Malory Monson

I would not be where I am today if I didn't have advocates along the way - people who were willing to say yes and take risks on me. They were very much a part of making sure I was able to get in the room and have a voice at the table. But I think the reason I was able to stay at the table and grow at the table was due to my own hand-raising, my willingness to figure it out, my willingness to learn whether that took study, networking, or just learning on the fly. I wasn't deterred, and I made sure I kept my resilience and just worked hard to earn those stripes over the years. I was willing to be scrappy, I was willing to work hard. I was a hand raiser from the beginning when I reached out to the soccer coach as a freshman. I asked people to let me tag along, to be in rooms that I definitely shouldn't have been in, to learn. I had a 'let me prove to you I can do this' kind of toughness when I was a kid. I had the right people who gave me those experiences, and when opportunities arose for promotions or full-time jobs, those choices were easy for my managers because they knew I could handle the responsibility.

The best career advice I ever received was from Jennifer Cohen, who is currently the athletic director at USC. I had a chance to chat with her - she's a woman in a field where there are virtually no women in her position of power, so I was very curious to know how she accomplished that with grace and poise and was respected in the field. She asked me who in my organization was nurturing me. I thought that was a very interesting question. She said if there is somebody who is nurturing you, who's willing to give you space, then those are the people who are going to advocate for you and give you opportunities behind closed doors. It doesn't matter what your resume says, it doesn't matter if you ask, it doesn't matter if you've proven yourself. It takes an advocate like that who's nurturing you, and vice versa, who you'll nurture in return at some point, to really make strides and find those unique opportunities for you to grow. So I try really hard to embody that myself and nurture my team and my employees or anybody who comes along the path.

I think it's important to find a female role model, because they're not around, they're not ample, so you have to be intentional about that. It's not easy to find women who have been successful and have longevity. So that's the first thing - find that kind of guiding light who can hopefully be a trailblazer of some kind and can show you the way so that you don't have to figure it out yourself. But then the other part is having the humility to do any opportunity. You can't pick and choose, you can't be above certain tasks, because everything that I've learned along the way informs and guides me in my higher-level decision-making now. It might seem anticlimactic to a young kid in their first go at this to be put in charge of tent inventory or something that really doesn't seem important or you don't understand how it fits into the big picture. But you can't be above doing those little things, because not only will they inform you and make you a better leader, but you also need that humility. We don't all just start running national championships out the door. It takes years, and it takes learning all those small things to get there. So I would tell a young person in the field to be humble, do whatever the task is at hand, because I promise it'll come in handy later. And the excitement and maybe some of the sexiness of the big events will come with time.

The opportunities are really incredible, especially in the world of women-focused entertainment, especially women's sports. The eyes that have been put, and the money, and finally the investment that's being put into women's sports is fantastic and long overdue. That is generating massive amounts of opportunity outside of just the athletes and the coaches themselves. If you build an expansion women's soccer team, you're building an entire supporting team or working staff behind that team, so there's so many opportunities in these large venues. That investment and the opportunity is very front of mind and very prevalent right now. The return on investment for the people who are paying attention to that is quite profound and quite noticeable. As far as challenges, the truth is it is still a male-dominated field, and so being able to navigate that aspect gracefully and firmly as a woman is still an important thing to embody and a challenge to be prepared for. The other part is because the world is growing so much in the world of entertainment, you can very easily get lost as an applicant as you're trying to vie for one of those opportunities. There are so many more people putting their name in the hat. One of the biggest challenges is finding a unique value that you bring to a position or to an organization. It's important to try and find that one thing that either you do better than everybody else, or an experience that others might not have that makes you stand out just a little bit.

I think it's really important to acknowledge people's humanity. Especially in our world, in entertainment and sports, it's like airport hours - it's 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We're playing basketball games on Christmas Day. There's a lot of sacrifices that you make in the world of entertainment because we're doing things not only at the desk Monday through Friday, but nights and weekends when other people can come enjoy it. It's so important to acknowledge that life - there's so much more to life than what happens inside the stadium. You almost have to fight against that really hard because it is so easy to get overwhelmed and to constantly be doing things, and there's always work to be done and nothing's ever perfect because it's such a large scale. But if you get too consumed by that, then you can really lose sight of the rest of life - time for yourself, or relationships, or even just time to reset and be healthy. That's something that I feel is really valuable, both obviously personally but professionally, to make sure that people have that balance and that we acknowledge that there's so much more to life than just work and just the job.