ESPN: Mike Soltys

"I'll work for free". These are the magical words that Mike Soltys, the former Vice President of Communication at ESPN, says landed him his position as ESPN's first ever intern when the company was just starting back in 1980. In this interview Mike talks about the early days of ESPN and some of the growing pains. He also walks us through how it has changed, for example how social media has impacted the way we talk about sports, and he gives some incredible advice for students battling between starting their career at a startup versus an established, larger company.

Transcript

Mike Soltys:

The pay wasn't as good as other places. And it's like, why am I working all those crazy hours for low pay at ESPN? And people would jump ship for that reason. But a lot of us stuck around because we just loved the work. And being startup and being that singular network. We were always the expression that was used from the kid's book, the Little Engine that we can take on anything and we can keep growing and growing. I think I can. I think I can. And that was the mantra within our walls.

James Moore:

Hello. Hello everyone, and welcome back to Office Hours, A show about how to make a successful jump from college to a young professional life. We know that landing your first job can often be an intimidating, complicated, and stressful process, but it's not impossible. And we're here to help by giving you access to some of the brightest minds and business to get their advice for how to build a successful career. Take what you can, pick what you like and listen to that stroke of re and you can use to help get you hired. I'm James. And on the show today we speak with ESPN's vice president of Communications, Mike Soltys. He may be leading the communications front for the worldwide leader in sports, but when he first started with the company as ESPN's first ever intern, he wasn't even being paid. And ESPN was a one building company.

Believe it or not, the Entertainment and Sports programming network or ESPN was not always the go-to source for sports information for most people. When it began in 1979, as previously mentioned, when Mike first got to ESPN, the ESPN campus was one building with a bulldozer pushing around dirt. Today, the ESPN Plaza now has 19 buildings on 120 acres that include 1.3 million square feet of office and production space for their 5,000 employees to work in. They're showing no signs of slowing down either. Seeing is how the company's total day viewership was up 32% during the first quarter of 2022 compared to 2020 one's first quarter numbers. This increase also led to ESPN's Best first quarter since 2017 and 2020. Forbes ranked ESPN as the 58th most valuable brand in the world, but they're also a great place to work, especially for new graduates ranking 40th out of 500 on Forbes best mid-size employers of 2022 list and 16th out of 250 on Forbes 2021 best employers for new grads list.

As a student, it can be easy to get caught up in looking to find an internship or a job with a big company, even if it does not allow with their true interest and goals. This can be for a plethora of reasons, including pressures from parents becoming overly concerned with prestige or even just the perceived security of the position. However, you might be missing an incredible opportunity because startups and smaller companies are hiring for a number of different roles where someone like yourself can find a role that directly aligns with what you want to do. Taking the risk can be worth it sometimes because there is a chance that the company grows be one of the biggest in the world. Even if the company doesn't reach this meteoric level of success, you will often have a much deeper level of work experience and build stronger relationships with people in the field.

Because at a startup, we're a smaller firm, he'll be given a lot more responsibility. Our guest today, Mike Soltys, is currently the vice president of communications, but when he was in college, he faced a similar choice to most of you go for a big or small company. He saw an opportunity to join a firm that at the time had a very uncertain future, that firm being ESPN, and it eventually became one of the most profitable and innovative television networks in the world. You may have heard of it. Mike has worked for ESPN for the entirety of his professional career. Starting with them in the summer of 1980 as an intern during his junior year, Mike was searching for what he wanted to do when he met one of the founders of N Bill Rasmussen. He gave Bill his elevator pitch, and as he recalls it in the podcast, the key words he said to Bill was, I'll work for free.

After being hired as the company's first ever intern, one thing led to another and soon after graduating from Yukon with a bachelor's in communication, Mike was working full-time for a very young company. At the time, the network was only a year or two old, but since 1980, Mike has now worked himself up to being the vice president of communications for ESPN. Over these 40 plus years, the communications industry has changed significantly, and we will get into these changes during the podcast. In addition to how Mike has adapted, however, Mike's adaptation over these years is not unique to him. ESPN has had to adapt constantly to give the people what they want to see in order to ensure the success and sustain position to top the sports entertainment world. Given the success of ESPN and Mike, this conversation has gems all throughout it. So let's not wait anymore and let's dive in.

James Moore:

So Mike, ESPN just won the Broadcasting Cables Hall of Fame iconic Network Award last week. However, in the summer of 1980, you were hired to be ESPN's first unpaid intern, and when you arrived, there was one building and a bulldozer pushing around dirt. Did you have any clue how big the company could become and when did you realize that ESPN was really starting to take off and take hold across the country?

Mike Soltys:

And I had the good fortune of going to that Hall of Fame induction last week, nice black tie affair in New York after a couple of years of no events like that. And we were the first network that broadcasting and Cable Magazine chose for their hall of fame. So it really was a testament to all the great work that people have done at ESPN over the last 40 years. But I had the good fortune of meeting Bill Rasmus and the founder of ESPN. I was a senior heading into my senior year at Yukon and needed an internship and had a chance meeting with him in a parking lot in stores, Connecticut, and immediately went into a sales pitch that I was interested in being an intern with ESPN. And I'm still friends with Bill today, and he still makes the point that I said the magic words, which I'll work for free.  And he didn't have an intern at the time and said, come on down to Bristol, and came down and haven't left. And really at that point, I believe the SPN concept was going to work. And keep in mind at that point, ESPN was strictly one singular network. It wasn't all the networks and radio and digital and things that you see today, but I just had this great belief that sports television was needed. I wanted to watch sports all the time. I would choose sports over other things. And at that era, it really was just weekend afternoons on the broadcast networks with the exception of Monday Night Football and the Olympics and a couple of other things. So the time was right and Bill had the great idea at precisely the right time to make it happen.

Brett Hummel:

That's pretty interesting. In terms of the foresight, how did you get yourself in a position to even meet someone that you said was in the parking lot and you just gave an elevator pitch? So how do you even get to that?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, it just coincidental that we were in the same parking lot, but athletic director at Yukon at the time was about to become the president of the NCAA and the NCAA was critical to ESPN's launch A lot of March Madness wasn't televised before ESPN and things like the College World Series, the Softball College World Series, those things weren't televised. And Bill connected with the NCAA before ESPN launched and got their commitment and a deal going, and then he was in stores on a follow-up meeting there. So I guess it's a lesson in taking an opportunity when it presents itself. And yeah, that one particular chance meeting certainly changed my life. So you never know.

Brett Hummel:

And in terms of taking on that first bit of responsibility, what do you think you did to kind of get yourself over the finish line from an MFA intern to actually getting that first job over at ESPN?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, so I interned in the fall semester and at the end of the fall semester, a woman named Rosa Gadi who became a legend in sports PR circles was my boss at the time. And she sat me down at the end of the semester and said, you really should figure out a way to come down the second semester. And stores to Bristol was about an hour drive because if you'd like to work here, you don't want to be out of sight, out of mind, you want some presents. So I was able to work my schedule around and get back down to Bristol again the second semester. And then nine months into it, I'd gotten to know a number of people and opportunity. There was great work opportunity as an intern because they were just so short staffed. A startup will do that. You have an opportunity when you're at a startup to do a lot of work that you might not be able to do as an intern at more established places because they need the work done and the fact that there's somebody there willing to do whatever works out well for them, but it works out well for you because you're able to get a lot of experiences that may not be available otherwise. So apparently was able to maximize that opportunity. And when I graduated, there was a entry level position that became available and I joined the company full-time that summer and have been there ever since been.

James Moore:

Yeah. So when you got started after you graduated, what were some of the challenges that you faced kind of just going up the totem pole? I know it couldn't have been at all rainbows and roses gone your way up in the past throughout the 40 years as you've been there.

Mike Soltys:

In the early days. I mean, and ESPN being a startup and a company that was losing a substantial amount of money in the early days, there was really strong demands put on the staff. You really had to work night and day, seven days a week and beyond. And that can be challenging for sure, and I know a number of people that left because it was like, why do, and the pay wasn't as good as other places. And it's like, why am I working all those crazy hours for low pay at ESPN? And people would jump ship for that reason. But a lot of us stuck around because we just loved the work and being dar up and being that singular network, we were always the expression that was to used from the kids' book, the Little engine that we can take on anything and we can keep growing and growing. I think I can. I think I can. And that was the mantra within our walls. And then the beautiful thing with a career at ESPN and a primary reason for not having left was as the company kept growing, the job kept becoming bigger and more interesting and more diverse and more new challenges that faced us that never really would've thought of previously. So whether it be multiple networks or then we took over the handling all the sports on a, b, C sports or globally we got into for a while with the SPN zones, the restaurant business. I never really thought I would be doing PR for a restaurant, but that's really what it was with the SPN Zone and just had been able to do over the years, so many different things because ESPN did so many different things.

James Moore:

Going back to that moment where you said, just keep going, just keep going. Were there any moments where it seemed like you can remember specifically that it felt particularly dire, but you just kept going and it ended up working all out in the end?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, I always believed that it was going to work out. There were a lot of people we get paid on a Thursday who would, there wasn't direct deposit back then who would get their check and they'd drive to the bank and immediately deposit it. They weren't quite sure that it was going to work out. Now we were owned at the time by Getty Oil Company, which clearly had the resources to make sure our checks cleared. So I didn't worry about it in that perspective, but I always just believed that it was a great product and a lot of great coworkers that also believed in it. And I always thought that it was going to succeed. So I really didn't have that moment. I know others that did, but I didn't.

Brett Hummel:

Give me advice for students kind of choosing between that startup versus the more it's called safer destination in their mind, or especially today, some of the questions would be, do you think that those destinations are actually that safe? Or because the world is changing so quickly that what we perceive as safe at a big company might not always be as safe as you might think?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, it may not be as safe to me if you have multiple opportunities, you just have to look at them and say, what works best for me? What's the opportunity for me to learn and grow? And that could be at a startup, it could be at a very successful, bigger company. I mean, you get a year on your resume at ESPN and suddenly there's a lot of doors that open for you that didn't open for you the year before that you have the year at a company that nobody's ever heard of. Maybe not, but you might get a better experience because you have an opportunity to have a much broader level of responsibility. So it's really just looking at the individual opportunity and what the work will be and whether you think you'll find it both interesting and enjoyable.

James Moore:

And working at ESPN, I'm sure that you've run into your fair share of successful and interesting people, including yourself. So when you look at these successful people's careers in addition to yours, what would you say are some of the common denominators or denominator among all of 'em?

Mike Soltys:

I think a passion for what you do. I think that helps, has certainly helped me. But I look at the successful people around me and feel that they all have a passion for the work they do and a passion for life. There are other things that I think something that doesn't get talked about enough is a personal curiosity. Because if you have the curiosity, you ask a lot of questions, you are open to trying new things to going in new directions. And I think that most people I know that have been successful have that curiosity in them and then a strong work ethic because you want to do a good job, but if you have the work ethic, you're also going to see other opportunities that come up and may present things that could make you have even that much more interesting job or that much more fun at what you're doing. So those are the things, and I would also say in a communication job, no matter what you're doing, and if you're in college or even if you're younger, that learning how to write well is helpful. Many times people don't think that way and don't understand, but a lot, I've seen people that write well usually think clearly as well. And it can help in pretty much any kind of communication. If you write well, you usually speak well, if you write, you say, okay, well, I'm going to do social media, and there's 10 word captions. It's like, well, it's a skill to write a successful 10 word caption too, and that comes from a writing skill.

Brett Hummel:

Yeah. Noticed in one of your articles that you posted that you said one of maybe the most underlooked things a student does is actually having a writing portfolio, and that can actually set them apart from everyone else. So I was wondering why, again, you could expand about why you think that's so helpful for a job applicant in the communication space?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, one, it can help separate you from others that aren't offering that up, but it does present, here's how this person thinks, here's how this person feels, is a good way to tell a story or to make a point. And you do have an, and you can really look at it and reflect on the individual's thought process and abilities to communicate clearly and things. So I do think that that's helpful. And it doesn't matter. I mean, if somebody writes two articles for their school paper or school website, whatever it is, there's a couple of samples that you have that you can provide to a potential employer.

James Moore:

So working at ESPN, the current state of the communications industry is obviously much different than it was 20 years ago, let alone 40. So how have you been really been able to adapt and change with the time, well, as you mentioned, things like ESPN zones and taking over the pr. How has that been? How have you been able to do that?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, I come back to the curiosity point and understanding all the different aspects of the business, and understanding the direction where the business goes and being open to new things. And social media is a great example. I mean, 10 years ago social media was in its infancy and was not something that really was that important to ESPN or really any other media company and let alone 15 or 20 years ago. But I had the curiosity about it. I could see some potential for some things and jumped in right away and was actively trying, getting right involved with Twitter. I always thought Twitter was going to be a big thing in the PR space, and it turned out to be. But I played with Pinterest and Foursquare and Tumblr and a number of things that really aren't a focal point at this point, Periscope, all these things, but you don't know which one of those things is going to take off and which one is going to be something that's meaningful to your career. But it also just demonstrates to your colleagues that you're open to new ideas and you're willing to try things out. So I just encourage people when they're in their career that maybe the core business is this, but really pay attention to everything else. And if you have an opportunity to play in the sandbox of other things to do that.

James Moore:

And you just brought it up a little bit, but in the past, I mean, you've praised Twitter saying that it's one of the best engines to connect the ES ESP N brand to a larger audience. So how crucial is having social media skills for not only a communications person, but also for a company? From a PRS perspective in this day and age in your opinion.

Mike Soltys:

It was particularly valuable. Now, most students come college have some kind of skills there, whether they're good or bad, but they do have some experience and know it well. But from a PR standpoint, Twitter remains the most important social media platform. The media resides on Twitter, the information flow comes through Twitter. And it's not that there's not information on Facebook and Instagram and even TikTok, but the main information flow comes through Twitter. But for communications to look at, so that's ESPN pr, but to look at ESPN on a larger standpoint, we have a lot of success on TikTok and Snapchat and things that aren't something that's an important PR tool. But if you're going to connect with particular audiences, and certainly with SNAP and TikTok, if you're going to connect with a younger audience, then you'd need to be there and ESPN's put the resources into it.

And we do specific things for TikTok specific things for Snapchat. It's not like, oh, here's our social content, and it all goes to the same place. There's people that are focused on the individual platforms, and that's led to, along with the brand strength, that we're really, from a sports media standpoint, we're the leader in social media on every single platform. And when TikTok became the latest in that case, ESPN quickly emerged as the group that was most successful there. And that helps us both to build brand awareness with people that aren't watching TV as much as their parents were, but also was introducing the idea on, oh, if I get to know, say Adam Schefter on social media, the hope is that that converts me into somebody who's reading espn.com and seeing Adam Schefter on NFL countdown and what have you. So social media has really had a great value for SPN, and there's a whole, we've got more than 50 people on staff that their full-time job is creating the great social media content that we do on all the different platforms.

Brett Hummel:

And I guess going back to the startup, even like you talked about, you were kind of the curious one playing with these different platforms when those things are so nascent, how do you convince more, let's say, because cable business was going great 10, 15 years ago, how do you convince someone that, hey, this is the future, and to divert those resources early so that you get that experience and become that leader early on? What could students learn from how you approach that?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, it's a great question because, and I'll take specifically my example with N-E-S-P-N-P-R, there were many people that just didn't see the value in any of the social media. They saw the value in connecting with their family with pictures of going to a picnic or something, but didn't see the value in it from a work standpoint. And I just believed firmly from the beginning that this was going to be where we needed to be. But if you spent your whole career writing press releases and calling media people, and suddenly you got to figure out how to do 140 characters impactfully and connect with people in that platform, it's a transition if that's all you've ever done. But I think it's just keeping an open mind and really paying attention to what's going on. I saw right away that the media that I was dealing with were all in on Twitter, and so it seemed kind of obvious to me, but there certainly were people that didn't share my enthusiasm for it.

Brett Hummel:

And then from a student's perspective, in today's day and age, what do you think for them coming into a PR or communications role, what are those things that are maybe be different or that college might not teach you that you should be prepared for or the things that you could do on the outside to get yourself ready for?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, I mean, the big difference from, I'll say five years ago and beyond is this whole content creation idea. A PR person today needs to be able to do social cards on Twitter to be able to do some basic photo and video editing and needs to know how to communicate effectively in short bursts and know how to use all those tools, which was not the case the first 35 years of my career, but it definitely is the case now. But at the same time, they still need kind of the traditional knowing how to write well, knowing how to have an effective phone conversation with someone that you're trying to win over to the points that you're making. Some of the traditional tools that you would use are not necessarily front and center, but they still are something that is very helpful to have. So it's really trying to meld the kind of old school tactics with a lot of the new things. And so coming in and out of college is just to make sure that whether it's through internships or working at the school television station or radio station or newspaper or marketing department of the university or what have you, just getting as much practical experience. So you've got both things you can demonstrate that you can do, but also then talking, having connections with professionals that may be able to help guide your early career.

Brett Hummel:

That makes a lot of sense. And in terms of how that parlays in the future, do you see a generation now that's grown up in Snapchat or in TikTok? Do you think that that is actually kind of the platform of the future in terms of, again, ESPN was focused initially on cable broadcast, but as it grows, do you think that that's where those

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, it's important for ESPN, any sports media company to clearly social media is here. What is the platform that everybody will be using five or 10 years from now? Will some existing ones go away? Will they turn into something else? It's hard to say, but certainly the beauty of sports is being able to watch a really compelling product on a big screen and seeing it live. And I think at least for the foreseeable future, that's going to remain as strong. I mean, ESPN is not in as many households as we were at one point, but the big sports fans are all still getting either a cable or a streaming sports service that's delivering them the games and SportsCenter and 30 for thirties and other compelling content on a bigger screen. So a lot of times people are looking at their phone and paying attention to social media accounts while they're engaged in the game, or maybe now involved in betting on their phone while they're watching the game. So it becomes a two screen experience, but at least for the foreseeable future, the television part of it is still going to be front and center.

Brett Hummel:

And that's interesting. So it's really, you think of it as almost a bimodal or multimodal screen in the sense of the TikTok components or whatever. Those things become supplements almost as in game experiences or to support it, and then you still engage through the main medium itself.

Mike Soltys:

That's what we see has been happening for several years now. And as I mentioned, the betting is bringing a whole nother level to it. And now some companies are looking at, well, how do I interact? I'm watching a game, I'm betting, but I want to be communicating about the game and my betting with my five best friends. And how does that all come together into kind of a shared experience, like you're at a bar or you're in the stadium together. So that's an area that's developing as well, because sports certainly has a social component. And I don't mean just social media, just you like to talk to your friends and family about, I'm a Red Sox fan, I'm a Yukon basketball fan. The social aspect of it is something that you share with lots of people, and that is an important element of sports, that social media can help make the sports viewing experience that much richer for people.

Brett Hummel:

Yeah. I almost have this working theory that in a sense, sports is the new kind of town hall back in the day. And when early Colonial America, the people would gather around the town square, and then if you look at it, then it was church. And then if you look at it now, really sports is the one common denominator, which usually crosses all barriers, political lines, as a way for a whole community to come together in a sense. So it is kind of a unique space for everyone.

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, our research department refers to that. They'd support your theory and refers to it as social currency, that sports is social currency, and that's, you can easily get into a conversation with someone you meet or someone you see in the supermarket or whatever, based off the fact that they're wearing a New York Yankees hat or whatever it may be. And to your point, it's also as society becomes more divided than ever, it is a thing that people come together around and everybody in Green Bay loves the Packers and they're all over the political spectrum, but they all share the love of the packers. And you can multiply that times hundreds of teams that have loyal fan bases or not just, and social media gets into this too, not necessarily a team, but a lot of times you've got a community nationwide of LeBron fans, and so they bond over their love of a particular athlete or even globally. A lot of the, you see on social media, some of the biggest accounts are global soccer stars. And so that becomes kind of a unifying force in the world too.

James Moore:

Yeah. And so ESPN definitely plays a large role in the rise of superstars, especially in sports. So how do you guys know what generations, what superstars are still relevant, but players are still attractive, so to speak, to the younger generations that are coming up and getting onto the internet and onto Instagram and TikTok and Snapchat and things like that.

Mike Soltys:

Some of it can be simply looking at followers on social media. It was clear. And Women's basketball page, Becker's comes into college with this incredible social following, no surprise, as she plays her first two years in NCA games that Yukon ratings television ratings are higher. She's already well known, better known pretty much any men's basketball player, which would not have been the case prior. She came in with that built in, and women's basketball players hang around where there's a lot more one and done in the men's side, so you can see it. And we saw it with LeBron when in high school we started to do a couple of LeBron high school games and they got big viewership. I mean, he had been hyped before ESPN was involved. Sometimes hyped doesn't match, but then when we do some games and the ratings of his high school games would be bigger than most college games, you knew this is a guy people are going to follow.

And we saw that through college. I mean, in the last 10 years, Zion's one year at Duke was the best regular season run of a men's college basketball player. And anytime we did a Duke game, it did particularly well for us. So through kind of traditional Nielsen measurement and stuff, you get a sense of that, but mix in what you see on social, and it's not that big a surprise. We're seeing growth now on both WNBA and women's college basketball television ratings. And I don't think it's coincidental that the fact that Diana Tara and Sue Bird and Paige Becker's and many others are big social media stars. And then that transfers over to people being familiar when you flip on a, B, C in the afternoon and you have a game that Seattle's playing in that like, okay, I know Sue Bird and Diana Tara, and they're playing each other, or I know any number of other WNBA players. And like I said, the women's, our Women's Final Four, we had some of our best ratings in years, and the players on South Carolina and Yukon and Stanford were well known already through their social channels.

James Moore:

And so with that, are you guys at ESPN more so listening to the audience and what they like or are you trying to predict what they will like

Mike Soltys:

More listening to the audience and giving them what they want, but really since the early days, we've recognized the value in doing lots of different sports. Even though they may not get a huge following, they may have a passionate fan base that if the ESPN is the early days of ESPN, when we did not have the NFL or Major League Baseball or the NBA or some of the bigger things that we have now, we saw that, okay, we could do cycling or we could do Australian rules football, or we could do a number of things that were looked at as obscure sports or track and field, and you could build an audience base because that group, ESPN was there for them. Now come forward 40 years and SPN plus, and were, if you're a lacrosse fan, you need ESPN plus. Now is lacrosse anywhere near as popular as many other sports know?

But there is definitely a group of people and they know that ESPN plus is there. Our recent deal with the NHL, the NHL does reasonably well on television, but there is a hardcore passionate group that wants the full season of games, and we're providing that on ESPN plus. And we've identified sports, the UFC global soccer things that have very strong passionate groups that are willing to then subscribe to ESPN plus as an additional service. And that kind of is the taking the secret sauce from the 1980s and putting the 2022 spin on it. And that's a way for ESPN plus to be successful.

Brett Hummel:

Yeah, because I believe there was actually a startup that started doing that, right? Was actually going into the smaller markets of wrestling and stuff like that, and they saw a huge response. That's pretty interesting that how you guys pivoted and still give that offering for that. I was wondering, just off the cuff, in terms of ESPN does so much to build you probably one of the biggest reasons why college football, for example, has become so big. And I guess what does that feel like sometimes, I guess obviously a ting of pride, but then sometimes it almost, it becomes so big that then they almost launched to other partners too at the same time. So it's got to be interesting that as you're building that's growing and you're the reason for them growing so much, and then in a sense they're like, okay, I've grown enough and now I'm going to go to other people as well. So I was wondering if you can touch on that too.

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, that was particularly a strong dynamic in the early days of ESPN because we didn't have the variety of platforms and we were not directly aligned with a broadcast network that we now are with a b, C sports. Now we can say to any rights holder that whether you want a high profile a BC series or ESPN prime time or you're looking for year round extensive coverage that we can bring you in the college case on E-S-P-N-U or that we could do, we do with the NHL on ESPN plus that there's all those platforms. But to your original point in the eighties when there was really no interest in the NCA tournament beyond the Final four, and ESPN was there for it, and then it quickly became a huge deal and suddenly we're out of the business of that and you're looking at somebody else doing it, and you knew that they weren't doing it as well as we did it.

That was a little tough. And we saw it also with nascar. NASCAR start to finish coverage of races was not something that went on. ESPN came in with 24 hours a day availability and would do NASCAR races from start to finish. And at one point we were doing pretty much all the races other than Daytona, and over the years, it got chipped away to the point that we didn't have any of it because it became so popular that they split it up with other broadcast networks. And that was, you'd look at it and have a little bit of a sense of pride, but it just was frustrating that like, okay, we were there for, we created March Madness, and then they take it away from us. But you have the ability over time if you bid enough to get something back. But we haven't, with the NCA has long-term deal for the men's tournament, and that seems unlikely, but NHL, which we had done significantly more coverage than others, then was gone for I think 17 years and then came back. They knew that the kind of exposure that ESPN will bring a sport is really valuable. And the way we were able to do games from ESPN plus to A B, C and just cover it on SportsCenter and cover it on the social platforms, the NHL saw the great value that we bring in that. So we're back in the NHL business in a very heavy way after 17 years of not being part of it.

Brett Hummel:

And I guess something like that, you mentioned the NHL, right, or March Venus, how do you all, from a communications perspective, how do you build the strategy of, okay, we've now got this great brand that we're going to steward or we're going to grow it from a nascent stage. How do you tackle that from a comms perspective?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, you have to look at the opportunities that you can to bring attention to whatever the sport may be. I mean, kind of a funny example of that is during covid, the only thing or one of the few things that was going on was cornhole because they figured out that I'm at one side, you're at the other, and we throw our bean beanbag and everybody's nice and safe and you're wearing a mask and no problem. And suddenly cornhole became a big deal to us and we put PR resources behind promoting cornhole, which other than in the early eighties, could not imagine that happening. But we saw the opportunity, you have to see where there's potentially an opportunity and jump on it. I mean, we've seen a real wave in the past year on attention around women's sports, and so we're really trying to get behind more and more. The gymnastics championship was just on A, B, C, and we did a lot of things to publicize that event. And again, the NCA gymnastics championship was not that big a deal, not that long ago, but I'd argue in 2022 it was a pretty big deal. And ESPN got behind it doing studio coverage, doing social coverage, and from a PR standpoint, promoting what we had.

James Moore:

Yeah. And so Mike, just to kind of change directions a little bit, you were hired, you mentioned by one of the founders and the first CEO and president of ESPN, bill Rasmussen. So when you look back at the early days of the company when you were first hired, why do you think Mr. Rasmussen was able to make ESPN into what it's, today is such a giant in the industry?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, bill, well, he had the great idea for a starting point. A few years later, somebody else would've had the idea. A lot of people think it probably would've been Ted Turner was launching networks with Turner Broadcasting, but in 1978, when he came up with it in 1979, we launched. Everybody thought it was a little bit crazy, but Bill had and still has to this day, he's 89 years old, has an incredible optimism, and that optimism has served him very well. And if somebody tells him no, he doesn't get down about it, he moves on to the next thing. If somebody tells him yes, if James says yes, he calls Brett and says, Hey, James is on board, you should be on board. And just uses that ability. And he did that to really help get ESPN, the idea off the ground to get it established to Getty Oil, to provide the funding to get the NCA to support on programming, to get people to join, to give up existing careers and join ESPN to get it going.

He was then gone fairly early on and on to trying to come up with other new ideas, but that optimism that he always had about sports continues to this day. And he just marvels at what ESPN has become. And I always just like to remind him that it never would've happened without him. And to thank him that me and thousands of others had a great career because he had the idea and he had the energy and the ability to go about and take it from an idea into a success story. And it wasn't as if Bill, when he had the idea it was a big deal who could just call his buddies and get some capital. He was a regular, he had just got fired. He was the PR guy for the New England Whalers, which were the WHA team before they merged into the NHL. And he had just been fired as their PR director and was really just looking for what's the next opportunity and came up with the idea and then had the optimism to go out there and make it a reality.

Brett Hummel:

Oh, that's amazing. I didn't know he had actually been dismissed from the, that's pretty crazy. So a PR guy from the Whalers with basically no connections, he just built it from scratch.

Mike Soltys:

Correct some if you're a hockey fan, Howard Baldwin was the general manager of the whalers who actually was involved with firing him. Colleen Howe, the wife of Gordy Howe was involved with the club. The Howe family were playing for the Whalers, I believe she's the one who actually called Bill to tell him that he was losing his job. So a lot of in hockey history, a lot of big names were involved with showing Bill the Door. And like you never know in Life Bill being shown the Door Memorial Day weekend, 1978 led to all the success of ESPN.

Brett Hummel:

That's pretty amazing. I was wondering if we could touch back on the idea of, you talked about how these new athletes, these superstars are coming in with a presence, and I was wondering if you could generalize that a bit more. Do you think that as a student, if you can build from your perspective, do you think it's important nowadays to build your personal brand even as a student? So when you're coming into the workforce, you can actually show kind of what you've done and be out there much more than previously?

Mike Soltys:

For many things, and I'll look at it, I mean, my expertise would be in the communication side and the social media being your communication platform, it does give you the ability to demonstrate to people some of the skills you have. Somebody might see something you do on Instagram or YouTube or something and just take an interest because they happen to stumble upon a piece of content that they like. But it does, you got to be careful that the kind of content you're putting out there, because yeah, it is your personal brand and an employer that's doing their legwork is going to check things out and see what it looks like. So on a most basic level, to make sure that you have a LinkedIn presence and not just, oh, I put my resume up there, but that you try to have some interaction with people and something that demonstrates that you're active there, but otherwise you do.

You don't have to be on every social platform, but you do have the ability to build your brand a lot easier than you ever had the opportunity prior. You also have an opportunity to network with people better. I just spoke at a sports business conference at ucon, and it was clear to me. I've spoken, that's my alma mater. I've spoken there for 40 years to many different things. And it just became clear to me that when I used to speak there, my presence there was their one opportunity to connect with somebody from ESPN. I was talking to a couple of students this past weekend when I was there, and they've already done that with lots of people that are a lot closer to their age that they've connected with on LinkedIn or on social platforms that they know went to their school, and they then establish a relationship.

And it would've been much harder to do that in the past. You could do phone calls, but people often annoyed by phone calls, you could do letters, but how many letters can you send now? It's significantly easier to do that. And my observation has been a lot of motivated students have done that, and they're getting to be seniors in college and already know a lot of professionals. Many, most of them have gone to their same school. So James is out there looking for the recent pit graduates that are doing things that they're doing. It's smart to then connect with them through the social platform so that relationship can build and they know who he is and what he can do.

Brett Hummel:

As a communications executive, how do you recommend that students, especially maybe those are more introverted, can cultivate relationships over time? So it's not just kind a one and done conversation, especially because I think a lot of young people, again, feel like they don't have a lot to offer when they're talking to someone like yourself.

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, the important thing is right away when you get in college to start building the, because you don't want to just reach out on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I'm here kind of thing. You need to try to look for a point that you might get an interaction back, or you don't want to say, oh, I want to get to know James, so I'm just going to retweet every single thing he does. You could look a little creepy doing that. So you have to just be smart about it, but just understand that that does present some opportunities if you are smart about it.

James Moore:

Yeah. I've read a little bit online about how you're a mentor for sound at UConn, and you've done a lot of work giving back in the community, especially to the youth. So why do you do that? What is the value you think of mentorship and giving back to the youth in that community?

Mike Soltys:

I always just think the kind of pay it forward thing has real value and to you personally, you meet interesting people, you can bill ra, mustn't help me. Maybe I can help somebody else. I do think that's a value, but I also think that I'm now 62 years old. I go up to Yukon and I'm talking to students about how they look at the world and how they think messages should be communicated. And sure, I have all this experience, but we talked about TikTok and that's a good example. Should PR people be doing TikTok for their company? I don't know the answer to that yet, but I do know that it's a question that at least need to consider, and I can consider it through my own viewpoint, but it's a lot more valuable to talk to some college students about their viewpoint. And I raised it in our department six months ago, and I got no way, shouldn't do it, raised it speaking in a college. Another one of my colleagues did the same thing, and the students were all saying, oh yeah, absolutely, you have to do it. So what that looks like, what it'll be, maybe the students would've, 10 years ago it told me I had to do four square, and that quickly came and went. But there is value to you to be able to grow, to connect with people that are of a different age and understand their vantage point on things.

Brett Hummel:

And I guess coming out of that, do you think it's valuable for students to get mentors when they're early on in their careers?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, I think it can be very valuable if you get connected with someone that can provide you the time and there's a natural connection that they're in a field you want to go into, or they share a perspective that you want to learn from because they can really help answer a lot of questions. A lot of times it's when you're in college, it's learning what you don't want to go into. I've had a couple of times over the years that we've had interns at the end of it, they're all sheepish. I don't want to tell you, I just decided being here. I don't want to go into pr. It's like, well, that's still good. You learn something yet, what do you want to do? Well, X, Y, and Z. Well, that's great because they had the exposure. They've conceptually knew what PR was but didn't know it, and then they did it for three months, they knew it. Same kind of thing with a mentor, you can, oh, really do have to be available all the time on nights and weekends. That's not something I want. Or I am having a particular challenge in this aspect. What do I do? Or are internships really that important? That kind of thing that you can get really good insights from people and then hopefully that person can help guide you when you're looking for a job also.

James Moore:

So when you're speaking to young talent, especially in the communications field, what qualities or characteristics really stick out to you as desirable ones from your perspective?

Mike Soltys:

I mean, you try to tell pretty quickly how smart somebody is. That's a starting point, but you do want to see that they bring in energy level, and you can tell that pretty early on, and you can tell in the questions that they ask. When I speak at classes, I love when I get smart questions and sometimes I speak at a class and I don't get a single smart question. I think, okay, and draw my own judgments off that. So anytime that you do have the good fortune to hear a speaker or meet someone, just kind of bring your A game and see, this person could really, maybe this person is after I have the conversation, we'll never think about them or connect with them again. Or maybe it's like me meeting Bill Rasmusson in the parking lot. You don't know, but you got to bring your energy level in order for that, for the good ones to happen.

James Moore:

Last question here. You have a story on ESPN front row where you had 10 ESPN employees share their favorite memories with the company. So I just wanted to know what's your fondest or favorite memory that you've made during your time with ESPN and why has it stuck with you?

Mike Soltys:

Yeah, that was a really cool story. We just put it on our employee website not knowing what we're going to expect. And we just got, it was hard to pick 10. We got so many great stories, and es, ESPN is the kind of place that you can have a lot of fun experiences and meet a lot of people professionally. For me, I mean this kind of single things out being, for many years I went to both the part of the men's and women's Final Four, and my school Yukon is the one school to ever win the men's and women's in the same year. And they did it twice. And I happen to be at all four of those games. So I mean, maybe I'm the one person on earth that's seen their alma mater win the men's and women's in the same year and twice.

That was a particularly cool thing. As a sports fan, separate from my individual fandom, I did go to three World Cup opening games and to be in the two that really, one was in the us, which was great. People didn't think there would be that kind of interest in soccer in the US at that point, and it turned out to be a big hit. But to go to South Africa where there'd been apartheid not that long ago and they're hosting the biggest sporting event in the world. And to go to Brazil, which considers themselves the capital of soccer, and to see what that meant in both countries, for those countries to host it, and you really get a sense of the global impact of sports. I mean, it truly was just a national pride I'd never seen before in both South Africa and in Brazil with the opening game, because the opening game and when it was in the US wasn't the case, but is the host country. But it's also the start. They've heard this is coming to their country for so long and it sounds nice and all, but then suddenly it's there and the energy in the stadium, and that's what sports can do too. It can just bring an incredible level of positivity and energy, which just can be unmatched.

Brett Hummel:

Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time today. It's been a pleasure. Great. I enjoyed it. Great questions.