While world-class track athletes shave seconds off their times in hopes of making the 2028 Olympics, Ben Schragger ’19 is helping them prepare for life well beyond the finish line.
Earlier this year, Schragger was named the Chief Content Officer at Global Athletics, an agency that supports Olympic and professional athletes worldwide. He leads strategy for athlete content, digital media, and creative activations. Schragger also oversees strategy for Iconic Productions, a production studio launched with Olympic champion Noah Lyles.
The athletes, he explains, already have the performance—many of them are coming off of recent world records and 2024 Olympic gold medals. His job is to capitalize on this success by helping athletes connect with fans and build meaningful audiences online. The strategy involves balancing authenticity with compelling content, tailored to each athlete on the roster. “I’m helping them build their presence off the track in a way that actually reflects who they are,” Schragger says.
Schragger’s work is leading up to the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where many of his athletes will have the eyes of the world upon them and the rare partnership opportunities that a “home” Olympics provides. By building their platforms now, he’s helping athletes be ready to capitalize on that moment in a way that’s authentic to who they are. He emphasizes that the Olympics aren’t the finish line for his work, though. “It’s about ownership,” he says. “We want our athletes to have platforms that reflect who they are and give them more control over their careers beyond competition. The Olympics becomes a massive accelerant, but it shouldn’t be the starting point.”
This type of platform building has been Schragger’s life work. “The through-line of my career has been understanding audiences and building digital communities around sports,” he says. Schragger founded Fantasy Football Live in high school, a media company that at its height had 32,000 Twitter followers and hundreds of thousands of website visitors. “This is where I learned firsthand how to create content people actually care about, optimize engagement, and grow an audience from scratch,” he says.
From there, Schragger moved into a content role at CBS Sports, overseeing strategy for the media conglomerate’s sports podcasts, YouTube, and social media. His work generated more than 50 million views across CBS Sports’ podcast content on YouTube in the channels' first two years, and his social media strategy added 1.5 million new followers across 14 podcast accounts.
After CBS, Schragger shifted his work to WIN Reality, leading the launch of the first-ever 1-on-1 virtual reality baseball coaching program. Then in 2024, he co-founded Duæl , an innovative reimagining of the sport of track that pits the top athletes in the world against each other in 1-on-1 races. “At Duæl, I really saw the opportunity in helping athletes build their own audiences and tell their stories,” he explains. “That’s what drew me to Global Athletics, where I could work more closely with athletes on shaping their presence around that.”
Schragger met his Duæl co-founder, Barry Kahn, through Rice’s Sport Management program. That isn’t out of the ordinary, Schragger says—Rice has been pivotal in finding and maintaining his professional network.
“A lot of the opportunities I’ve had have come through relationships, whether directly from Rice connections or from applying what I learned on campus about how to build and maintain those relationships over time,” Schragger says. “That mindset of being proactive and intentional with networking has been a constant throughout my career.”
Now, Schragger is returning the favor to current Sport Management students. He has mentored Rice students and even taken on some as interns during his time at WIN Reality and Duæl.
“I’ve tried to stay connected with Rice in a meaningful way,” he says. “[Professor] Tom Stallings has been great about connecting me with really strong students, and it’s been fun to now be on the other side of that and to help open doors for them.”
Molly (Mohr) Bruni '15 is a proud Rice Sport Management alumna and freelance editor and writer. Find her at mollybruni.com.