searching for a mentor for my journey though ISM this year. My original work is creating a salary cap for major league baseball, so if all goes well in my interview with Mr. Alban, I would love to be able to have an advisor through my original work that has background knowledge in baseball finance. Due to the knowledge he has gained through working in finance for the Frisco Roughriders, I think that theoretically, he is a perfect fit to be my mentor. However, I am anxious to see if we will click and work well together. Also this week, I began sending out my invitations for the research showcase. I am excited to have the opportunity to show off all the work that I have done this year in ISM. This week I also continued my research for my original work project. Every time I do research for the project I get more excited about the opportunities to learn the things I will learn through the project. In the upcoming weeks, all of my focus will be on creating my original work.
This week in ISM we planned out the way that we want to format our display boards for the Research Showcase that will take place at the Ford Center at The Star on Wednesday, January 18th. Preparing for the showcase is exciting as it shows how close we are getting to it. The Research Showcase has been something I have been excited about since I started ISM. That is because I know how much hard work it has taken to fulfill the responsibilities of the ISM program and I can’t wait to show off all the hard work I have done. On challenge that I came across this week was designing my research showcase invitation. This is a challenge for me because I am not the most artistic person in the world, but I am very happy with what I put together with my limited artistic ability. Completing a task that is out of my comfort zone is always satisfying. The last thing we did this week was the guest list for who I will be inviting to the research showcase. I care about everyone I invited and I really hope that a lot of them can make it so I can show them all the hard work I have done and what I have accomplished.
This week in ISM I created and presented my research speech. This is the second speech I have done in ISM. All the speeches we do are combined into one on final presentation night, so I also got one step closer to my final presentation night speech this week. I am excited at how far I have come on my ISM journey and the fact that I am watching my progress materialize in the research speech. My speech started with the first lessons I learned about finance, and ended with my original work proposal which I thought really emphasized the journey that I have been on for the past few months. I was able to talk about my original research in basic finance, which I still find very important because I am not sure whether I want to jump straight into the sports finance world, or if I want to go down the path of corporate finance and enter sports finance that way. That led me into my final topic proposal, when I realized that sports finance was the career for me. I got to talk about my interviews with Bill Rhoda from Legends Global Planning, Matt Walsh from the Texas Rangers, and Ryan Donlon from the Dallas Mavericks. The Research speech was very gratifying in the fact that it showed how much I have done throughout my journey, as well as gave me another opportunity to become more accustomed to public speaking.
This week in ISM I finalized my original work proposal and scheduled my fifth informational interview. My original work is creating a salary cap for Major League Baseball. After creating the equation for the cap, based on player salaries, ticket sales, and other factors, I am going to go back in time and implement the cap. I will evaluate the impact of the salary cap on how the team's success changes and how the businesses grow or shrink as a result of the cap. I also scheduled my fifth informational interview. It is with the President of the Texas Legends. The Texas Legends are a basketball team that are in the Developmental League for the National Basketball Association. I am excited to gather the knowledge that he has on the world of sports and managing a franchise but that is not my only objective in the meeting. I hope to ask him to interview with someone that is in their finance department as well. That way I would be able to get all of the aspects of Sports Finance in one trip. Next week I look forward to beginning my original work project as well as my fifth informational interview. For my original work, I am going to complete the research I need to do on the creation of the equation for a salary cap.
This week in ISM the most important thing I did was decide what my original work is going to be. I came up with the idea for creating an MLB salary cap immediately after hearing about the Original Work project, but I didn't know if it was a possible project. To learn more about the topic and see if it could be used as a project, I did my sixth research assessment strictly on salary caps in professional sports. I learned a lot and saw that this was definitely a possibility for an original work because of the difficulties that a Major League Baseball salary cap would present me because there are many aspects that would impact what the salary cap would be. Also this week, I spoke to Coach Goff about my proposal and she gave me some great ideas on how I could enhance my project. Once I come to a conclusion on the equation that will determine the salary cap of the MLB, I am going to go back in time and see how it would effect the league if the salary cap would have been enforced in previous years. I am very excited to start my Original Work and move forward on the ISM journey.
This week I solidified my topic choice as sports finance. I entered ISM with an open mind and because of that, I chose a broad topic in finance. However, since entering ISM, one of the biggest lessons that I have learned from my experience so far, was that you can only be the best at a job that you love. Therefore, I have decided to combine finance with the other greatest passion in my life, sports. This week I had two interviews. On Monday October 16th, I had an interview with Matt Walsh, an account executive from the Texas Rangers. He had a lot of knowledge on how sports and finance come together, and I learned a lot from his journey. He showed me how much of an important part of the organization the finance department is, and that although the players contribute the most to the team’s success, the team would run without the finance people behind the scenes. He referred me to Ryan Donlon. I had an interview with Mr. Donlon on Friday, October 20th. The biggest lesson I took away from my interview with Mr. Donlon was that there is no formula to success. There is know quickest route from point A to point B. In order to maximize your success, you must simply work hard, have an open mindset, and take every advancement opportunity that presents itself to you. My two interviews reassured me that I am on the right track in my journey of ISM.
This week in ISM we had the Business Symposium. The first thing we did was networking with all the professionals that attended the event in order to give us knowledge on what it takes to be successful in their careers. Not only was this a great opportunity to gain knowledge on their journeys, but it forced us to go out of our comfort zones and gave us trials in conversing with professionals. We then got to be interviewed by three of these professionals. This gave us practice in answering tough questions and explaining why we are fit for the jobs that we are pursuing in the ISM program. Overall, the Business Symposium was a great event that gave me many experiences that will translate into my journey in my mentorship and my creation of my final product. Tomorrow, I have my third informational interview. It is with Melissa Baumann. She is the CFO of Careington International. Although she is in Medical Finance, rather than Sports Finance, I feel that it is necessary to learn from different perspectives and broaden my search for potential mentors so that I can learn the most that I can and I can make sure that Sports Finance is where I belong. On Wednesday, I will visit the University of North Texas. I will be attending a Finance class and an Accounting class. These two skills will translate directly into what I want to do and I am excited to gain more knowledge about them.
This week I conducted my first informational interview. I was very anxious going into it but once the interview started it felt like a natural conversation. I learned a lot and I can’t wait to use what I learned this year. The interview was with Bill Rhoda, the president of Legends Global Planning. He is in charge of the ideas for, creation, promoting, and selling stadium tickets, suites, and concessions. Since I have always been interested in sports, I would love to work in sports finance. He taught me about the importance of connections and he reinforced my interest in the field of sports finance when he told me about how every project he works on presents him with new and different challenges which keep him engaged in his career. After my interview with Mr. Rhoda, he told me that his associate Adam Kerns would be good for me to interview. I was able to interview with Mr. Kerns immediately after I interviewed with Mr. Rhoda. It was very interesting to me how different their paths to their current careers were. Mr. Rhoda created CSL from the ground up and expanded it and eventually sold it to Legends, while Mr. Kerns started at Legends with an entry level job and through hard work was able to attain his position he has today. Their success stories motivate me to get where I want to be. I have the Business Symposium tomorrow and I am looking forward to learning from all the professionals that attend.
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Jake JamesSports Finance. |