Alumni and Faculty Spotlight: Mark Nagel MA '97

by Written by Jeremy Field (MA '21) | November 19, 2020

Coach Nagel always enjoyed sports as a participant as well as its business side, and progressively, he realized that coaching at the collegiate level may not be the sole career path destined for him. Although he learned a lot as a basketball coach at USF, he also gained experience in statistical analysis, game operations, ticket sales, and facility management while working within a variety of capacities in the athletic department and campus recreation center. . On top of a growing resume of practical experience in collegiate athletics, Mark Nagel was becoming increasingly aware of, and interested in, the growing number of academic programs that related directly to the sports world, such as sport history, biomechanics, and sports marketing. He insightfully recalls that “Curricula were becoming more specialized in certain fields, first with sport management combining the science aspect of sports along with the business and management side and then further specialization occurred within each area as sport management focused solely on business and its subdisciplines.” Today, he reflects, “the nature of our society is much more specialized, and technological advances have helped in that evolution. More and more programs are offering a wide diversity of classes as they are more equipped to offer courses in various subdisciplines, therefore making students a more powerful employee as they have more in-depth knowledge in the potential silos that they can study. Before, most physical education majors were very similar but that has certainly changed.”

Consequently, as he exchanged thoughts and ideas with many faculty members at SMC and especially the Athletic Director and Associate Athletic Director at USF, both of whom had doctoral degrees, Professor Nagel’s “inner nerd,” as he amusingly voices, led him to enroll in the Sports Management doctoral program at the University of Northern Colorado. Thus, he diverged from his initial aspirations of becoming a collegiate basketball coach at the Division I level. As he completed his degree, Dr. Mark Nagel earned his first professorship at San Jose State University in 1999. He then worked at the University of West Georgia in 2001 and then Georgia State University in 2006.  In addition to his full-time positions, Mark Nagel has taught at the University of San Francisco and at Saint Mary’s as an adjunct faculty member since 2001At Saint Mary’s, he primarily teaches the Administration of Kinesiology course. This course includes topics and skills relevant to some of the top leadership positions in the sports industry. In that class, he continuously asserts that “if you want to occupy higher leadership positions and progress up the chain of command, all sport professionals, no matter what their expertise, must develop the necessary skills in the business side of sports which include marketing, handling budgets and/or revenue plans, and matters relevant to human resources such as hiring for a position.” Dr. Nagel is a prolific researcher and textbook author in such areas as sport marketing, sponsorship, facilities, and finance.

Concerning the current COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Nagel emphasizes the importance of delivering content in a way that helps students learn and staying optimistic about the future, even though a timeline to the end of the pandemic is unclear. In an illuminating conversation regarding collegiate athletic programs, he concludes that “Collegiate athletic programs have shown that a lot of schools have tenuous revenue generation models and many fixed expenses; financial problems are occurring across the industry but particularly at  schools that are not in the Power 5 Conferences. Though the budgets and revenue sources of Division I athletic departments have never been equal, the pandemic has created a sad situation where some non-revenue generating sports are being eliminated as school seek ways to cut costs.  There is going to have to be a financial healing process to bring some of these programs back and in some cases schools may elect to not return to their previous spending levels and number of sponsored teams for many years, if ever.”

Given his vast knowledge of the sports industry as an academic and as a practitioner, Professor Nagel strongly discourages his students from burying their books upon graduation and instead encourages his students to follow in his footsteps in order to be a life-long student of the sports industry.

To learn more about Professor Mark Nagel, read his University of South Carolina faculty profile: https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/hrsm/faculty-staff/nagel_mark.php.