Team Managers

Jeff Berding had no idea that the one-off project he agreed to take on in the mid-1990s would lead to a career in professional sports team ownership more than two decades later.

The project, spearheading the effort to fund two sports stadiums for his hometown Cincinnati Reds and Bengals with a sales tax initiative, was near to his heart, as he was a lifelong fan of both teams. It led to a job with the Bengals, which he kept for close to 20 years. Toward the end of his time there, he wrote up a business plan to bring a third major league team to town. Now he is co-owner, president and co-CEO of Cincinnati’s Major League Soccer team, FC Cincinnati.

“Prior to the Reds and Bengals campaign, I had not given pro sports much thought other than as a fan,” says Berding, a 1985 graduate of St. Xavier High School who received his MBA from Xavier University in 1999.

In his work life after college, he acted out of a sense of civic duty—to keep the city’s beloved teams at home and later to possibly create a new one. Berding had played a little soccer in his day, along with track and football at St. Xavier. But it was his young children who were the rabid soccer fans, as passionate as he had been as a boy for the 1975-76 Reds, the legendary Big Red Machine. After securing initial funding, he continued to work on the enterprise build as a civic project, and in 2015 Carl Lindner called to ask if he would like partner with him to bring the plan to life.

“I have had an ongoing intellectual curiosity about the world that the Jesuit education certainly nourished,” Berding says. “I learned a calling to excellence, of my whole person. At St. X, the teachers and staff focus on all aspects of our person and talents—not just intellectual, but our social conscience and convictions, our emotions and relationships.”

The thing about professional sports team owner jobs is, there are only so many. Even factoring in front-office executive management jobs that don’t involve ownership, the numbers are still relatively small. Yet an outsized number of Midwestern Jesuit-educated people fill these roles today, and to list them all would take up the better part of a page.

But to name a few, Scott Perry, a graduate of the University of Detroit Jesuit High School served as general manager of the New York Knicks from 2017 to 2023, and as an executive with several other NBA teams. Creighton University alumnus Mark Walter is a part-owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers and now, with tennis legend Billie Jean King, he co-owns the new Professional Women’s Hockey League, which is scheduled to begin play in January.

Marquette University alum and 2023 NBA Hall of Fame inductee Dwyane Wade recently bought into the Chicago Sky of the WNBA, and Larry Dolan, an alumnus of Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland, is the longtime owner of the Cleveland Guardians (formerly the Indians).

John Carroll University has produced four current or former NFL general managers, including David Caldwell (Jacksonville Jaguars), Nick Caserio (Houston Texans), Tom Telesco (Los Angeles Chargers) and Dave Ziegler (Las Vegas Raiders).

Brian Walsh, a fellow JCU alum who graduated from Saint Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, is a former part-owner of the Chicago Red Stars women’s soccer team and the former owners’ group chair of the National Women’s Soccer League. Recently, he and Kevin Willer, an alum of Loyola Academy (Wilmette, Ill.) and Boston College, sold the team to a Laura Ricketts-led owners group that includes Jennifer Pritzker, a graduate of Loyola University Chicago.

Willer actually co-owns three other soccer teams—Leyton Orient Football Club, OneKnoxville Sporting Club and Rhode Island Football Club—and he’s looking to invest in more.

He played soccer as a child, but his fandom grew exponentially when he studied for a year in London.To this day, Jesuit teaching guides his way in business.

“Men for others, from my time at Loyola Academy, has always been a guiding principle in my life,” he says. “I’ve tried to help elevate the sport here in the U.S. and make sure that every professional soccer club I’m involved with has a strong community impact initiative—usually around making the sport more accessible in under-served communities.”

Another Loyola Academy alum, Brian McIntyre, worked his way up from freshman basketball team manager to head of PR for the NBA. To be fair, McIntyre did more than just manage the basketball team. Hockey was his game back then. He had played hockey growing up, but Loyola Academy had no team in the 1960s. He volunteered to manage the freshman hoops team and spent the next three years lobbying varsity basketball coach and athletic director Gene Sullivan to start a hockey team. McIntyre got his wish for his senior season, 1965-66, and Loyola has had a successful hockey program ever since.

McIntyre went on to Loyola University Chicago, served as varsity basketball manager and sports editor of the student newspaper there, and then went on to make his mark in the NBA, even though that had never been the plan. “I wanted to be a sportswriter in Chicago,” he says. But one night, while tending bar in college, he shared his dreams with a customer, who replied: “Wouldn’t you rather make news than write about it?”

The idea, which had never occurred to McIntyre, rattled in the back of his head for years as he produced and sold an alternate program to the official ones sold outside the Chicago Stadium for Bulls and Blackhawks games. McIntyre’s programs had fresh articles and updated rosters, and he ended up out-selling the official programs three-to-one. After four years, the Bulls offered him a job, and less than four years after that, the NBA came calling.

McIntyre ran the league’s public relations department from 1981 to 2010, and then served as a senior adviser to NBA Commissioner David Stern until 2014. It was perhaps the most robust era of the NBA, with its first superstar players (Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Isiah Thomas and Michael Jordan), the proliferation of cable and satellite TV, a visible anti-drug program, and a collective bargaining partnership between the players and owners.

McIntyre navigated it all, and managed not only the message but the personalities. “Put yourself on the head of a needle and spin around really fast, every day,” he says. “It was a merry-go-round at ultimate speed.”

One of his legacies is the NBA’s Sixth Man Award, which he created to recognize the league’s best non-starting player—the guy who comes off the bench and contributes in a quiet but impactful way. The award is Ignatian in spirit.

“I never really thought of it that way,” he says. “But that’s precisely why I created it. It was for those who selflessly gave of their own stature so the greater whole could benefit. That’s how society should work. And that’s what the Jesuits preach.”

“To me, it’s the discipline, the dogged determination to find out what is right,” he says. “Respect others, work your tail off, dare to be different—just all these little things that spurred me on. And have a sense of value for others.” Berding says he feels a sense of responsibility not only to the Cincinnati community, but to every person his organization touches.

“We want to maximize revenue like other businesses, but must do so aligned with our values of being a family-friendly, inclusive club,” Berding says. “We are not chasing every last dollar so much as chasing every new fan. And because we represent the city, we are very involved in efforts to make the community better, more than most businesses. As Cincinnati rises, so does FCC. We rise together.”