Backing up the four-person executive board are four faculty sponsors, including Chaltas,Hazeltine, Grace Calhoun ’92, the vice president for athletics and recreation and Kirsten Green, the athletics chief of staff. “You can dream big when you step foot in one of these unbelievable facilities,” Pliner said. “That’s so much more than just having a guest […]
Backing up the four-person executive board are four faculty sponsors, including Chaltas,Hazeltine, Grace Calhoun ’92, the vice president for athletics and recreation and Kirsten Green, the athletics chief of staff.
“You can dream big when you step foot in one of these unbelievable facilities,” Pliner said. “That’s so much more than just having a guest speaker on Zoom.”
When asked why he decided to sponsor the club, Hazeltine said that “one of the aims of a liberal education is to understand the world we live in, and sports are a significant part of that world.”
One week ago, Nikolas Rohrmann ’26 and Charlie Pliner ’26 filled what they saw as a glaring gap on campus: Brown’s lack of preprofessional opportunities in the sports industry. The duo founded Brown Sports Network, the first on-campus club dedicated to connecting Brown students with careers across the sports industry.
By connecting students with alums and organizations, Pliner hopes to create a “Brown ecosystem in the sports industry.”
By connecting students with alums and organizations, Pliner hopes to create a “Brown ecosystem in the sports industry.”
“Our insights as college students who are aspiring sport entrepreneurs or executives, whatever it might be, are invaluable,” he said. “When you’re under 25 years old, you’re on the pulse. And a lot of these guys aren’t. So we provide a perspective they don’t.”
“We hope this is just the start of something,” he said.
Alongside bringing in top executives from a variety of sports industries, the club will provide opportunities for members to work on projects in leading sports firms. According to Rohrmann, these projects will allow students to hone their design, content creation and sports analytics skills.
Last year, 65 guest speakers from across the globe spoke in the class, Pliner said: “From Colombia to Japan to Argentina to Italy to America, we kind of built this global prospective network of Brown alums.”
“We think that’s a unique aspect to our club,” he said. “That’s not really been there with any other clubs that we’ve seen at Brown.”
“These guys have a Rolodex that’s unheard of,” said Brando Babini ’27, one of the club’s two vice presidents. “They’re willing to share, and they’re willing to turn that into what is now becoming Brown Sports Network.”
A board of eight student directors will work in collaboration with the executive board. Divided into pairs, the directors oversee the club’s athlete relations, business development, communications and special events.
Lydell Dyer is a sports editor for The Herald. A junior hailing from Bonn, Germany, Lydell is studying nonfiction English and political science, and if he’s not off “making words sound pretty,” you can find him lifting heavy circles at the Nelson.
“The GISPs were a foundation for developing a concentration in sports management,” Professor Emeritus of Engineering Barrett Hazeltine, one of the courses’ sponsors, wrote in an email to The Herald. Over the course of the semester, “the rest of campus came to realize that sports and sports management are legitimate subjects for academic study,” he wrote
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“What we really think is going to make us different from other clubs is the ability to work on these hands-on projects,” Rohrmann said. “That’s what we’re working on right now — building out partnerships with local organizations, but also global organizations.”
Pliner added that the alumni committee often points the club toward projects or connections.
Lydell Dyer
Babini emphasized that the projects not only benefit students but the sports companies as well.
