One does not have to look hard to see Rice Sports Management graduates succeeding in all aspects of the sports industry. One such success story is Shane Kotlarsky, a 2009 graduate who has recently been elected as the Senior Managing Editor of the Sports Lawyers Journal, a law review put out once a year by the law students of Tulane University.
Law review is the most prestigious activity a law student can undertake while in school, and Tulane University Law is one of the few law schools that offers a review focusing specifically on sports law. As Senior Managing Editor, Shane edits the articles that writers present to them. In addition to editing for grammatical and spelling mistakes, he also looks at the content of the article to make sure that all quotes, cases, and decisions have a source attributed to it.
When asked about the some of the issues that the upcoming volume of the Sport Lawyers Journal will address, Kotlarsky pointed to the current NHL collective bargaining agreement and the right to publicity of college athletes.
“Unfortunately, we are not like ESPN, where we can take up to the minute stories and put them in our review,” he said. “Our writers do a lot of research, and it takes time to properly put together a quality article. We try to stay as up to date as possible.”
Kotlarsky noted some of the advantages his Sports Management degree gave him in his aspiration to be a lawyer in the sports world.
“Sports in a really difficult industry to break into,” he noted. “You have to know someone in order to be able to break in. I was able to get a lot of internships through the Rice Sports Management program, and learned how to network. Those opportunities are important for being able to get a job.”
Many Rice Sports Management graduates attend law school. Kotlarsky offered a few pieces of advice, his most notable being to learn legal writing in some capacity before going to law school.
“I was a good writer in college, and as a History major I wrote a ton of papers," Kotlarsky said. "Legal writing is so different though, and it takes time to learn.”
Garrett Roland, a junior from Walnut Creek, CA, is majoring in Economics and Sports Management and minoring in Business.