Nation`s top sports execs mentor Hawken students and grads

Some of the nation`s top sports marketing executives-people who`ve worked with some of the biggest names in sports including Brady Quinn, Tiger Woods, Venus and Serena Williams, Joe Montana, Eli and Peyton Manning, Maria Sharapova, Muhammad Ali and Charles Barkley-recently pooled all that expertise and converged on Hawken`s Upper School campus for a summer internship program for both current students and graduates. The students, who are overseeing the sales and merchandising, game operations, public relations, communications and marketing for Walton Weekend, the school`s grand opening celebration of its new $1.95 million stadium, are primarily being led by former IMG Senior Corporate VP Stephanie Tolleson and Buffy Filippell, founder of TeamWork Online, an online executive search firm that recruits executives for the NBA, NFL, NHL and MLB, but have had a cadre of other executives visit to help them. Throughout the summer, top football agent Tom Condon; Peter Johnson, the former IMG CEO of Sports and Entertainment; Paul Garofolo, former VP and General Manager of the Cleveland Force and current President and CEO of Signature Sports and Marketing, Inc.; IMG Senior VP and Director of Worldwide Fashion Event Operations Jeff Orloff; Alan Zucker, IMG Senior VP of Athlete Sales and Marketing and Senior VP of Business Development Group; sports media coaching consultant Lisa Bercu-Levine; IMG consultant Terri Bell; and Mike Rielly, former Senior VP and Managing Director of IMG Japan all lent their time to offer advice for hosting a successful weekend as well as tips on how to succeed in the competitive world of sports marketing. \"You have to be inquisitive, you have to be aggressive, you have to be the smart guy out there and you have to want it more and work harder than any one else,\" Tolleson told the interns in a meeting with Condon. \"So that`s why this summer, we`re trying to expose you all to these things\"