A Case Competition
for Student-Athletes

The Gonzaga Sport Consulting Group is a student-run sport consulting practice inside the School of Business Administration, directed by faculty. Students do the work. A faculty director oversees it, and the engagements are real: an actual client, an actual business problem, and a deliverable that organization uses.

Our client work includes:

• San Diego FC Major League Soccer
• Seattle Mariners Major League Baseball

That track record is the reason this proposal is worth your time. We are not asking athletics to help us try something for the first time. We are asking you to help us open something we already run to a group of students who currently cannot reach it.

This is not a hypothetical business school case. Teams work a real client's real situation, and the winning work is delivered to that client at the end. The problem is defined with the organization, not written to have a tidy answer.

The fall 2026 client

The client is a major professional team. We are finalizing the engagement now and are not in a position to name them yet — the announcement is theirs to make with us, not ours to make early.

[ TBD · fall 2026 client — unannounced ]

No barriers to entry

Students form their own teams and sign up. There is no application, no prerequisite coursework, and no GPA screen. A student-athlete who has never taken a business course can enter with four teammates and compete on the same footing as anyone else.

Most experiential business opportunities are group-based and synchronous. That is precisely the format a student-athlete's calendar cannot absorb.

• Group work assumes a shared calendar athletes do not have Practice, travel, and competition schedules rarely line up with the availability of non-athlete classmates. When a team has to meet four afternoons in a row, the athlete is the one who cannot. Over time that makes group-based experiential opportunities effectively closed to them — not by rule, but by logistics.
• The same schedules crowd out internships The hours that would go to an internship are already committed. The conventional path to a resume line and industry exposure is largely unavailable during the season.
• This format is asynchronous by design Teams do their research and build their presentation on their own schedule, in whatever hours they have. There is no required meeting, no weekly session, no attendance. The work happens when the team can do it.
• The only fixed commitments are the two presentation rounds Everything else flexes. Round one is a short live presentation with questions from the panel; the final round is the same for the teams that advance. Those two windows are the entire synchronous footprint of the competition, which is why the date-setting ask in section five matters more than anything else we are asking for.

What the athlete gets

A resume line, and real reps presenting business work to industry professionals. Every team that presents receives feedback from the panel — not a score, but specific guidance on what to do differently. For a student who cannot take an internship during the season, this is a legitimate substitute for the experience that internship would have provided.

The sequence below is how the competition already operates. The two rounds in red are the only dates anyone has to hold.

1. Step 01 Students form a team and sign up Teams are self-organized. Registration closes [ TBD · sign-up deadline ].
2. Step 02 The case is emailed to registered teams Every registered team receives the same case at the same time.
3. Step 03 Teams research and build on their own schedule Market research and presentation development happen entirely on the team's own time. This is the bulk of the work and none of it is scheduled by us.
4. Step 04 · Fixed date Round one Teams present live to a panel of industry professionals and take questions. Every team receives feedback, including specific guidance on how to improve — teams that do not advance get that feedback too.
   [ TBD · round one date and time ]
5. Step 05 Finalists selected The panel advances a set of teams to the final round.
6. Step 06 · Fixed date Final round Finalists present, receive feedback, and a winner is selected. The final round runs roughly two weeks after round one.
   [ TBD · final round date and time ]
7. Step 07 Winning work is delivered to the client The winning team's work goes to the organization. This is what separates the competition from a classroom exercise.
8. Step 08 Winner announced and promoted We announce the result publicly and promote the team and their work.

Four asks, plus one open question. None of them require athletics to run any part of the competition — we do that.

• Help us strategize how to run this inside the student-athlete population You know how this group's year is actually shaped — which sports are in season when, where the dead weeks are, and how information reaches athletes. We would rather design around that with you than guess at it.
• Help promote the opportunity to athletes Through whatever channels reach them: coaches, academic advisors, team meetings, athlete communications. A message that comes from athletics carries weight that the same message from us does not.
• Help identify round one and round two times that work around competition schedules This is the ask that decides whether student-athletes can participate at all. Two dates, roughly two weeks apart, that clear as many competition schedules as possible. Tell us what works and we will build the competition calendar around it.
• Partner on external promotion of the results When the winning work goes to the client, we would like athletics beside us in how that gets told.
• An open question: what recognition might athletics offer the winning team? We are not asking for a specific thing here, and we are not assuming there is budget. We are asking whether there is a form of recognition or reward inside athletics — visibility, an acknowledgement, something at an event — that would mean something to a student-athlete who wins this. If the answer is that nothing is available, the competition still runs.

At the end of this there is something specific to say: Gonzaga Athletics and the Gonzaga Sport Consulting Group built a way for student-athletes to do real business work for a professional organization, and here is what they produced.

We would like to announce and market that jointly — to external audiences, to prospective students weighing Gonzaga, and into the client's network. A student-athlete presenting business work to a professional team is a story that serves athletics recruiting and the business school equally, and it is more credible told by both of us than by either one alone.