McCormack Department Renews with J. League

The Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management and the J. League, Asia’s premier professional soccer league, have renewed their agreement to offer an innovative on-line sport management program with Sports Human Capital*.

The Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, housed in the nationally-ranked Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has provided on-line courses to students in the Sport Human Capital Project since 2016. “From our perspective, it has been a wonderful experience,’ commented Department Chair, Janet Fink, “the students in the program are academically talented and incredibly eager to learn.”

This certificate degree program aims to train top talent for careers in sport management. The McCormack Department provides cutting edge sport management content, including sport marketing and sport finance lectures complete with alumni videos, through a series of on-line course modules. As part of the partnership, McCormack professors travel to Japan to serve as guest lecturers for the program.

“We’re excited to renew this academic collaboration with our partners at Sports Human Capital and the J-League,” explained Director of The McCormack Center for Sport Research & Education, Will Norton. “This global partnership provides our faculty with engaging teaching opportunities, and strengthens the global perspective we bring into the classroom.”

“We’re very thankful to our alum, Takehiko Nakamura, who continues to negotiate the relationship,” Janet Fink added. “It is exactly the sort of program the McCormack family envisioned when it established the McCormack International Partnerships program to further establish the global legacy of their father, Mark McCormack.”

Takehiko Nakamura (MS ’04), is the owner of the New York-based sport management consulting firm Blue United and has played a major role in managing the relationship between McCormack and the J-League. This February, Blue United is hosting the inaugural Pacific Rim Cup in an effort to bring international professional sporting events to Hawai’i.

*About Sports Human Capital: Launched in 2015, an initiative designed to recruit and train top talent for future manager-to-be candidates who will make contributions to the professional sports industry in Japan. The course is comprised of three stages: business school, sports management courses conducted by industry executives in the first year, and in the second year, trainees will go through practical training. Successful candidates will then be offered short-term contracts to work at J-League or in professional sports in Japan. https://shc-japan.or.jp/