The Work in Sports Podcast - Insider Advice for Sports Careers · Brian Clapp - Work in Sports

Creativity Behind Sports Partnerships w/Pittsburgh Penguins’ Luke Mohamed

·47 min·1 clip

Brian Klapp opens by pointing out that sports careers rarely look tidy from the outside. He and Luke spend much of the conversation on how people figure out what fits by actually doing the work. Luke says he thought he knew which lanes he wanted and which ones he did not, but real experience changed that quickly. The episode revisits roles like operations, community relations, social media, marketing, and sales, treating each one as a useful test rather than a fixed identity. Brian keeps returning to the idea that the biggest lessons usually show up after you have been in the field for a while. That leads into a longer discussion about graduate school timing. The conversation suggests that going straight from undergrad to grad school can mean studying ideas before you have had a chance to use them. Work experience, by contrast, gives those ideas somewhere to land. Luke points to the value of meeting people from different teams, regions, and backgrounds inside graduate programs. Those connections are framed as one of the hidden benefits of the right program. He also mentions how some programs bring corporate partners into the classroom. In that setting, networking is not theoretical. It is built into the day-to-day learning environment. The conversation keeps coming back to the idea that career growth in sports depends on effort, fit, and timing. Near the end, Brian widens the lens to sports sales. He argues that the work is not just dialing for dollars. It also includes creative thinking, business planning, presentations to CEOs, and an eye for what different opportunities can become. The episode closes with a practical nudge to broaden the definition of sales and notice the many paths inside the sports business.

As heard by us

Sports partnerships land best here as relationship-driven career work, not a scripted sales job.

Brian Klapp and Luke Mohamed frame sports partnerships as relationship work with a long runway, not a neat sales track. The strongest thread is the career advice: try roles before settling on one lane, and let actual work test the assumptions people bring in.

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Why you'd press play

If you want to see sports sales as strategy, not just cold calls.

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