Interviews with Point Park Faculty & Alumni

by: Thurgood Moses

After talking with Paige Beal and James Hill, I’ve come to realize that sports management and politics are good careers to pursue and are good fields to practice.

I started talking with Paige and she said, “Sports management can mean different things.” At a time, she worked with Comcast. Her job was to work with big companies like Nike, Adidas, Coca cola and others with promoting their brand. They were able to promote their brands or products during sports games whether it’s during timeouts, halftime, TV timeouts, at the beginning or the end of the game. She said, “My number one advice would be you have to start young and I highly encourage young people to start early. Plus, you need to record stuff as well. Because you don’t want to be fresh out of college with nothing recorded and expect to be on ESPN or Sports Center. They just won’t hire you because they can’t see what you’ve done because you haven’t done anything to show them.”

Talking with James was very interesting. James is now the Executive Assistant to the mayor of Pittsburgh, Bill Peduto. Like Mrs. Paige said, James started early with what he wanted to do. I asked him why politics is a good field to practice. He was very active in high school, particularly on the school board. After graduating from high school, he majored in journalism during his time at Point Park. He said, “I think it’s the best field to practice. I like doing my thing because, I like to make lives better. It’s a good field to practice because I can’t think of anything better than advocating for people to make their lives better.” Towards the end, he discussed the statement Bill Peduto made when he was being critized about the shooting of Antwon Rose Jr. To summarize the clarification that Mr. Hill made was that the officer that killed Antwon was not employed by the Pittsburgh police department. Mayor Peduto was getting many messages and comments demanding that the officer needs to be fired. They can’t fire him even if they wanted to just because the officer was not part of the Pittsburgh police department. Mr. Hill’s advice to a young person wanting to be in politics was this. “You need to be able to ask questions and be able to listen to people. Also take a trip to the city council to see how your government works. And if you have any questions or if you disagree with something that was said, just simply ask.”