How did you get into sports?
Bobby McCann, my uncle, played seven years in the NBA. I've known him since birth, which meant I grew up spending time in locker rooms before I understood what a locker room was. I was around professional athletes the way other kids were around their parents' coworkers: it was just the texture of life. I didn't think of it as access. It was just family.
But somewhere along the way: high school, probably: I started to notice things. I noticed how athletes were treated by the people around them. I noticed how much confusion existed around money, around decisions, around what came next. I noticed that the people with the most talent were often the least informed about the business of their own careers. That stayed with me.
When I was in college, I started paying attention differently. Not just to the game, but to the industry. Who represented people. How deals were structured. What management firms actually did versus what they claimed to do. I started forming views.
My brother, Bryce's best friend was traded to the Boston Celtics while he was playing I was living and working in Boston at the time, and that connection gave me a front row seat to how a hall of fame point guard operated on and off the floor: how he carried himself, how the people around him functioned, how the business of professional basketball actually worked at that level. Nothing came from it directly. But it taught me something I've carried ever since: being in the room isn't enough. You have to know what to do once you're there.
Building with intention.
I was on a fast track to upper management in technology. Ten years in software: building products, managing teams, operating systems that had to perform. I was making real money, I had a clear career path in front of me, and most people around me thought staying on that track was the obvious choice. Moving into sports management was not the obvious choice. But I'd been reading this industry my whole life, and I was convinced there was a better way to run it.
I started the way you have to start: reading contracts for friends who trusted me to handle their day-to-day, manager first, before anything with a title. That access, unglamorous as it was, is how I actually learned the business. Not from a program. From being in it.
In 2017, one yes turned into six clients. I built slowly: by design, not by necessity. I could have grown faster. I didn't want to. The thing I kept seeing in the firms I'd studied was that growth without infrastructure creates problems you spend years cleaning up. I wanted to build the infrastructure first.
One of those early clients was Allonzo Trier: Iso Zo, as the internet came to know him. He was coming out of Arizona, undrafted, signed as a free agent by the Knicks, and he exploded in the preseason. The night he scored 25 points in Madison Square Garden and went viral, I was getting calls I'd never gotten before. That moment taught me something about what it means to have a client who performs: and what happens to the business around an athlete when the spotlight finds them. You have to be ready. We were ready.
This is my life's work
Brunswick is the thing. My full attention, my full ambition, and my full commitment. Every client on the roster knows that. It's not something I say: it's something you feel over the course of a relationship.
Bobby McCann taught me something simple that I've never forgotten: the best thing you can do for an athlete is tell them the truth, even when it's not what they want to hear. Especially then. That's a harder standard to hold than it sounds. It means sometimes having uncomfortable conversations. It means putting the relationship at some short-term risk to protect it long-term. It's the only way to build trust that actually holds.
That's a line I come back to often. It applies to athletes building their post-career. It applies to young people trying to get into this industry. And it applied to me in those early years building something that most people around me couldn't see yet.
Brunswick manages 30+ athletes today. We've been through contract years, injuries, trades, retirements, business launches, and everything in between. The firm is more capable than it's ever been: financially, operationally, in terms of the team behind it.
But the thing I'm most proud of isn't the scale. It's the continuity. The athletes who came to us first are still here. They didn't need to leave to find something better. That's the standard we hold ourselves to. That's the firm we built.
