Fact: Sports business is a $325 billion annual industry. This isn’t something you toss untrained managers into and expect them to succeed. In the early 1990s sports business education became a glaring need.

Enter the James H. Warsaw Sports Marketing Center, the first of its kind in the United States to be housed within a business school. Founded in 1994 by James Warsaw—who for 13 years ran Sport Specialties Corporation, a sports-marketing agency founded by his father in 1928 and bought by Nike in 1993—the center has become a model for sports business programs across the country.

If you choose the sports business focus area, during your first year you’ll take part in a weekly sports colloquium and Strategic Planning Projects that give you a comprehensive orientation to the sports industry. During your second year, after a summer internship in the industry, you’ll complete the 21-credit concentration of sports business courses:

• Marketing Sports Properties
• Sports Sponsorship Alliances
• Economic Aspects of Sports Marketing
• Legal Aspects of Sports Marketing
• Sports Marketing and Technology

Each year sports business students host events that exercise their organizational talent. The Women in Sports Business Symposium, the Warsaw Classic 3-on-3 Basketball Tournament, and the Warsaw Golf Invitational provide experience in event management, sponsorship acquisition, game-day operations, and marketing.

The Warsaw Center has become a national leader in bringing high-level speakers to campus, and every term sports business professionals share their experiences with students. Annual trips to New York and San Francisco allow sports business students to interact with the most powerful men and women of the industry on their home turf.

The successes of the first sports business classes have been remarkable. From the NBA and Salomon Sports to Nike and ABC Sports, students have landed excellent positions in top sports companies. Others do marketing for Fortune 500 companies in a sports context, while still others apply their skills in nonsports settings at Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

If you think you’ve heard of the Warsaw Center or Oregon’s leadership in sports business, you probably have. We’ve been mentioned and quoted in the New York Times and Sports Illustrated and on National Public Radio, to mention just a few.

For more detail, see the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center site itself. (Opens in a new browser window.)

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