Ogwumike and Rosen share their success stories to start the day
By: Kiera Baker
The third annual USC Next Level Sports Conference opened on October 20 with some major star power. Former Los Angeles Sparks WNBA player and current ESPN analyst, Chiney Ogwumike, interviewed Lon Rosen about his journey from Los Angeles Lakers intern to president of business operations.
Rosen stressed the importance of making connections, self-advocacy and having as many interactions with other people as possible.
One person he met while interning for the Lakers was franchise icon Irvin “Magic” Johnson, who eventually became his longtime work partner on and off the court.
“Meet new people each month, and by doing that you’re going to increase the amount of people you can go reach out to when you need advice or anything,” Rosen said.
Rosen’s networking mindset has gotten him far in his career. As a result, he wears many hats, including executive vice president and chief marketing officer for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
On the flip side, Ogwumike discussed how she was able to transition from professional basketball to journalism:
“I think it’s just understanding what makes you, you…That’s like your uniqueness in the market," she said. She used her identity on the court to translate it in front of the camera.
Their conversation helped clarify their career trajectories and communication across the industry, as well as the evolution of sports business.
The Accelerated Community of Companies shares new research
The Accelerated Community of Companies (ACC) presented a new report during the conference, showing insight into fan expectations for the Los Angeles Summer Olympics in 2028, titled “The People’s Games: What Americans Want from Los Angeles, in 2028.” The report was created in partnership with USC Annenberg.
The report raised a legitimate question its authors found in a focus group: “What if there are two Olympics? One for influencers and the very wealthy, and one for the common people?”
Despite raising the question, the authors of the report only spoke enthusiastically about alternatives for the “common people”: watch parties, “experiencing the Olympic atmosphere,” and attending public celebrations. The report does not address why that question was raised, or how it can be meaningfully addressed. Instead, the ACC explored game-adjacent activities, specifically those aligned with brand engagement.
Content of the report aside, the ACC’s work reflected a recurring theme: sports are about more than just sports.
Sports are becoming investments
Michael Arougheti prefaced his thought by saying he didn’t want to sound patronizing:
“I think a lot of casual sports fans don’t appreciate the complexities of running a sports franchise and trying to be competitive in a financial constraint.”
Whether he succeeded or failed, Arougheti, CEO of the asset management firm Ares Management Corporation, was clear that he has enjoyed blending his financial background with his love of sports.
In the first panel discussion of the day, “Sports as an Asset Class,” Arougheti, who co-owns the Baltimore Orioles and the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC), described how the COVID-19 pandemic led him to sports ownership. At the time, most team owners were asset-rich but cash-poor and needed investment when revenue dried up, according to Arougheti.
“I don’t want to say it was a hobby business, but it wasn’t something that was being professionally managed,” Arougheti said. In his eyes, investing in sports wasn’t “just [about] team ownership, but all of the adjacencies.”
Arougheti is part of a larger trend in sports, as more franchises turn to those with backgrounds in alternative investment management, such as private equity. He claims that his firm, Ares, has invested $17 billion into sports and $12 billion in the last six years.
Private equity investments in sports have increased in recent years: In late 2025, the NBA expanded its rules, allowing private equity firms to invest in up to eight franchises instead of the original five. Major League Baseball also changed its rules, allowing private equity firms to own up to 20% of a team, but no more than the controlling owner. The NFL, NHL and MLS have similar rules aimed at private equity investments. Private equity has also affected youth sports, which has ballooned into a $40 billion industry.
As for the “why” of it all, Arougheti’s answer was simple:
“You should do things that are cool. You should try to find things that are fun,” he said. “You should not be spending that kind of money and time on sports if you’re not into that sort of thing.”
Despite his financial success, Arougheti hasn’t found success on the baseball diamond—under his control, the Orioles have gone from postseason players to outright disappointments, finishing with losing records in 2025 and 2026.
Arougheti acknowledged that it’s “hard to win” in the American League East. “Baseball is really weird. It’s really random.”
Still, when asked why he, a lifelong New York Yankees fan, would buy a rival team, he didn’t hesitate to answer:
“Historic franchise. Iconic stadium. Camden Yards changed stadium design…[it] was revolutionary. I can see myself spending time [there].”
Arougheti almost made it sound like winning was his priority.
“You should be running the team to break even at best.”
He did not say, nor was he asked, anything about his co-owner, David Rubenstein’s comments last week about how much money he makes from baseball, as the league and the players’ union hurtle toward a labor battle this offseason.
Olympian Felix takes Next Level Stage
The most decorated female track athlete ever and USC alumna, Allyson Felix, has added another title to her name besides champion: CEO
The Olympian, with 11 gold medals across five games, spoke highly of both businesses she built from the ground up during her panel, “The New Athlete Ecosystem.” The ventures couldn’t be more different, but both were founded on something greater than herself: the need for women’s advancement in sports.
She founded Saysh, a women’s footwear and lifestyle company, in 2020. Her goal wasn’t just to make something that looked good, but to make something that also felt good.
“I realized that actual shoes weren’t being made for women and they were being made off the mold of a man’s foot,” Felix said.
Felix plans to compete in the L.A. Olympics in two years, despite not having any sponsors as of yet. In the meantime, her latest venture, Always Alpha, is a talent management firm she co-founded with her brother Wes Felix, for female athletes, broadcasters and coaches in sports. The agency aims to correct the trend of marketing women in the wrong way.
“I had been at a lot of the big agencies, and I really believe that they were marketing women like they marketed men,” Felix said.
According to Felix, when it comes to women compared to men in advertisements, women build more relationships and intimacy with their fans by being authentically themselves.
USC Annenberg will be collaborating with Always Alpha to design future branding campaigns for talent.
“Well, I hired a lot of Annenberg graduates”
Crammed into an upscale club with no line of sight to the Clippers’ home court, Rosen, former Raiders CEO Amy Trask and LA28 commercial comms manager Gigi Gutierrez spoke to at least 100 attendees about breaking into one of the most competitive industries in a panel called “The Long Game.”
For Rosen and Trask, their entrances to the industry came across as antiquated to an increasingly muted audience. Rosen used to sneak into the Kia Forum (then known as the Forum) to watch Lakers games. The head of marketing gave him the opportunity to intern instead of being kicked out.
Trask described getting her first internship with the then-Los Angeles Raiders in 1983: she cold-called them. According to Gutierrez, she asked her supervisor at LA28, “If I graduate early, will you just hire me?”
Further removed from entering the workforce, Rosen and Trask stuck to advice that addressed the “big picture”—how to navigate workplace disagreements and the importance of culture and mentorship.
Trask spoke specifically about her relationship with former Raiders coach, general manager, and owner, Al Davis. She described her first disagreement with Davis in vivid detail.
“He ripped into [another employee] the way a velociraptor would into flesh. But he was wrong.” She alleged that co-workers eavesdropped in the hallway to hear the argument. That, she said, set the tone for their relationship, with one caveat: once the decision was made, that was it.
“You don’t run around behind closed doors,” she said. To Trask, relitigating organizational decisions that she disagreed with was unacceptable.
In Rosen’s experience, culture was everything.
“If you don’t have a good culture, you’re not going to win,” Rosen said, citing his experience with the Dodgers. According to Rosen, a good culture comes before winning games.
For Gutierrez, her role has evolved rapidly in the four years since joining the Olympic planning committee. LA28 started with less than 100 employees, but now operates with a 1,200-person team.
With 635 days to go until the Olympics kick off at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and SoFi Stadium, “it feels like a lot more of a reality,” she says.
Gutierrez sells a plan that is slowly coming together. Angelenos alone have already purchased more than 700,000 tickets. Commercial sponsorship has raised around $2.2 billion.
Part of her experience with LA28 has been learning to lead. When speaking about managing down, Gutierrez shared her secret: “Well, I hired a lot of Annenberg graduates.”
More than just hitting play
Club DJs are different from sports DJs. Why? Well, that’s what “Soundtracking the Game” panelists discussed during Tuesday’s event.
“I feel like a lot of people think a DJ is just playing music,” Sparks DJ Jay Shalé said. “No, you’re building something.”
That “something” is a fan experience. Shalé, along with former USC DJ Mal-Ski and Dodgers DJ Severe, talked about how doing music for sports means more than just pressing play. It’s about creating an experience ecosystem that involves fans, players and team culture. Mal-Ski described it like composing a movie score.
“When you get to know your sport, the sport you’re working for, the community that you’re working in, and the team you’re playing for. You start to be able to lean into the curves and score the moments, and they could feel a certain way,” Mal-Ski said.
According to the panelists, doing so is key for maintaining fan engagement during games, even if the team is doing poorly. There is a larger purpose as well; it can build brand awareness, loyalty, and ultimately more money, according to Dolby OptiView.
Being in charge of music for a team not only helps the fans, but also builds on the identity of the DJs themselves. After all, it is their mixing, face and voice, or as it was described during the panel, “identity.”
Athletes also play a role. Severe spoke about how, as a baseball DJ, building relationships and getting to know players as people can create a better experience for everyone. Especially when baseball culture involves walk-out songs for each individual player, a rarity in other sports.
“It’s not really about what you think they want to feel; you know how they feel,” Severe said.
Balancing the creation of an experience for fans, players, executives, and anyone else watching is what makes DJing a sports game more than just playing music. Ultimately, they are storytellers of the sports experience.
Spitzer speaks about streaming sports
As Americans across the country try to figure out what sports are being broadcast where, Netflix is expanding its empire into live entertainment. Gabe Spitzer, the Vice President of Global Live Sports & Entertainment, sat down with Willow Bay, dean of USC Annenberg, to discuss just that in a discussion titled “Netflix Writes a New Script for Sports.”
“I feel like we’re watching the Netflix strategy evolve in real time,” Bay said. She took a brief detour, leading off the discussion by addressing the six percent of Netflix colleagues who were laid off.
“All I can say is the business remains really strong, particularly in the areas that I am focused on,” Spitzer said. Bay posited that the layoffs might create extra pressure on live sports, which Spitzer shot down, framing live sports as “icing on the cake.”
“Once we got that live functionality,” Spitzer said, referring to the platform’s first foray into live coverage, “I think it proved to people internally what live sports and live events can bring.”
Since 2023, Netflix has collected the rights to six NFL games, several MLB events such as Opening Day and the Home Run Derby, and the exclusive rights to the next two Women’s World Cup tournaments in 2027 and 2031.
Almost 800 million people interact with Netflix daily, according to Spitzer, who touts the streamer’s ability to bring people together on a single platform for sports.
Netflix is slated to stream NFL games on Thanksgiving Eve and Christmas Day. The platform also streamed the Week 1 matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams, which took place in Australia. Netflix built its Australian audience with live activation events designed to capture fan attention in all aspects of their day-to-day lives.
As complicated as broadcasting NFL games can be, taking over the production for a World Cup has higher stakes.
Spitzer touted the success of the NWSL, the 2026 Men’s World Cup, and engagement from casual fans as signs the 2027 Women’s World Cup would succeed. At the same time, he hopes to keep die-hard fans engaged.
“I think we’re going to learn a lot from the Women’s World Cup,” Spitzer said, in reference to producing coverage in Spain and Andorra for the 2030 Men’s World Cup.
When asked how Netflix judges success, Spitzer answered, “Viewership…also conversation factor." " Does this lift our branding?”
Spitzer cited the Japanese rights to the World Baseball Classic, which Netflix held this year, as an opportunity to explore new technology and new methods to improve live production.
“We’re not going to be a traditional broadcast,” Spitzer said. “We try to bring our entertainment talent in as well.”
Audience engagement has been mixed. While the 49ers-Rams game drew over 18 million viewers, events like MLB’s Home Run Derby and Field of Dreams game both saw significant declines in viewership compared to last year’s pre-Netflix presentations.
The future of sports media is now
Using social media as a storytelling device may feel a bit odd to some, but it’s supposed to, according to “The Next Generation of Sports Storytellers” panelists Katie Feeney, Julia Adams, Shams Charania and Carlo Jimenez. They gathered Tuesday to discuss their experiences as young people in the sports industry and their careers.
“This isn’t a straight line,” Jimenez said. “Some days it feels impossible, and some days it feels like you got it all figured out.”
All four have utilized social media in some way over the course of their careers. For example, Charania currently has over 4 million followers on X and posts breaking sports news and stories. Adams also uses Instagram as one of her main platforms, and Jimenez has over 200 thousand followers on TikTok.
Feeney, who currently works for ESPN, started her career as an influencer and currently has a following of over 14 million across various platforms. She says that standing out in a sea of content can be hard.
“Anyone can capture a big moment or talk about a big moment, but what’s the perspective that I can bring?” Feeney said. “So, I think bringing in pop culture.”
Adams had a similar story, saying she came up with her new show, “Good Juju Bad Juju,” while trying to figure out how to combine sports betting in a way that made sense for her.
“We always try to be like the people we admire, but I think the way people really find their own voices, they lean into who they are and the things that they’re interested in. And I think you create this unique personality that’s a reflection on yourself, that people come to enjoy,” Jimenez said.
Still, understanding audience, place and time is something that Jimenez said he consistently keeps in mind. On radio or broadcast, he thinks solely about his audience; on social media, he does the same. Charania said the audience is always his number one priority.
“There’s a level of responsibility, and every day I gotta wake up thinking, how can I serve the audience? How can I serve the fans?” Charania said.
Reaching that level of responsibility doesn’t come without hard work. All four panelists discussed that being a sports reporter in the social media age has not come without sacrifice, time, consistency and commitment. Feeney and Charania also both touched on the importance of relationships and networking within the industry. Adams also acknowledged the reality of failing.
“I used that kind of failure,” Adams said. “And then turned it on its head, and I was like, ‘I’m going to be determined to make sure I get this, and how can I make it different?’”
Social media may feel awkward or non-traditional, but as all the panelists demonstrate, it provides a world of opportunity.
Pat McAfee closes out the conference
He never sleeps. Pat McAfee is arguably one of the most controversial sports personalities, but his reach is only expanding. McAfee recently joined Monday Night Football’s Hall of Fame crew, which includes former Alabama head coach Nick Saban.
McAfee praised the group, speaking about how special they are and that the work is never solely about him. He described Saban, with whom he has grown close, as a “special human and incredible friend”.
He said his team on The Pat McAfee Show is one he thinks will be hard for others to find. People come up to him all the time saying, “I’m going to create a Pat McAfee show”. He said that he is all for it, but success requires a great group of people, and he believes that his group is one of one and will be hard to replicate.
“We have a great group of dudes,” McAfee said after explaining the duties of some of the people on his team.
When talking about his daily viewership compared to the digital side of production, he gave all the credit to his team.
All the moving parts behind producing, editing and uploading a 45-second clip of him generate tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of clicks. “We have a great group of dudes,” McAfee said, explaining the people on his team.
When asked how he shows up for himself, he talked about his wife Sara and their children, Midas Robert and Mackenzie, being the anchors of his life:
“I don’t know if I show up for myself ever.” He claims he hasn’t had a day’s rest in a while. The consistency of showing up brings him joy.
“You know, I feel incredibly lucky I get to do what I do…I enjoy the work, and I enjoy accomplishing things.”
Edited by Lauren Worley and Adriana Brady