From Student to Lecturer in Three Years
By Sarah Corso
William Norton finds himself sitting on a different side of a desk in the Isenberg School of Management these days than he did just three years ago.
Norton was a student in the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management’s MBA/MS program, where he completed a master’s in management and a master’s in Sport Management, from 2010 to 2012. As of this fall, Norton has come back to the McCormack Department of Sport Management, this time as a lecturer teaching three classes to undergraduate students.
There was never a plan to become a lecturer for Norton. He thought, as an undergraduate, that his life plan would take him to law school and establish a career in law. However, he chose to pursue a sports-related career instead.
Norton, 31, whose young looking complexion could lead you to believe he is an undergraduate college student, grew up in the Boston suburb of Belmont. He and his older brother attended Belmont high.
| After high school, Norton moved to Ohio to attend The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. There he majored in political science and minored in economics, graduating in 2006. While in school, he thought his political science degree would lead him to law school but by the time he graduated and found a job at a law firm, he quickly realized he had other ideas for his future.
Having an interest in sports and a background in economics, Norton soon found himself taking a job just outside of Chicago, working for a major sports statistics company called, STATS LLC. There he was an Operations Data Analyst in which he performed a slew of duties including scouting analysis for the NFL draft and data compilation for MLB teams. |
Focusing on the future and realizing that sports is a “who do you know industry”, Norton moved back to Massachusetts to attend UMass Amherst and complete a master’s degree in management and sport management. “I was working at a sport company and I felt like I didn’t have the contacts or the network to sort of breakthrough the clutter,” Norton said explaining his decision to go back to school
Norton understood that a degree in sports management could lead him to a job in professional sports as well as other companies that focused on combining sports knowledge and business activities such as sales, marketing, management, and media.
During his years as a student at the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, Norton made connections with Professor Steve McKelvey and former Department head, Lisa Masteralexis. These two would become instrumental in bringing Norton back to UMass as an Associate Lecturer. Also during his time in the second best ranked graduate program in the United States according to a 2014 Sport Business International Magazine report, Norton interned at the Boston Celtics meeting his mentor, Senior Vice President of Corporate Partnerships & Business Development, Ted Dalton, who is also an alumnus of the sport management program.
After completing the double degree at Isenberg, Norton was hired by a highly ranked marketing company, Epsilon, in Wilton, Connecticut. After working there for over three years, Norton left the agency to be closer to his family in Boston and for less restrictive hours.
His connections with the professors at UMass led him to his current job as a lecturer. “It was certainly a perfect crossroads in timing,” Norton said of the hiring. He is currently teaching Sport Statistics, Sport and New Media, and Professional Sports to undergraduates in the sport management major.
Every Monday Norton commutes from Connecticut to his studio apartment in Northampton and leaves on Thursday afternoons to return home. This commute from his Stamford, Connecticut home he shares with his wife, Ellie, each week to UMass is so she can stay in Connecticut to work at a job she loves being a designer for a retail company.
Even though the traveling is trying, it is worth it. “You can’t have that amount of flexibility in the agency world,” Norton said comparing his free time now to when he worked for Epsilon.
Looking back on the path he has taken to get to where his life is now, Norton can see the connections of how his education at UMass is helping with teaching at UMass. When describing the program he went through he said, “You get sociology of sport, you get sort of organizational behavior, you get economics, finance”. Norton says this knowledge results in “a nice foundation with all the pillars of sport” and allows him to be qualified enough to teach the next generation of sport industry professionals.
Norton says of his teaching style, “I remember being in you know six/seven years of academia and the best sort of teachers give you an understanding of what the landscape is and then have you apply it and learn from each other as much as you learn from the professor.” This is the type of teaching he tries to work into his classroom with weekly group work and projects that last over the long semester.
While Norton builds off of his UMass education in his teaching, he also teaches off of his past experiences working for a media marketing agency and for a sports statistics company. With nearly eight years of professional experience under his belt, Norton feels confident that he can teach these classes to undergraduates. Norton says, “I’m doing some textbook but I’m building it off of my own experience.”
As for the future after his one year contract as lecturer expires at the end of the 2015-2016 academic year and it is time to move on again from UMass, Norton says “I am leaning toward going back to industry. My wife is from Chicago so there’s a strong possibility we’ll be heading back that way.” Whether that means he will work for a statistics company, a major league sports organization, or for marketing agency is yet to be determined.
Norton loves to read and play golf when he is not driving back and forth from Massachusetts and Connecticut. He said he also has a liking for the arts, “My dad is an artist and my brother is as well so I like going to museums.”
With most of his time not being consumed by working at the marketing agency anymore, Horton has more time to enjoy a life of happiness with his wife and family. Norton said, “Happiness is definitely, to me at least, is finding a balance between your work and your life to where your work does not necessarily own your life.”
UMass Journalism 300 