Team players
When Gina and Jeff Pauline watch sports, it’s more than just a game. It’s business.
Even when the New York Yankees fans sit down to watch a game it’s hard for them to concentrate on just their beloved pinstriped baseball squad. Gina focuses her attention on the types of sponsorships present, the facility management and the marketing tools. Jeff is a more intense fan of the game itself, noticing players’ behaviors on and off the field.
Both part of Syracuse University’s sports management department, Gina, 30, and Jeff, 37, have shifted from their undergraduate degrees in psychology to studying the marketing aspect of sports and sports psychology on a collegiate level.
‘I knew I wanted to work in sports in some sector because it was a segment of my life that I’ve always known and really wanted to continue,’ Gina said.
While working at Ball State University in Indiana, Gina heard about SU’s new sports management department and recognized its potential. Originally, she applied for the director’s position but was not offered the job.
Once the department started looking for faculty, it called Gina, who was then seven months pregnant but determined to become part of SU.
‘It was fairly obvious (that I was pregnant),’ she said. ‘But they (the department) were great about it.’
The University Partnership for Spouses program at SU, which works to find jobs for spouses working at the university, coincidentally found work for Jeff also in the sports management department and called him for an interview a week after their daughter Gabriella was born in May 2006.
Working together in SU’s sports management program seemed like the ideal opportunity for the Paulines, whose love of sports existed since childhood.
Like Gina, who swam the 100 and 200-meter butterfly in college, Jeff was also an athlete – an avid tennis player – and wanted sports to be a part of his professional life.
‘Sports always had a huge influence in my life, I guess,’ Jeff said. ‘In high school, I played a lot of different sports. I always enjoyed sports. I enjoyed sports in college as well. The idea of being part of a team and the dynamics of a team were always very interesting to me.’
During undergrad in the mid 90s, the two found themselves thumbing through the course guides, trying to find classes that would suit them, Gina at Binghamton University (N.Y.) and Jeff at Old Dominion University in Virginia. Gina, with a psychology degree, wanted to work in the sports psychology field but later concluded that career wasn’t feasible.
‘It really was about what fit for me. … The field of sports psychology is extremely competitive to work in,’ she said. ‘…The reality of me going on to be a fulltime sports psychologist wasn’t very likely.’
The dean of the health, physical education and athletics department at BU, Joel Thirer, helped Gina sort through her options for post-graduate study and possible career routes.
‘Some students make an impact more than others,’ he said. ‘Gina was one of those.’
As a senior at Binghamton, Gina worked in all areas of the sports field, focusing on the marketing and management side. She even worked on the business side at minor league baseball team, the Binghamton Mets, but missed being around college athletes.
‘I really liked it, but I recognized that my passion was more being on a college campus, being involved with student athletes, as opposed to being in a minor leaguer baseball setting,’ she said.
Finding a topic of study wasn’t easy for Jeff either. It took dipping into three different majors -pre-med, engineering and business – before Jeff decided he wanted to learn the behaviors of athletes.
‘I tried it all,’ he said.
Jeff went on to grad school at Barry University in Florida, where he studied the effects of exercise on people with HIV and AIDS. He also was the assistant tennis coach at the University of Miami.
It was love of sports that would finally bring the two together – in West Virginia.
When a member of Jeff’s research team took a job at West Virginia University, Jeff followed a couple years later to earn his doctorate in sports psychology.
‘It kind of got to the point whether I had to decide, do I want to go on to get a doctorate or do I want to pursue coaching,’ Jeff said. ‘I kind of decided that I really liked tennis, but I wanted more of a grown-up job, not that that it isn’t a grown-up job, but I thought I could benefit and reach more people because I still had that interest in human behavior.’
Jeff had already been at WVU for a year when Gina entered the sport management doctoral program. The two met during Gina’s first week of classes, at least that’s what she says. Jeff responded lightheartedly, ‘I guess I’ll go with that. … So we met that first week huh? Sounds good to me.’
Due to the different programs, the couple was only in school together for a year. Jeff popped the question in 2003, after three years of dating.
‘Gina – she’ll kill me – five years, or was it four years? I’m cheating here,’ Jeff said as he looked through his online calendar to determine how long the pair had been together before he proposed.
After Gina graduated from WVU, she worked for the Eastern College Athletic Conference in Massachusetts and on her long distance relationship, while Jeff finished was at Ball State in Indiana.
‘It was incredibly challenging for me, and at that point I was ready to walk out the door and try something else, but it was really rewarding for me to do that,’ Gina said about working for the ECAC.
Adding to the difficulty of her time-consuming and intensive job, Gina was in a field largely dominated by men. As an intern, Gina didn’t think twice about the male workforce, but that changed as she moved forward in sports management.
‘Then I started to look around, and there were a lot of males, and I started to question it, but continued on and went to grad school and realized it is a challenge,’ she said. ‘You don’t see many female administrators at all, and further, you don’t see many females who are married with kids. It is a very demanding field, and it’s hard to balance the two things.’
Before moving to Syracuse, the Paulines were working and living in Indiana – Jeff heading the sports psychology department at Ball State University and Gina teaching physical education classes and working toward her doctorate in sports management after she left the Big East conference to be closer to Jeff.
‘She took a gamble on us,’ Jeff said.
When an opportunity for Gina opened up at SU, Jeff knew it was his turn to take a chance, leaving behind his job in Indiana to return to Central New York, where he grew up.
‘At that point we were all set to go,’ Gina said. ‘We had a baby, and we were going to move in a month in a half, we were trying to sell our house, trying to figure out new jobs, trying to figure out parenthood, so we had a fun couple of months.’
The Paulines have been a part of SU’s sports management department for nearly two years, where Gina teaches a sports marketing class, giving students hands-on experience with local businesses like KeyBank.
Senior Mikki Mandarano has taken three classes with Gina as a finance, accounting and sports management major.
‘My favorite aspect is that she prepares us for the real world,’ said Mandarano, who has taken marketing, sales and sports law with Gina.
On a professional level, Jeff said SU is better for Gina than himself.
‘I had some apprehensions, not about taking the job because I knew the quality of this school, but I knew I couldn’t do exactly what I’d been doing at Ball State, which was a prime, perfect job for me in terms of what I wanted to do and had the ability to do,’ he said.
Jeff teaches research methods in sports management, but in the future he hopes to create a psychosocial class designed for sports management students.
Although he hasn’t had the same opportunity to focus on sports psychology at SU, Jeff said he’s lucky to be able to spend every day working next door to his wife.
‘You always have someone you know you can go and talk to about something,’ Jeff said. ‘… You know you’ll always get an honest answer.’
Published on April 15, 2008 at 12:00 pm
