For a large majority of college athletes, intercollegiate athletics is their final foray into the world of competitive sports before they enter the workforce. But for three of Ithaca College’s student-athletes, the workforce and professional sports became the same over the summer.
The college is well known for its connections with media industry titan NBC, which has representatives come to the college annually to meet with students and provide internship opportunities. In this case, though, it was the NBA and its affiliates who scooped up three senior Bombers for summer internships.
Women’s basketball junior forward Annabella Yorio recalled using TeamWork Online, a recruiting site for finding jobs at every level of the sports industry, and said she got some help from her academic adviser to get the internship she wanted.
“I went to my adviser because I wasn’t really hearing back from any of them,” Yorio said. “So I went, and she’s like, ‘Oh, which ones are you applying to?’ And I said, ‘I applied to the New York Liberty inside sales internship,’ and she’s like, ‘Oh, I know the supervisor!’ So she kind of connected me with him and I got through the whole interview process.”
Yorio is a business administration major with a concentration in sports management, in addition to holding a role as vice president of the IC Sports Sales Club, a club dedicated to preparing students to join the sports sales industry. All of this is to say, the inside sales internship with Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty parent company BSE Global was right up her alley. Junior guard Jillian Payne, who is a sports media major, said she went into her internship with less field experience than Yorio had.
Payne initially applied for the Olympics internship with NBC but did not land the opportunity. She was encouraged by her mother and Yorio to apply for the internship with the NBA, earning a role in its global media operations department for the summer.
“Going in, I had no idea what I was going to be doing,” Payne said. “I did a lot of different things [around Park], but global media operations: that’s a very broad term. I really didn’t know what that entailed and it was all gonna be new to me because I didn’t know much about it.”
Men’s cross-country runner senior Drew Taylor said his summer internship with the NBA came from a similar Hail Mary.
“Late in [2023] — probably November or December — I saw it was posted on LinkedIn,” Taylor said. “I just applied, kind of just took a shot in the dark. Obviously, as a sports management major, you see something from the NBA pop up for the summer, you think, ‘Hey, might as well see if this could take me somewhere.’”
Taylor’s role as a marketing partnerships & media intern with the NBA was not unfamiliar to him. He held an internship with Duke University’s Iron Dukes fundraiser in Spring 2024, as well as a virtual sales role with the NFL’s Washington Commanders during Fall 2023. On campus, he is president of the IC Sports Sales Club.
All three of these Ithaca student-athletes found themselves working internships with very different titles, but Yorio and Taylor’s roles were essentially different sides of the same coin. Taylor said their role difference was that Yorio worked more with consumers while he was focused on the corporate side, seeking new partners and sponsors.
Yorio said that after a few weeks of training with the Brooklyn Nets, she was already starting to make sales for the Liberty.
“After those two and a half weeks, I was cold calling and actually selling, doing what the whole inside sales class was doing that whole time,” Yorio said. “I was able to make a few sales within the month I had, so that was super rewarding.”
Payne’s role, meanwhile, was wildly different from what the two sports management majors were doing. She said her job working on the linear side of media communications was relatively simple.
“I was basically trafficking, programming and scheduling for NBA TV,” Payne said. “All of those NBA ads that you were seeing, I was going through different spreadsheets and inputting that into the different channels of what was going to be going on, ensuring that that 24-hour channel was always full of content.”
As time went on, Payne moved more toward digital media communications, which was a more varied day-to-day experience. The main project she focused on was researching new geo-proxies so that the NBA could manage international advertisements across its websites from one location.
As far as the location of the internships, Payne was stationed in Secaucus, New Jersey and Taylor and Yorio worked in New York City.
With how busy these 9–5 roles are, there is not much time left in the day for other activities. However, the responsibility for these three to perform as athletes at Ithaca College is just as significant for them as their professional advancement. Each one of them had to figure out training times that did not conflict with their full-time work hours, something Payne said they were all willing to do.
“If we were tired after work it didn’t matter,” Payne said. “We still had to go work out, and we had to get shots up and we had to run.”
Yorio said something similar, referring to the limited amount of time they had left to play.
“Also, we’re seniors,” Yorio said. “We only have one more year of this. It was one summer of preparing for a season, our last season, so you kind of just have to suck it up and do it.”
The collegiate basketball season starts in November, but training was arguably even more urgent for Taylor, whose cross-country season began at the end of August. Taylor said there were several commitments for him to try and balance even outside of work and training, but he was confident in his ability to do so.
“I was working 40 hours a week, but then also adapting to city life, then also just wanting to explore the city and have a fun summer,” Taylor said. “Nine times out of 10, I would get my workout or run in before the day even started.”
As difficult as this sounds, these jobs came with their fair share of highlights. Payne shared that she was able to meet with both NBA Commissioner Adam Silver and Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum.
Yorio expressed that making her first sale was the most rewarding moment of her internship, but she also said a different role put her in the spotlight.
“One of my jobs during the game was seat-filling,” Yorio said. “So when [celebrities] were in the [Barclays Center’s] Crown Club, I would just fill their seat. So I got to sit next to Sue Bird and Jason Sudeikis one time, it was pretty cool.”
In the end, each student had nothing but glowing praise for the NBA and the experience they had working for the company. Yorio said she was sad to leave an environment as nice as her office over the summer.
“It’s so refreshing, being able to walk into work and be welcomed by the whole team just being so friendly with you, genuinely caring about you,” Yorio said.
Taylor said that he would definitely work for the NBA again if the opportunity arose, and explained that his internship helped give more perspective on how big the world of sports sales truly is.
“It’s a different kind of side of sales,” Taylor said. “I mean, sales is definitely something I want to do after I graduate, whether that’s more what I did this past summer or more of what Annabella did this summer, I think it’s always good to have a kind of a well-rounded approach.”
Payne said that the internship was such a positive experience that she considers getting back to the NBA an end goal for her career, even if her path back might not be direct.
“Honest to god, [it was] the best summer of my life,” Payne said.
