Photo illustration by Liz Spangler
Aly Criscuolo processed so many emails and phone calls from students about her job that she organized weekly office hours so that the questions wouldn’t interfere with her day-to-day work. The 32-year-old is director of sustainability and corporate social responsibility at New York Road Runners. She works not only to make one of the world’s largest marathons, the TCS New York City Marathon, more sustainable, but also the smaller events the organization hosts every weekend, as well as its internal operations.
The field of sport sustainability is even younger than Criscuolo, with the oldest of these courses being perhaps 12 to 15 years old. Most are much newer, especially the few in the C-suite, such as Erik Distler, AEG’s vice president of sustainability. He knows, like many interested in sports sustainability, that reducing the impact of the resource-intensive sports and entertainment events the industry hosts is a task. That work is comparable in all sectors.
An MBA focused on sustainability prepared Aly Criscuolo for her role at NYRR and led the sustainability initiatives of the TCS NYC Marathon.nyrr
“What really interested me was pillar two, which often doesn’t exist,” but in the sports world it does, Distler said. “The hearts and minds, the influence of sport, the love we have for our favorite athletes, the teams we love – I speak of it as a responsibility to promote these environmental issues that are more important than the sport itself. of platform stuff is really interesting.”
But unlike, say, dentistry, where students follow a certain training path to a career, those who work in sports sustainability find their way onto the field from dozens of entry points at different life stages. A study conducted by Sports Business Journal of nearly 40 people working in sports sustainability found some common educational backgrounds in environmental studies or architecture, as well as outliers such as nuclear engineering, religious studies and the Chinese language.
There are countless opportunities to develop the field because of that plethora of backgrounds, said Jessica Murfree, a sports ecologist and visiting professor at Texas A&M’s Kinesiology and Sports Management Program. “When thinking about opportunities, a lot of people are talking about a career in sports sustainability right now,” she said. “It’s quite a hot topic.”
Everyone who spoke to SBJ for this story agreed that younger generations are more interested in this type of work, and that the sports industry is increasingly interested in the same. However, there is a gap between the outlook and the industry, a gap that the higher education system is probably best able to fill. While the different backgrounds now allow for a diversity of views on sport sustainability, the field will still need expertise and practical training to support it in the future.
“Historically, we’ve had a few people on the side talking about sustainability,” said Suki Hoagland, who teaches the “Sustainability in Athletics” class at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, which opened this fall with the backing of nearly $2. billion in philanthropic giving. “The business community is increasingly realizing that sustainability must be a priority for the entire company. And we have to prepare the people. All these universities working in this space need to jack it up to meet the challenge.”
The personal connection
Criscuolo studied environmental science and did a minor in Spanish at Fairfield University, combining a science major with a hard skills minor, a common way to build a sustainability career platform in the absence of an actual program. To see also : Member Status News | newsroom | US Senate Committee on Finance.
After graduating, she spent five years working for General Electric in the fields of energy and the environment, but reached a ceiling and decided to pursue an MBA at Bard College, then in Manhattan. Sustainability was embedded in every study programme. Her capstone project focused on making triathlons more sustainable, though she never realistically imagined finding work in the sport’s less mainstream professional ranks. Of course, the New York Road Runners job posting was posted a week after she graduated.
“It seemed like it wasn’t a possibility,” Criscuolo said, “but the industry was taking off faster than I thought.”
She has been there for three years now, making an impact through waste disposal stations and reusable bag programs, establishing NYRR’s sustainability strategy and key pillars. During the 2021 TCS New York City Marathon, NYRR diverted 141 tons of trash — the weight of about 79 taxicabs. The role was new to NYRR, so Criscuolo was able to mold it to her vision. The educational foundation from Bard was crucial in this.
“Had I walked into my New York Road Runners role without that MBA experience, I wouldn’t have known what to do on my first day,” she said. “The training, the practical experience, walking in on day 1, I knew exactly where to start, what my first six months would look like. I also had the confidence that I would not have had without the MBA.”
There is often an underlying passion that fuels the pursuit of these jobs. “In our field, which I would say is more social than natural, I think it relies on that personal connection to work,” Murfree said. Prodigy Search partner Mark Gress said that for many of the candidates his company sees striving for more sustainable, higher-level jobs, their qualification “comes primarily from real work experience, volunteering on the non-profit side and, quite frankly, a passion and desire to see that this works.”
Gress is looking for a sports marketing manager with a sustainability focus for Dow, but the field is still new enough that very few, if any, C-suite-level jobs are being created. It is not clear whether there would be enough viable candidates to fill the positions if the jobs existed.
“It’s not like someone grew up at a low level in the organization and went to a C-suite job,” said Chad Biagini, president of Nolan Partners. “They often come out of public affairs positions or supply chain positions where they have developed an understanding of sustainability during their careers rather than studying it.”
Many more people involved in sports sustainability simply find the responsibility of overseeing an organization’s sustainability efforts falls into their lap. Or they stumble over work, like Rossetti sports architect Phonephasith “Fil” Chulramountry. Earlier in his career, while working at architectural firm HKS, Choulramountry helped design North Texas’ Apogee Stadium, which became the first LEED Platinum-certified sports venue of any kind when it opened in 2011. way of thinking in his work because it learned with his personal ideals.
“It was definitely on the fly, on the job, especially with clients when they ask,” he said. “When you work with clients like that, you hire LEED professionals and then you learn from them, the checklist they have.”
Only four of the 38 respondents to the SBJ survey said their college education led them to do sustainability work in sports.
“For meaningful work, having people from different backgrounds is a real asset,” says Murfree, who originally studied marine biology in college before transitioning to sports management. “Half of me is sports, half of me is the environment.”
Distler worked in finance before an internal calling led him to earn a master’s degree from Presidio, a sustainability-focused graduate school in San Francisco. He joined AEG last year with one person reporting to him, but with the understanding that he would be allowed to build the team up to the pre-pandemic total of four people. Until now, Distler said, it’s much easier to find young people fresh out of school to fill those kinds of roles than directors or senior managers.
“There are now more degrees, both graduate and undergraduate, now appearing on the resumes of people applying for jobs,” he said.
Nearly $2 billion in philanthropy provides the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability with funding that could have a significant impact on the field, possibly including the sports industry.twitter
More supply needed
The practical, day-to-day aspects of sustainability are new enough that it is difficult for higher education to find qualified people to set up sustainability programs. To see also : Sports Betting in Michigan: Promotional codes, online sports betting promotions, latest apps, how to play. An academic told SBJ that the schools with sustainability courses often only had them because a certain professor taught there; if the professor left, the sustainability classes would essentially go with them.
One of those college instructors helped Melanie West into the field. The 24-year-old interior designer started in July 2021 as an intern at architectural firm HOK, where he worked under Sustainable Design Leader Vanessa Hostick, before being hired full-time last fall. West studied interior design at the University of Missouri, where she took a number of sustainability-focused courses. These sparked her interest, and the professor urged her to take a sustainability certificate course, again forcing her and a classmate to participate in the US Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon design challenge, in which teams develop innovative and sustainable buildings. to design.
That experience opened West’s eyes to the intersection of design and sustainability and led to her opportunity at HOK. She is still working towards full certification for interior design, meanwhile completing LEED and WELL Building certification applications or helping Hostick prepare sustainability assessments and projections for the company’s projects.
“Before I got into the professional world, I didn’t even know what a career in sustainability looked like,” West said. “Sustainability can be anything. You could be a fashion major, in marketing or business, and you could still pursue a sustainability career. Not many people know what that looks like, so talking to people in that field is huge.”
There are no sports sustainability programs or schools; there are also not many general sustainability schools in US colleges. The University of South Florida’s Patel School of Global Sustainability has been offering a master’s program for about ten years and includes nine concentrations, including water and energy, tourism, business, the global climate, hospitality, and food sustainability and safety, although nothing explicitly targets on sports. And it’s not tied to USF’s Vinik Sport & entertainment management program.
“With the state we’re in with the world in general, I definitely think there needs to be a standardization to learn about” sustainability, Choulramountry said. “It’s extremely important to understand it.”
That will change in the coming years as students and industries, and the planet, make the need clearer. Hoagland has already seen that; her Sustainability in Athletics class was born out of a keen request from student athletes at Stanford University.
While most universities lack the ten-figure donation Stanford received to launch the Doerr School, many universities could create sustainability courses through a combination of existing classes and the addition of environmentally focused professors. Academics told SBJ that the focus of new programs should move beyond theoretical research and become more practical, a shortcoming Stanford has identified, Hoagland said. In recent years, the university has consciously made a strategic shift to become more goal-oriented, not to be content with gathering knowledge and expertise without connected action.
That will be the fundamental premise of the Doerr School, where sustainability will prefix hundreds of courses, not just a handful. It will bring programs, majors and faculties from across Stanford and its seven schools under a new umbrella, with plans to build a new campus and hire 60 new faculty members. It’s not yet clear that sports sustainability education occupies an important place in the school’s course catalog, but some of the thousands of graduates will undoubtedly find their way into the sports business.
“We can’t just be here in our ivory tower creating knowledge,” Hoagland said. “You need both” experts and interdisciplinary. “We need to have these people who go deep into these disciplines, and the goal is for them to create new knowledge. But we now know that that is not enough to meet the sustainability challenge.”
Hoagland’s class is already working with a European data scientist to develop metrics to measure sustainability impact, a necessity for the sports industry – and many other fields of activity – to track progress or failure and investment success.
“It’s only natural at Stanford, where sports is such a big part of our ethos, that we have this opportunity to create these sustainability experts to go into the athletics industry,” Hoagland said. But, she added, “we don’t have a supply line for the need yet, not even close.”
