Welcome to The Pivot Point, a student-led podcast that shines a spotlight on the vibrant city of Las Vegas while exploring the transformative journeys of students, professors, and executives. My name is Bardia Eivazi, an MBA student at UNLV. Join me as I delve into the stories of those who have embraced change, overcome obstacles, and made significant strides in their academic and professional lives. We're more than just a podcast - we are a community dedicated to empowering student voices and inspiring the next generation of leaders. Tweet us @pivotpointunlv!
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You're listening to locally produced programming created in KUNV Studios on public radio. KUNV 91.5. The content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.
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Welcome to the Pivot Point where we talk about all things pivot, all things business, and all things Vegas. I'm your host, Bardea. Let's get the ball rolling. All right.
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Hello, everybody.
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Thanks for joining us on another episode of The Pivot Point. Today we've got something really special on the menu. We're talking about sports innovation and sports entertainment along with their impact on the hospitality industry in Las Vegas. I'm joined by an expert at the forefront of this industry today, the COO and Director of Business Development of UNLV Sports Innovation, my friend, Mr. Jay Vickers. How are you today, Jay?
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Hey, Barty. How are you today?
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Good. Thank you so much. So, you have a very interesting job, I think, on campus. Can you tell us a bit about your background and your career story?
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Actually, that's a lot, but however, I gave it a chance here. So my background, I went to the University of Notre Dame, played football there, was their own scholarship, so I always had a passion for sports. I didn't realize how much of a passion I had for it from a higher education standpoint, but being a first-generation college grad, like a lot of our students here at UNLV, I learned a lot through different mentors and people that I had the opportunity to be around, which is you don't get that opportunity until you come to college. And I had a great experience, and with that experience, I was able to take that and understand, hey, I wanna be in corporate America. That was the big dream at one point, is how you get in corporate America, and then at Notre Dame, it gave me, offered some opportunities that I can only dream about. So I worked in the private sector for about seven, eight years. Initially with Pfizer, I'm sorry, with Gallowines, Hershey and Pfizer, respectively, got some great experience as relates to relationship management and sales and et cetera. But there was something missing. I really wanted to look and say, Hey, look, I have a passion for sports and the opportunity to play at a professional level had gone and passed due to some injuries and things of that nature but you go to school because you look for that long-term sustainability and After meeting with some mentors that side I want to be in athletics I wanted to be a voice for student athletes a voice for young people as it relates to You know sponsorships philanthropy things of that nature. So started my career in collegiate athletics Worked for had opportunity to work for some great universities, Fresno State, University of Arizona, here at UNLV, University of Wisconsin, New Orleans, Illinois University, and now back at UNLV. So I've kind of been around. I came back to UNLV because I just love the opportunity and the fight in our students. I love the passion that they have for the city of Las Vegas. And I believe it's a great community. That's why we built our family here. So very happy to be back on this campus as well as have the opportunity to take advantage of this Opportunity we're going through something that's unprecedented. I believe in any city as far as our generation I've never seen a city grow to become quickly the sports and entertainment capital of the world and I believe that's where we're headed and Many people would tell you we're already there. Yes. Was there a particular sport that inspired you or continues to inspire you today? You know what, now, obviously growing up and playing football, football inspired me quite a bit. I believe that's one of the perfect metaphors for life because it teaches you so many things about teamwork and leadership, responsibility. So for me, it was always that aspect of it. But I think that also resonates with all sports, not just football. I have a passion for not only all the different components of sports now, you know, as you grow, you mature, right? So, all the different components of sports, the innovation side of it. I'm a Star Wars junkie, so I'm waiting through, waiting for some midi-chlorians to be developed so they can take care of some of my knee issues. But that innovation part to me is exciting, but also looking at, you know, from a technology standpoint, the mental health side of sports, the social science, those pieces are really important. The ability that we can talk about those now are so important to what we do so it makes it really exciting about the future of not only of sports but also the future of
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what we have here in Las Vegas. Yes, so in your experience working on campus, what are the key challenges and opportunities that you see in implementing sports
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innovation strategies within the university? I think the biggest challenge right now is that we're moving so fast. And so, and like any other thing that's moving fast, you don't slow down sometimes the smell of the roses, as they say, because as you try to smell one new ones grow, and that was prettier than the last one. Right. And so we need to be able to slow down for our students and create platforms so they can not only just our students, but our faculty and create platforms so they can showcase the work that they're doing in innovation or technology and research. We try to do that through UNLV Sports Innovation via our UNLV Sports Research Summit, which we held at the UFC Apex. We held our third one back in April. These events have been very beneficial to allowing students not only to see what we're doing on campus, but also faculty and networking and collaboration. And hopefully, through that process, there's some deal-making happening as well.
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Absolutely. So something we talked about prior to the podcast, which was a very fun topic, I think, was the development of some sort of a technology hub in Las Vegas. Now, I don't know how much you can speak to that, but if you could share any cool developments that might be happening in the near future.
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I think there's a lot of cool developments. I think a lot of the work that the LBGEA is doing, as well as the interest that our city has in sports and the LVCVA is opening up doors now to say, hey, look, we're not just a hospitality and gaming industry, we're a sports and entertainment industry. We've already been number one in entertainment, but look what we're doing in sports. We won our first world championship with the Aces, our second with the Golden Knights, as we saw, and heck, we won a national championship many years ago with the Rebels. So we are a town that can embrace sports, but now we want to make sure that those athletes, those organizations, they have the resources surrounded around them so they can continue to have that type of success. And what you need is that infrastructure in place. You need to be able to have great medical units, be able to see the new innovation and technology and data collecting and those type things happening. And so it gives us the opportunity to see that. So working and collaborating with LBGEA, LBCVA and others, we can enhance and entice other companies to say, look, you should be home here. And through Sports Innovation, we have the opportunity to show that, create a platform to showcase what we already do on campus very well in all these different areas. We call them our pillars. And so from there, it gives us a great opportunity to Collaborate with each of those entities whether they're new or old or every case may be but it gives us that great opportunity for collaboration Yes
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and I think so you already just touched on one question I was going to get to but It was about connecting the sports innovation at UNLV to hospitality entertainment in the city now one of the coolest I think programs coming out recently was the IPSM, the Intercollegiate and Professional Support Management program. How do you see that cohort contributing to Las Vegas? I think they do amazing stuff.
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Well, first and foremost, I want to give kudos to the founder of that program, and that is Dr. Nancy Lowe, who is one of my colleagues. She's done an outstanding job of building our program from the ground up. A lot of times at higher ed, we get these so-called impossible tasks, but we have such great people around like Nancy Lowe and others that can build something from the ground up, which is what we've done in sports innovation. As part of sports innovation, our goal was how can we have an impact not only on economic development, whether it relates to innovation and technology, but also how do we have an impact on workforce development? And if you look at why we're the number one hospitality school in the country, it's because we answer the call of our city. As a public institution, that is our job. It's answer the call and the needs of our city in so many different areas. And our entire campus does a great job in their respective areas. And if you look at hospitality and gaming, we're number one in hospitality. We are the thought leaders in gaming. We've done that very, very well. And we've done it very well in other areas, too. But now we have a call for sports. And now we have these beautiful buildings, these beautiful venues, T-Mobile, Allegiant Stadium. We have World Championship teams. How do we support that? How do we make sure that our students understand that you don't have to be a student. I mean, you don't have to be an athlete or a coach or a trainer to be involved in sports. There's so many other jobs and opportunities of how these organizations run and how they tick. And through the IPSM program, our students are learning that. And so, and through going back to the external aspect of it, part of the job that we do in sports innovation is we connect with those entities and collaborating with IPSM, we provide them opportunities as well, to have internships, volunteerships, and et cetera. One that we're extremely proud of is the Las Vegas Super Bowl host committee. And so we initiated an internship program, and I know many people say, oh, you know, they've had internship programs in other cities as well, but this one's unique. And what's unique about it is, it's the first fully paid internship program in Super Bowl history. Now, the Super Bowl we're hosting is Super Bowl 58. So there's been 57 other Super Bowls that haven't had fully paid internship programs. This is the first. It's because Sam Joffrey, the executive director of the Super Bowl host committee, said, hey, let's think outside the box here. How do we make this different? And Jay, why should we make a difference? And I said, the reason why it should be different is, one, we're Las Vegas. Number two, two-thirds of our student population is either first gen or non-traditional students and so we need to make sure we identify a way that we can pay our students and give them a world-class experience of helping create and build the very first Super Bowl in Las Vegas history and hopefully the very best Super Bowl ever out of the 58. So that's what we're looking to do and so we're able to get some great some great partners involved in this. NFL Foundation is one that said, hey, look, this is amazing. Not only is this based on the needs of your campus, but you guys are also the most diverse campus in the country. And so with that, we can easily say we are supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion and belonging. And so through that process, we're hiring 45 students. And the one organization in town that said, we need to be involved is United Way of Southern Nevada. So Julian Hyde, their CEO and their board, we're so grateful to, simply because they understood the needs of our community and they're seeing it, and they wanna pay it forward by seeing these students have this opportunity. So right now we've hired close to 25 students, if I'm not mistaken, I could be a little off. We change out each cohort every semester because we want to get as many students involved as possible and going into the fall, we'll hire close to 20 more so we can really make sure they have the support needed to pull off the Super Bowl.
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Wow, I never thought how deep it would go, how different it would be compared to other Super Bowls.
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It's interesting because most people don't understand, most don't understand, I didn't understand that to have a Super Bowl come to your city, the NFL shows up and they do a great job when they show up. They show up with the teams, they show up with a lot of great support, but the city puts on the show. They put on all the events, they have to be invested in what they're doing and what other city in the world can put on the best show. And we approve it time and time again with the the NFL Draft, Whether it's the Pro Bowl or the Shrine Game, you name it, any event possible, no one does it like Las Vegas, and we hope the same for the Super Bowl.
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Yeah, that's why I really love how I was exposed during the Summit to you saying the sports and entertainment capital of the world.
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Exactly. And I think that's a really important motto that I've heard from you a lot of times our students graduate and they want to look around at other places for jobs, you know this, you don't have to leave. Everything you need now because of how we're, and it's really about our city leaders, their understanding now that, look, we need to expand who we are as a city and keep our best talent home and with giving them opportunities. With sports coming into the realm over the last few years is allowing us to do that and keep our best talent home.
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Absolutely. So I wanna rewind it just a little bit back to that Sports Innovation Summit. So I had the pleasure of meeting you there and Andrew Woods is a presenter there and he has presented some amazing research that wasn't even published at the time. So honestly, I encourage anyone who's listening, you can go and you can go to these events and get some really great exposure to cutting-edge research. And recently the UNLV Sports Innovation published a white paper called a summary of the sports economy in Las Vegas published about a month ago with just extremely interesting data. What opportunities do
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you see for employment in the sports field in the coming years? I think that opportunity is still unset right now. I think there's tons of opportunity for our students as we move forward. I think I can speak now based on some of the students that have been involved in the Oswego Super Bowl Host Community Internship Program is that their minds have been blown away simply because they didn't realize all the different opportunities that are involved within a sports organization or what it takes to pull an event, whether it's sports marketing, sales, sponsorships, you know, the behind the scenes pieces, like we're doing this podcast now, and there's someone in the booth. Like there's so many different opportunities, film and videography, there's social media. So I think the opportunities there are endless. And so now you're starting to see, and I'll use this word, even though we don't pivot point, you're starting to see students pivot now towards sports because they understand there's opportunities there. I didn't know exist. And that's what happens. We have a lot of first gen students, too. They don't know all the opportunities and where they should go. They're very talented. But now with data that Andrew was is doing, what's happening, not PSM program, as well as other units on campus. Now, students are starting to understand, man, there's different opportunities here that didn't exist before and I'm actually a great candidate for it. And so we want to hope we hope to continue those opportunities through internships, through volunteerships, as well as connecting not only with you know there's only so many jobs in our city at some point but we also want to connect to our other entities outside of our region too. That's why I call it the pivot point man,
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embracing the change. So what about tourism? What do you think will happen? Well I think we
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already see it. I mean you go to a Raiders game and half the fan base are tourists. Whether they're there to support the Raiders or support the opposing team, it doesn't matter. I think tourism will continue to increase. I think we're seeing the impact of that during months that are typically maybe not we don't have as much foot traffic in our community or in our city, but now those numbers are rising every day. I don't want to be the expert on this, others that are expert on what our ADRs are and how much foot traffic we have in our city. However, we are seeing an increase that just because of, hey, the Raiders are playing, or the Knights are playing, or the Aces are playing, and we want to continue to see that trend. Yes, I have a hard-hitting question for you because I think you can handle it. Okay.
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This has to do with just in a general sense over the course of your career, over the course of your leadership positions, community service, anything like that. How do you handle failure or setbacks? And what lessons have you learned from those experiences?
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Well, the first thing that I've learned through failure or setbacks, and if you've been around here long enough, you're gonna have some failures and setbacks, is you have to get up. Don't matter how hard they hit you, how hard you felt to the ground, just like no different than when I played football, you have to jump back up and go back in. Absolutely. If you sit back and just kind of go over and over again about what happened or why it happened, you need to understand it so you don't repeat the mistake again or the failure again, but you have to be willing to learn from that failure. And you have to get up and go back and do the fight you can't give up on it You have to continue to move forward One of my mentors always says there's no there is no such thing as stand and steal either you move forward or backwards Regardless and so I only know one way that's the move fail move forward you can stall a little bit But you got to still be going forward at the same time and so I think once you get knocked down Just get back up. Yes. That's the first step just get back up. Is there anything else you would say to say
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your younger self to sort of push you through those times?
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You know, to my younger self, I had great mentors that taught me to get back up.
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Yes.
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You know, and forced me to get back up, whether it was parents or coaches or mentors that I met in business. It was really important that I listened to them. And I think the, what I would tell my younger self is get as many mentors as possible and learn from them from all different areas. Don't just be focused on one area of expertise. You know, kind of expand that more to your pointless pivot. Right. And I think that's the need is to have the opportunity to pivot a little bit more and broaden your horizons. I think at some point, you know, I had blinders on because I was just so focused on one goal and not understanding that this world is vast as large. I never thought I would live in Las Vegas Mm-hmm, and I've had the opportunity to live I think in 11 different cities since I Graduated from high school and this is by far my favorite city, but I never thought I would live in Las Vegas, right? But it's the best move I've ever had and that's because I was open to the opportunity and it's the best community based on the people what we do here at UNLV, and just how driven this city is to be the best in everything that we do.
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Absolutely. I think even in my personal experience, behind those decisions of like, should I do something, should I go out, was a lot of fear. And it was not helpful for me to find any mentors. I was closing myself off. So if anyone, you know, listening relates to that, it's all about making that fear smaller Just by going out doing small little things for me It's been helped so helpful to meet more people and just to expand my horizons like you said I could tell you about fear
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one of my mentors and I've read this several times is that fear is defined as false experiences appearing real so That's how I look at absolutely that makes us
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Are there any books you recommend to anyone listening, any younger folk?
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Well, I can tell you right now, other than the last great book I read was Good to Great, only because I've been busy with so many other things, but it just continues to resonate. You know, I've always, you asked about failure is how do you get better? You can never stop at, hey, I'm good right now, but what's the next step? And so I've always felt fail back or fall back on that book as far as from good to great, because I just, you know, maybe that's just the competitive nature of me from being an athlete. It's just, how do you continuously get better? You know, Jay, you're already the fastest. Okay, how can I get faster? Or how do you get stronger? And how do you put on a better event? You know, we had the Sports Research Summit, and the first thing I kept thinking about is, how do we make it better for next year? So again, good to great.
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Absolutely, absolutely. So do you have any personal goals or visions or impact you hope to have on the Lathx community?
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I think now I think I just want to continue to do the work that we're doing, but also try to try to create opportunities so we could plant, you know, whatever goals that we can do as a university, how do we plant that flag in that really shines and not only to those that are within our community but outside of our community that we truly are the global sports capital of sports entertainment.
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Absolutely. Well, I'm certainly very excited. I never thought growing up here that we would see a stadium like Leeson Stadium, that we would see like baseball stadiums coming, arenas, Formula One. What's the most exciting thing for you? I think it's all of it.
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Yeah. For me it's been all of it. I mean it's been rewarding to see what's happened with the Super Bowl. It's been rewarding to see all these different teams coming. But what's really been exciting is the people that are coming with these teams. These organizations have done a great job of hiring great talent. We talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion. We have the first female president in NFL history with the Raiders. We have a very diverse Las Vegas Aces organization. And again, they're championships. They're winners. And what they do, but not just what they do on the court or field of play, but what they do in hiring, their hiring practices, what they do as far as working with the community. I mean, they're truly partners in what we do. Our students are getting jobs with them, whether it's internships or volunteerships, they're reaching back out and saying, how can we help? How can we be a part of it? I saw Nikki Fargis at a June 10th event recently, and she was the same way. She just wanted to be a part of the community, and she was open to anyone walking by that recognized her, and that's what you want. You want people that really want to be here and embrace our community and the sports teams that have been here That we are so lucky to have right now. That's exactly what they're doing. They're embraced in Las Vegas and that's really important. You mentioned how
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You work with diversity equity inclusion and you and LV is the most diverse campus. Yes And I think that all ties back into some sort of some sort of unity How do you foster unity and how do you think that is important in accepting all
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these sports and they come to Vegas? Well as I said earlier I think sports is the perfect metaphor for life because it does embrace unity. You want to bring people together to get a competition and whether that competition is baseball or football or basketball it doesn't matter or hockey you want somebody you want a group of different people cheering for the same cause, you automatically see in their sports. And so I embrace unity from the different things that we do to support those entities, but also support unity within our organization, the people that I meet. I don't like meeting strangers, so everyone I meet is a friend, right? So it's good to be able to connect with people regardless of their backgrounds and where they're from or their gender. And I've always been that way. I was raised that way. Yeah. And I will continue to be that way.
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Yeah. Are there any departments or student organizations on campus that you'd like to work with?
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You know what? I have the opportunity to work with all the organizations, but we're a small team. So there's so many more that we want to work with in departments on campus. And I think we're doing what we can handle right now. But we've always been open to work with all the different organizations now. We'll do some things with sports media here pretty soon here at Greenspun, but we'll continue to work with others as we move forward.
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Yeah, and that definitely all sounds exciting. I honestly cannot imagine that Vegas would become such a great breeding ground for all these things, for sports and everything. What else would you say to someone, a student perhaps, who's interested in pursuing a career like yours?
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I would say, let's have some conversation. Feel free to send me an email, but if you see someone that's in a position similar to what you may have interest in, send them an email and reach out. And I would say, don't be afraid to take the first step forward, to try to have a conversation. And I think that's really, most people that are in leadership roles, I think that's your responsibility is to figure out how to throw the rope back over and get more people to move forward with you. And if they're not doing that, then call somebody else.
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Right.
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Is there, do you see any impact of all these professional sports coming to Las Vegas? Do you see any impact on youth sports?
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Oh, absolutely. One thing about, as we talked about earlier as relates to the community, one way that you have seen whether it's the NFL or WNBA or regardless of what, the Golden Knights, they're building new facilities, it's all for youth. They want to have the youth the opportunity to understand what's going on in their sport, help them with technical skills, but also with life skills. And I think that's really important. We're going to have a UNLV School of Public Health will be working with NFL or NFL Play 60. These are the type of things that we need to be doing and we are doing it. And just a matter now of how do we get that information out there? How do we make sure our students and K through 12 young people are involved? And so they see that community focus. But one thing about the athletes that are here, as we talked about, but
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One thing about the athletes that are here as we talked about they have never met a stranger either Especially when it comes to kids
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Wow, what's sort of like a life experience? Where you hope to teach someone? I think they mean I think the best one for me is Never veer away from your dreams, you know, I had a conversation With a teacher here. I want to say about six months ago, maybe a little bit longer, maybe a year ago. And we all know that only a very small percentage can make it to the professional ranks, right? That doesn't mean that you tell a young person, hey, you're never going to make it. Exactly. You should pick a different, you should always have a backup plan. I think that's a great life lesson. But the backup plan, when I guess a young person told her, hey, listen, only a few can make it to the NFL or the NBA. So what's your backup plan? How about, you know, say you want to be a police officer or a firefighter. And I said, those are great.
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They are.
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Those are great things to do. Some of our best athletes in the world are in our military or they're firefighters or, or police officers. I said, however, there's a lot of other jobs in sports that they can be a part of. They can be a president of an organization like the Raiders, you know, they can also, or the Aces, or you name it, they can be in sports marketing. You know, so I brought out all these different jobs that are involved in sports, I'm saying, yeah, and they can still be involved in that. And she was just kind of blown away, so I just never thought about it.
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That's an important message, I think.
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And so I think there's, don't kill their dreams, expand their dreams.
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Absolutely.
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Well, I think that I would have liked this conversation to continue even more. I wish you really had more time. No worries. But is there anything else you'd like to share with the listeners?
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No, I'm just really happy to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. This has been great. I would love to do it again and answer more questions and have some more conversation.
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Absolutely. And if anyone is interested, you can look up more about Jay Vickers' work and look more into UNLV Sports Innovation at sportsinnovation.unlv.edu. Thank you again, Jay, for joining me today. I had an awesome time.
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Thank you.
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Thank you all for listening to The Pivot Point. You can follow us Thank you all for listening to The Pivot Point. You can follow us
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at Pivot Point UNLV on Twitter, all one word, and hope you enjoyed the show.