The Sports Business Group at Berkeley started meeting as a club for the first time in Fall 2016 and commenced on numerous projects henceforth. Spring 2020 would be the first year that our founding members would be graduating and we will have an official graduating class of seniors. In order to recognise and celebrate this accomplishment, we ran a two week social media series profiling all our members in individual mentions. In this blog post, we would like to share with you all their profiles together. SBG would like to thank all our seniors for their outstanding commitment in the growth of the club! We wish you the best for your next endeavours.
Name-Adam Benezra
Major- Economics
Hometown- Los Angeles, California
Adam Benezra is the brain behind the launch of the Sports Business Group at Berkeley. He along with a few other members decided to form this club for encouraging student athletes and other non-athlete Cal Bears to join together and work on passion projects existing out of the realm of sports. His project deliverables include Cal Football, Oakland A’s, and Cal Baseball. His favourite memories at Cal were walking into the Clark Kerr Campus and a large lecture hall for the first time.
Adam was also a part of the Delta Chi Fraternity and studied abroad in Spain in his junior year in Spring 2019. In his free time, he enjoys watching sunsets, and shabbats, and hanging out and having dinner with friends.
As he graduates from Cal this semester, he is eager to get into business development roles in the tech industry. He is also curious to learn more about Judaism and wants to travel as much as he can.
Name- Emma DeSilva
Major- Business Administration
Hometown- Trabuco Canyon, California
Emma DeSilva is one of the founding members of the Sports Business Group at Berkeley and a retired Student Athlete in Track and Field. Her fondest memory was the first time when the club met together in a dusty room in Barrows Hall and talked about what the members wanted the club to be, a speaker series or one focused on consulting. She had so much fun meeting everyone who was interested in the sports industry and seeing the passion in so many members, and she knew already that the group would grow into something really awesome. She started off on a project with Cal Athletics to increase student attendance at football games. Her next project was with the Oakland A's, helping to consult on the location of their new field. She learned how to focus in and answer the case given by the clients as well as being comfortable working in a team and presenting to executives.
Amongst balancing academics, athletics, and SBG, Emma also ventured into writing for the Haas Undergraduate Blog, tutoring/mentoring junior Cal athletes, and studying abroad over the summer in Portugal for an Entrepreneurship and Technology program, where she created her own startup venture with a group of other students. She is also interested in the fashion industry and has undertaken a variety of projects in the fashion world.
As she graduates from Berkeley, she is looking to move to a country where she has roots from, and for whom she had wanted to compete in Track and Field at the Olympics- Sri Lanka. She aims to both work as well as volunteer to help her community develop further.
Name- Collin Moore
Major- Political Economy
Hometown- Novato, CA
Collin Moore is one of the earliest members of the Sports Business Group at Berkeley. Being on the Cal Football squad, he was one of the student athlete members in the club. He thought that the idea of such a club was perfect. He was young and figured out that it was a great way to meet people outside of athletics.
From then on, he stayed in touch with Adam, and the club creation started to gain momentum. Eventually, the first meeting of the club was held, and the rest is history. He says that he was lucky enough to work on a project with Cal Athletics, Cal Baseball, and the Oakland A's.
The best thing that he learnt was that when talking to the groups or teams that he worked with, it was best to be yourself because college students have a unique perspective. It benefits the teams and companies to hear from college students, so it is good to not be nervous and just know you are talking to people who love sports like yourself. As he graduates from Berkeley, recounting the moment that he and his SBG team mates had a huge smile on their faces after their first consulting presentation, he aims to pursue a master’s degree in Public health.
Name- Kian Marghzar
Major- Business Administration
Hometown- Los Angeles
Kian Marghzar joined in as a member in 2018 and worked on his first project with the San Jose Earthquakes. He also presented his findings to the PAC-12 for their Fall 2018 Project. He recalls that his fondest memories at Berkeley have been to hang out with his friends and enjoy his Cal experience as much as he could.
He has also worked with Cal Athletics and the Golden State Warriors as an intern by gaining exposure at the Sports Business Group at Berkeley. Apart from his endeavours in the sports industry, Kian was also a part of the TAMID Group at Cal, through which he was able to go to Israel one summer and intern at a local company in Tel Aviv.
As he looks to graduate this semester, he aims to work in the wealth management industry.
Name- Roben Sieling
Major- Anthropology
Hometown- Pacific Palisades
Roben applied to SBG in his final semester at Cal! He was recruited as a senior mentor and supervised the consultants on a project with the Cal Basketball Team. Being a transfer student, Roben says that in spite of the limited time that he has been able to participate in the group, it has been incredibly insightful for him as it is along the same path in which he plans to take his career. In the few months that he has been a part of the club, he has learnt how to refine teamwork skills that he acquired as a student-athlete into the application of a classroom setting.
His favorite memory from his time as a Golden Bear was in fact experienced on the rival campus -Stanford University. Ending a decade-long drought, Chase Garbers ran an uncontested 20 yards into the endzone to put Cal ahead 23-20 in the big game.
He now looks to work in the sports industry and potentially earn a master’s degree in sports management.
Name- Valentino Daltoso
Major- Legal Studies
Hometown- Boise, Idaho
Valentino Daltoso joined the Sports Business Group at Berkeley when his friends, who were the founding members, invited him to apply. He worked on a project with Cal Baseball, helping them to improve ticket sales for the upcoming season. It was an awesome experience for him to be involved in real life scenarios where his input was possibly used and applied to major sporting events in the Bay Area. The experience was eye opening for him as he was able to view professional and collegiate sports from a different perspective that he felt one doesn't always consider as an athlete. Being on the football team probably gave him a little different experience than most college students. However, he really cherishes the time spent that he spent with so many guys from different walks of life in the team’s locker room. The great part about Berkeley he says is how diverse it is, and the ability to step out of one’s comfort zone is something that he appreciates. Joining the Sports Business Club was a great learning experience, but it also gave him the chance to branch out and meet new people who he can now call his friends! As he finishes up his undergraduate career, he is applying to get Masters of Public Health at Berkeley, while finishing up his last year of playing collegiate football in the fall.
Name- Jordan Golden
Major- Economics
Hometown- Santa Monica, CA
Jordan was one of the very first members helping Adam to create the club. He remembers Adam talking about his idea for an undergraduate sports business club, something that wasn’t currently on campus. They met up one night in his dorm room at Clark Kerr and created a plan for what they wanted to see. They had short and long term goals. They were never afraid to admit something wasn’t working and always tried to adjust to fix it.
He worked on the Cal football project and met with the first client David Kao weekly. It’s very hard to beat the feeling of defeating Stanford in Fall 2019, but some of his favorite college memories were coming home from a long night in Main Stacks and just sitting, talking, and losing track of time with his housemates.
As he graduates, he plans on working in the medical consulting sector.
Name- Cameron Mir
Major- Business Administration
Hometown- Los Angeles
Cameron has had a tremendous time with SBG. He worked directly with Adam to jumpstart the club and helped out with funding because he was always incredibly interested in sports and the business behind it. He had the privilege of working on the projects with Cal Football and the San Jose Earthquakes. With these projects, he really had his first exposure to decking and the importance of it (a skill he would be using at work next year). Overall, he learned some great techniques, but more importantly, he met some really cool people that he still keeps in touch with.
As he graduates, he is working with Accenture in Los Angeles.
Name- Jordyn Elliott
Major- Business Administration
Hometown- Hollywood, Florida
Jordyn has always been interested in the business aspect of Sports, so joining SBG was a no brainer for her. She had the opportunity to work on a project with the San Jose Earthquakes MLS team on how to increase their show rates at home games. It was such an interesting project for her that taught her a lot about the marketing and behind-the-scenes efforts of a major professional athletics team. She also learned very valuable public speaking skills as she presented the final pitch to a group of 5-6 Earthquakes executives along with her teammates.
Some of the best memories she holds at her time here in Berkeley include that of her student athlete experience. She could not imagine these past four years without the countless hours dedicated to training, traveling, and playing for the Cal Women's Soccer team. Being on a team, she was constantly surrounded by amazing, hardworking women who pushed her to explore her physical and mental strength day after day.
At Berkeley Haas, she also served as a member of the RISE committee and won a prize at a case competition held at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in early 2020. She was also voted as the Poets and Quants Best and Brightest Business Majors in 2020, volunteered to teach youngsters how to play soccer, and was the secretary of the Black Student Athlete Committee at Cal.
She will be working as a Marketing Associate for a tech company in San Francisco!
Name- Maxwell Abish
Major- Economics
Hometown- Los Angeles
Maxwell first joined SBG because he wanted to gain some experience in the consulting field, and he has always loved both playing and watching sports throughout his life. He has specifically been a baseball fan, so he was thrilled to find out that his first project would be determining a new stadium site for the Oakland Athletics. Working with the A's was an amazing experience that gave him so much insight into the sports business world, and touring their offices in Oakland was a surreal experience. In fact, he enjoyed this project so much that he decided to become a project leader the following semester.
His favorite semester as a member of SBG was when he served as a project manager. As a project leader he headed a team assigned by the PAC-12 athletic conference to create innovative ways to boost attendance levels at the conference championship football team. His team and he then pitched their final deliverable to PAC-12 executives at their headquarters in San Francisco.
As he graduates from Cal, he will be working in the consulting sphere for Accenture, as a strategy associate in the Los Angeles office.
Name-Jackson Stewart
Major-Economics
Hometown-Calabasas, CA
Jackson was actually one of the founding members of SBG. He initially joined because he was always an avid sports fan (basketball, football, soccer, etc) and was intending to major in business, so he felt like a club of this sort was the perfect combination of interests for him.
He worked on the Cal Football project (first one for SBG ever), was project manager of the San Jose Earthquakes project, was co-project manager of the Cal Baseball project, and was Vice President of the club during his junior spring semester (Spring 2019).
He has developed so many different skills through my experiences in the club. He feels like he’s vastly improved his public speaking, leadership, teamwork, and organizational skills along with his research capabilities.
His favorite memories at Berkeley were definitely the football game-days. Everyone seemed so stress-free and ready to have a good time on those days.
As he graduates from Bekeley, he looks to pursue a career in either finance or sports business.
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