Telling Gina's Story

“May it always be fun.” This is the quote Gina Antoniello, Clinical Assistant Professor of Sports Management at NYU and Ph.D. in Sports Management candidate at Troy University, has consistently kept on her career vision board. She explains that this quote has kept her on track throughout the entirety of her career. She says, “the whole point is to be doing something that you love and to have fun, so I always checked in with myself. If there were points in my career where I was feeling like there were too many days in a row where it was feeling heavy, where it was feeling like not what I had wanted, then I really dug into that and explored that and that was often the catalyst for change.”

By following this mantra and seizing on unique opportunities, Gina has built an impressive resume in the sports industry. She has been an on-camera talent, a public relations tycoon, an eager student, and a passionate teacher all within sports over the course of her career.

Gina’s time in the sports industry began at 18 years old with a variety of internships. She had several mentors early on who gave her the foresight to experience as much as she could to not only figure out what she liked but to figure out what she did not like. She tried internships that spanned from event management to ticket sales to broadcast production. It was from these early work experiences that she realized two things. The first being that she loved sports. She found that everyone she met while working in sports was excited and invested in their jobs and she wanted to surround herself with these people for the rest of her career. The second thing she became sure of was that she loved storytelling. Whether that was in front of a camera, developing social platforms, or pitching stories to large media outlets, she loved it all. She loved seeking out what the major storylines were and finding the perfect medium for the story to live.

Wanting to further pursue and combine her interest in sports and storytelling, Gina attended Columbia University to get her master’s in sports management. It was during her time in school that she both kick-started her career in communications and discovered a new interest in higher education and teaching. Gina tried out for and got an In-Arena Host job with the Brooklyn Nets where she worked on broadcasts and communications efforts and also jumped at an opportunity to teach at Columbia’s Sports Management high school summer intensive program. Both of these experiences are what set her up for an exciting career path that got her to where she is today.

Gina describes her sequence of career moves after graduating from Columbia as conscious, intentional, and strategic. Her first job came after she attended an open call for an on-camera host position on Back9Network, a startup golf and lifestyle network. Gina brought her resume and convinced the network to let her work on their public relations initiatives in addition to hosting. She ended up as their Director of Marketing and Public Relations, working about 90% on communications strategy and only 10% on-air. Gina made a name for herself as a talented communications professional and proceeded to become the Director of Public Relations and Community Relations for the Golden State Warriors organization and later the Senior Manager of Communications for BSE Global (Brooklyn Sports and Entertainment.). Whether she sought out an opportunity or it came directly to her, Gina ensured that every new position she took expanded the scope of what she had previously worked on and presented new challenges and learning opportunities. Simultaneously, Gina had also still been teaching Columbia’s high school summer sports program and had become a teaching assistant for the public relations class in the sports management master’s program. She eventually was promoted to become an adjunct professor and taught several classes in the program, including athlete activism and social justice. She particularly enjoyed teaching this class, as she had experience working with players to tell their stories and elevate their voices to make an impact, and social responsibility was something she felt strongly about. Academia was becoming more and more a part of her life. Getting her Ph.D. became part of the vision board and Gina slowly started to feel a shift where being in the classroom felt like her new game day, making her start to consider a long-term career in higher education.

The tipping point was when Gina took the Head of Communications and Media Relations role with the New York Guardians, the XFL’s New York team, after 3 years with BSE Global. Gina was excited by the prospect of taking everything she had experienced and learned thus far and applying it to the launch of an entirely new team in an entirely new league. Gina was only the 3rd woman in all of professional football to assume a Head of Communications position and she successfully built an entire communications and media strategy from the ground up. She created fun media moments with the players, built relationships with broadcast teams, managed communications of trades and acquisitions, monitored the national broadcast, and much more. And while the launch in February 2020 was incredibly successful, a testament to Gina’s work and one of the most satisfying moments of her career, the startup league was not sustainable through COVID. It was a disappointment to all who worked for the XFL, but for Gina, it was the start of the next stage of her career.

Moving from BSE to the XFL had left Gina with a small amount of extra time to begin pursuing the Ph.D. she had dreamed of getting. She had started classes in January, right before the XFL launch, but once the league folded she was able to increase her course load and focus on her love of education. It became the perfect time to acknowledge the lingering feeling she had that she should go into teaching full-time. She was able to get her name in the mix for an open role with NYU’s Sports Management program. While she came into the hiring process late, did not have full-time teaching experience, and was still at the beginning of obtaining her Ph.D., Gina explains that her “unbridled passion and authenticity for truly wanting to be in the classroom and teach and parlay all of [her] industry experience for the benefit of the students” came through during the interview process. She got the job.

Gina’s biggest challenge has always been knowing what she wants and figuring out how to go after it and ask for it. But her curiosity to learn and ferocious work ethic have guided her through her career and landed her exactly where she wants to be. She is a full-time teacher at NYU, pursuing her Ph.D. in Sports Management with a focus on athlete activism and social justice, and working on athlete activist causes on a consulting basis. Gina describes this as the perfect fusion of everything she loves and her original passion for sports and storytelling remains at the root of it all.