Eccles Business Buzz Podcast

S10E1: From Past to Present: Building NBA and NHL Brands while Breaking Boundaries

Powered by RedCircle

Welcome to the kickoff for the tenth season of the Eccles Business Buzz podcast! This season we will bring you conversations with notable alumni from the David Eccles School of Business and their stories of the impact the school has made on their lives and careers. For our first episode, host Frances Johnson talks with Elaina Pappas, head of marketing for the Utah Jazz and the Utah Mammoth professional sports teams.

We learn about the principles that have guided Elaina’s career in the NBA and NHL —loving sports and helping people. Elaina also talks about the importance of creating opportunities through hard work, relationship-building, and advocating for herself as she built her career.

In addition, Elaina explains how earning an MBA at the David Eccles School of Business made her more well-rounded and boosted her confidence as a leader, and describes her leadership approach of aligning teams around a shared goal, while allowing diverse paths, staying calm under pressure, and encouraging staff to take “one more step” to resolve conflicts.

She explains how sports build community locally and globally through fan experiences, content, and merchandise, and reflects on Utah’s growing sports future and youth impact.

Episode Quotes

How Elaina stays calm in the high-pressure world of sports

[24:13] Frances Johnson: How do you keep your cool in this… it’s a fast-paced environment. You know, a lot is changing, high emotions, like a lot at stake every game, every night, and within the work that you do, you know, outside of the arena as well, how have you developed that muscle to stay calm and to learn how to deal with these difficult scenarios and hard conversations?

[24:42] Elaina Pappas: I think, frankly, a lot of it’s my nature. [25:24] I think practice helps, and understanding so much of my position is navigating those situations. The more muscle memory I’ve built over time has helped me with the next hard conversation or the next situation. I think early on in my career especially, which is unique to sports and entertainment, if you think about it just from a marketing lens, you go to school and you learn so much about pricing something and what a product looks like and what it provides. But in sports, they’re human beings, and you can’t control wins and losses. You can’t sometimes control the ticket price because it depends on wins and losses. You can’t control who gets hurt. You know, there’s all of these things that I learned very early on, which is very hard, was to let go of the things that I truly can’t control.

Why advocating for yourself matters and what you gain from it

[11:27] If you want to go talk to someone in another department, or you want an informational interview, or you want to invite someone to lunch, go do it. And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be asking or, again, making your desires known as far as what you want to do, because that’s the point of an internship. And so many of those either turn into full-time positions, whether it’s immediate or not, or with other organizations too. And so, so much of it is, like, even if something comes six months after their internship ended, if they made an impression on you or someone on my team, that’s way more valuable than a random resume coming through our system. And so some of those, you know, building blocks that they’re establishing early on may not come to fruition for some point, but it helps you build this reliable reputation and credibility that will carry you through your entire career. And then, whether you know it or not, you’re building advocacy, and you have people who are looking out for you, whether you are aware of it or not. And so I’ve been very fortunate in that perspective for my career too. But some of it, so much of it, comes down to, like, the relationship building early on, and again, being able to back it up with your expertise and experience. But that can really help you carry through your career in really positive ways.

Elaina on the future of sports in Utah

[36:04] 10 years ago, I never would’ve probably imagined an NBA All-Star game. An NHL team. An NHL Winter Classic, an Olympics coming back. And so for me, especially [as] someone who’s from Utah it’s been so special to be a part of, and I think we are so fortunate to live in a state that is so strong economically and is so resilient to change and so, like, inelastic to all of these market conditions, which I think sets us up and is why we’ve been rewarded with, you know, we have a women’s soccer team, now we have an NHL team. Again, I can continue to go down the list, but I think what’s the center of this is Utah. And Utah is just a place in a state that’s always growing and climbing and wants to get what’s next. And I think it’s continually shown time and time again that Utah is very ripe for sports.

Show Links: