Sports have long played a central role in marketing professor Adam Marquardt’s life.

“My parents trained horses from the time I was 3 or 4,” Marquardt said. “I bought into my first horse when I was 15 and grew up in the horse racing and breeding industries.”

Marquardt met athletes and celebrities through his family’s various businesses, which also included sports apparel and a restaurant in Cooperstown, New York, near the Baseball Hall of Fame. He later helped student-athletes develop business plans and branding while working on his MBA and Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee and University of Oregon. Today, he shares his passion for athletics with his students in his sports marketing classes, a field in which he’s seen a rising interest.

“I think the connections that people develop through social media and content access give them a deeper level of connection with athletes than ever before,” he said. “And I think that those things have made it possible for people that might have had a surface level interest before to develop a deeper interest.”

The field is highly competitive, but his students have gone on to find careers with sports agencies and teams, including analytics in professional sports.

“Anything that deals with sales or performance analytics, those are kind of the two golden areas that open up doors for students,” Marquardt said.

Networking is also important. His students have developed and pitched proposals for those in the industry, including Nike, the Tampa Bay Rays, and the Washington Commanders. Alumni have played a big role in helping students get the experience they need to secure internships and jobs.

Having a solid business background in classes such as finance, accounting, market research, analytics, and selling is also important.

“I think the students romanticize the space a lot,” he said. “But we're trying to create, communicate, and deliver value to somebody in the same way that you would a typical product.”

The NCAA first began offering athletes the opportunity to control and profit from their name, image, and likeness in June 2021.

Last fall, he taught a new class, NIL & Athlete Branding. Over the course of the semester, each student developed a branding plan for an athlete. About 60% of the students were UR athletes who created their own personal plans.

“It’s a rapidly changing field, and there’s not a lot of understanding as to how it’s going to look,” he said. “I think that there's a lot of money in college athletics. And the idea that student athletes are going to be able to receive a portion of those benefits makes intuitive sense.”

However, he’s concerned that not enough discussion has been put in place into how the deals will be structured. Having gone to both an SEC and a PAC 12 school, he knows that the larger programs have a lot of support.

“There are a lot of boosters who would have an interest in supporting the athletes through NIL deals. So that crosses back into recruiting, where there are a lot of gray areas,” he said.

“I do hope that some of the structural pieces come into play quickly because I think for the next 2, 3, 4 years, it'll be the Wild West.”