That the most significant professional education I received at Prep happened in the football coach's office (which has, since my time there, vastly improved), not a classroom. In my senior year, I served as a teaching assistant for David McKenna `88, who was the head football coach at the time. I watched college coaches come through the building to evaluate players, and I watched Dave navigate those conversations with a focus on what was genuinely right for each athlete. I did not have the language for it then, but what I was observing was skilled, principled advocacy on behalf of young men who did not yet have the tools to advocate for themselves. Today, I am a certified NFLPA Contract Advisor with The Team (formerly Wasserman), one of the largest NFL/talent agencies in the world. We just came off draft weekend and had all five of our players drafted from our Vegas division, which is my team. This was an incredible blessing for us, our clients, and their families. What I do now in those rooms, the preparation, the attention to non-monetary provisions, the insistence on protecting the client’s long-term interests, that is a direct impact from Coach McKenna.

As mentioned, Coach McKenna was deeply impactful to my experience. I was his student, his teaching assistant my senior year, and I was part of Magis when he oversaw it. Magis is the senior retreat at Prep, modeled on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, designed to bring seniors into a deeper engagement with their faith through meditation, silent prayer, and small group reflection. Working alongside Dave and other staff and students to prepare for that retreat was formative in a way I did not fully appreciate until years later. It gave me a working understanding of Jesuit teachings, particularly the concept of magis itself, the call to ask what more you can do in the service of others, which has become foundational to how I approach my professional life.
Dave understood that advocating for an athlete means telling the truth about what serves them, even when the truth is inconvenient for the program, the family, or the recruit himself. He put the player’s interests first, consistently, without seeking recognition for it. That standard became the one I hold myself to in every contract negotiation and every eligibility hearing I walk into.

Prep instilled an awareness that a life well lived is a life lived with purpose. The Jesuit emphasis on service was not abstract. It was an expectation embedded in how you were taught to think about your obligations to other people. Sports law is a high-stakes field, but the stakes are deeply personal. They are a player’s livelihood, a family’s financial future, a young person’s eligibility to compete. My education empowered me to see each client as a whole and to treat the work as an obligation to that person. Had I not been shaped to value service to others, I would not have been drawn to a role where the entire purpose is to use your knowledge and your leverage on behalf of someone else.

Eight years of Jesuit education across Prep and Gonzaga University shaped how I understand my professional obligations in a way I could not have arrived at on my own. The concept of cura personalis, care for the whole person, is the closest description of what I try to do for my clients. I represent athletes at every stage: negotiating NFL contracts, challenging NCAA eligibility rulings, navigating the NIL landscape. The work only functions if I see the whole person and attend to the full scope of what they need.
I think about the role of an agent through the lens when Jesus knelt and washed the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper. In that period washing feet was the task of the lowest servant in the household. The disciples had been arguing among themselves about which of them was the greatest. Jesus, who held all the authority in that room, responded by taking on the most menial task available to him. He did it deliberately. He did it to demonstrate that leadership within his kingdom would be measured by willingness to serve, not by status or position. The agent’s role, when it is done correctly, requires the same selflessness. You hold the leverage, the access, the knowledge, the relationships. You deploy all of it in service of the person you represent. The moment the representation becomes about the agent’s career or visibility, the relationship has failed its purpose. Jesuit education gave me that understanding, and I carry it into every room I walk into on behalf of a client.

I arrived at DU Sturm College of Law knowing I wanted to represent athletes. During law school I worked with 360 Sports, an NFL agency, and in my third year I worked in player development in the NFL, developing curriculum for incoming rookies for teams across the league. That experience gave me direct exposure to the challenges players face during the transition to the professional level and reinforced my conviction that quality representation has to extend well beyond the contract. I was also building relationships with players, scouts, and front office personnel throughout school because this field requires you to earn credibility in real time. My final year at Denver Law, I published a piece in the Denver Law Review on the role of the Contract Advisor in collective bargaining negotiation, which gave me the opportunity to interview working agents and study the history of player representation in depth.

When a player I represented who had played basketball at the Division I level signed his second contract in the NFL. From the time he inked his first deal as an Undrafted Free Agent, we knew from the beginning it would be a long shot, and his path was not easy. Standing in the team conference room watching him sign his second contract after all the adversity he faced meant everything to me. That moment confirmed what this work is about: staying with someone through the difficult parts and doing everything in your power to make sure they get their opportunity.

The NIL era and the post-House settlement landscape created an entirely new population of athletes who needed competent legal representation and were not receiving it. I watched unqualified, unlicensed individuals sign college athletes to agreements those athletes did not understand, negotiate deals structured to benefit the representative or the collective rather than the player, and fail to report transactions through required NCAA compliance channels, putting eligibility at risk. In addition to my work with The Team, I now serve as lead attorney in NCAA Division I football eligibility challenges for Christine Brown & Partners, where our team is a leader in eligibility and antitrust challenges. I also teach an NIL course at DU Sturm College of Law, where I am training the next generation of attorneys and agents to operate in this space with the legal rigor and ethical discipline it demands. In addition, I have developed an educational curriculum for student-athletes at DU to ensure they understand their rights, their reporting obligations, and how to evaluate the people who seek to represent them. Across all of it, the priority is the same: empowering athletes through education.

That it is transactional. In reality this work is deeply personal. These are young men and their families who are trusting you with some of the most important decisions of their lives. I am available to my clients and their families for everything, whether that is a contract negotiation, reviewing a lease, helping them find the right financial advisor, walking them through a tax question, or just being someone they can call when something comes up that they need guidance on. The relationship does not start and stop at the deal. You are a resource, a sounding board, and at times a confidant. If you are doing this work correctly, the athlete and his family know they can reach you, and they know you will show up.

College athletes today are operating in a regulatory environment that changes faster than most attorneys can track, let alone an eighteen-year-old student. The intersection of NIL rights, House settlement implications, institutional compliance obligations, state athlete agent statutes, and NCAA eligibility rules creates a landscape where one unreported deal or one poorly drafted contract can cost a player their ability to compete. The pressure is compounded by the volume of people approaching these athletes with financial propositions before they have the experience to evaluate them. Professional athletes face different pressures: salary cap implications, guaranteed vs. non-guaranteed money, injury settlements, free agency strategy, post-career planning. Both populations need the same thing from their representative: someone who is honest, competent, and available. The professional athlete typically has more experience identifying that person. The college athlete and his family often do not, which is why education and accessibility are so critical on that side of the work.

NIL created economic opportunity for college athletes that did not exist before, and that is a meaningful development. It also created an unregulated marketplace where the people advising athletes are frequently unlicensed, uneducated in contract law, and operating without any enforceable ethical obligations. In every major professional league, agents must be vetted, tested, insured, and subject to disciplinary authority. In the NIL space, anyone can call themselves an agent. I have seen the consequences firsthand: commingled funds, undisclosed conflicts of interest, contracts that assign an athlete’s image rights indefinitely, and failed compliance reporting that triggers eligibility suspensions. The biggest ongoing challenge is the absence of a uniform credentialing standard for NIL representatives. Until regulation catches up, the burden falls on athletes and their families to ask the right questions and demand written answers before signing with anyone.

That they were informed, protected, and supported throughout the process. A successful outcome is one where the athlete understood every provision they signed, was never pressured, had their compliance obligations met, and retained the ability to make their own decisions about their career and their life. I also measure success by the relationship I have with their family. If a player’s parents trust me and feel comfortable calling me, that tells me I am doing my job. The financial outcomes matter, but a client who earns a significant contract and was not counseled on tax structure, financial planning, or post-career preparation has been failed by their representative regardless of the number.

They require the same skill set, and they are both deeply relationship based. My success in the NFL is dependent upon the trust I have fostered with various NFL scouts and front office personnel over the years. Those relationships allow me to advocate effectively for my clients because the people on the other side of the table know I am prepared and credible. On the college side, many issues can be resolved with a candid and trusting conversation with the right person. The NFL negotiation table and the NCAA eligibility hearing room both demand mastery of complex regulatory frameworks, the ability to advocate under pressure, and the discipline to prepare more thoroughly than the other side. The client in both rooms is a young person whose ability to earn a living through athletics depends on whether their representative did the work.

Resilience is quiet. The athletes I work with who sustain careers are the ones who do their work when no one is watching, accept setbacks without externalizing blame, and show up the next day prepared. I have tried to apply that same standard to my own practice. I have also learned that identity is something athletes are forced to confront earlier than most people. Their entire public identity is tied to performance, and when that performance changes due to injury, a roster cut, or a transition out of the game, the question of who they are beyond the field becomes very real. Being part of those conversations with my clients and their families has deepened how I think about my own purpose and what I want my work to stand for. It has also reinforced what my Jesuit education taught me about servant leadership: that the most meaningful work you can do is the work that serves someone else, and that the measure of your leadership is found in what you gave, not in what you gained.

My first semester teaching law students in my NIL course at DU Sturm College of Law. I had spent years doing the work of athlete representation, and being able to pass that knowledge along to the next generation of attorneys and agents was a different kind of fulfillment. Giving back through education and working to develop a high quality future of athlete representation is part of a greater effort to leave this industry better than I found it. That is particularly important to me as a woman who has built a career in a male-prevalent space. If I can contribute to preparing young attorneys, especially young women, to enter this field with the tools and confidence to succeed, the work will have meant something beyond my own career.

No. I had no idea that this career was waiting for me. I knew I wanted to advocate for people, but I could not have articulated what that would look like professionally. When I look back on my relationships and experiences at Prep, it is clear that God was laying the foundation for my path very deliberately. Being placed in Dave McKenna’s psychology class sophomore year, being part of Magis, the emphasis on service and cura personalis throughout my Jesuit education, those were not coincidences. Every meaningful professional decision I have made traces back to something that was formed during those years.

To thine own self be true. There will be tremendous pressure to conform to what the industry looks like, to mirror the people who are already in the room, to adopt their approach and their priorities. Your values and your character are what will ultimately define your success in this field. The way you treat people, the standard you hold yourself to when no one is watching, the willingness to do the right thing when the easier path is available, those are the things that will earn you lasting trust with your clients, their families, and the people you negotiate with. Credentials and knowledge are essential, but they are tools. Who you are is what determines how you use them.

Quiet your mind so that you can hear when you are being called. There will always be outside noise, people telling you what is realistic, what is practical, what the safe option looks like. Had I listened to that noise during my time in college or law school, and let others influence the direction I was heading, I would have never gotten here. When you are given the gift of purpose, do not turn from it, even if it does not feel like the safe option. Your path may not look like anyone else’s, and often, that is the point.

That the work and the life are aligned. Professionally, I am proud of what I have built. Personally, we live between Scottsdale, Arizona and Austin, Texas with my partner, who also works in the sports industry as a college football coach teaching young men lessons that will set them up for life, not just on the field. We share the same values: loyalty, consistency, and showing up for the people who depend on you. I am also so blessed to still have some of my closest friends from Prep in my life. Having friends I can depend on almost fifteen years later is one of my proudest accomplishments and I cherish them deeply.

By demonstrating that competence and integrity are compatible with ambition. I teach an NIL course at DU Sturm College of Law because I believe the next generation of sports attorneys must be trained to navigate this landscape with legal rigor and moral seriousness. I also want young women entering this industry to see that there is a place for them in it. I have built my career in rooms where I was often the only woman at the table. That is changing, and I want to be part of accelerating that change through education, mentorship, and by continuing to do the work at the highest level.