Professor aims to help students navigate the brave new sports-business world

Angelise Blessing, MS has been involved in the sports media world since she was 6 years old.

That’s when her dad started taking her to every Philadelphia Eagles home game. Wielding a microphone attached to a PA system in the parking lot, she began interviewing “Eagles Pregame Live” personalities Michael Barkann, Ray Didinger, Derrick Gunn and Gov. Ed Rendell for a program she called “Live at D5,” a reference to where her family tailgated. That tradition continued through her final year of high school.

In 2015, while she was completing her Master of Science in Sports Management at Temple University, she launched PhiladelphiaSportsDigest.com, which became the top multimedia provider of high school sports coverage in the Philadelphia area. Blessing’s mother, award-winning broadcast journalist Angela DelVecchio, serves as managing editor for the staff of 40-plus.

Blessing recently joined the Alvernia faculty as a professional specialist of business, teaching multiple classes in the Sport Management Program in the Header School of Business. Her interest in teaching stemmed from working with high schoolers at Philadelphia Sports Digest.

“You get a lot of students that say, ‘I want to work for the Philadelphia Eagles’ or ‘I want to be an athletic director,’” she said. “Well, guess what? You need to learn how to write. You need to learn how to edit videos. Social media is so important now. And there were a lot of journalistic skills the students needed that they weren’t getting in their coursework.”

So she created a course to teach Temple undergrads everything they needed to know to be successful. Only 24 at the time, she became the youngest professor at Temple. Over the ensuing years, she added Drexel and La Salle to her teaching slate.

Blessing and her husband moved back to Berks County in December to be closer to her father, “the strongest person that I know,” who is battling an aggressive case of glioblastoma.

“The day after we found out that we got the house, I saw the posting for this job at Alvernia,” she said.

It’s a return of sorts for Blessing, who attended Alvernia’s Montessori School for kindergarten. Though she only joined the university’s faculty in the spring, she hit the ground running.

“Alvernia prides itself in experiential learning,” she said. “Well, I live it.”

• Her Facility Management and Events class toured the under-renovation American House at Reading CollegeTowne to learn firsthand about construction management, followed by a tour of Santander Arena. And Mike Robinson, the director of the Redner’s Event Center at FirstEnergy Stadium, home of the Reading Fightin Phils, visited the class to discuss working at a facility that focuses on sports for half of the year while maintaining a robust non-sports schedule during the offseason.
• Alvernia Director of Athletics and Recreation Cory Beddick and Assistant Athletic Director for Campus Recreation and Operations Marisa Lombardo shared their experiences with Blessing’s Intro to Sports Management class.
• Her Management Principles class features local leader presentations, during which each of the 27 students brings someone who impacted their life into class to share their journey and expertise.
• Her Senior Seminar class is working with the Reading Royals to promote and sell tickets to the Nov. 20 home game versus the Kalamazoo Wings. The winning team will drop the puck at the game. The students also plan to use $5 from the sale of each ticket to create the Senior Blessing Scholarship for incoming first-year students majoring in sports management.

“This field, especially with social media and the media marketing departments, is so highly sought after just because you can be a personal media manager for specific athletes,” she said. “They’re not just athletes anymore. They're content creators, they’re influencers. They're picking certain schools not necessarily because of how much they're willing to play but because of the exposure they're getting. So it's a totally new market and avenue that these students can take. And with the background that I have, I'm excited to develop more programs that can prepare our students for that.”

Her most notable offering so far has been “Beyond X's and O's: A Conversation About Leadership, Life & the Business of Sports,” a panel discussion held in October at Alvernia’s Physical Education Center that included Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame basketball coaches Fran Dunphy and Phil Martelli.

Blessing is close with Dunphy, the former men's basketball coach for the University of Pennsylvania, Temple and La Salle, having taught with him at Temple and La Salle. She reached out to gauge his interest, and not only did he agree to it, but he recruited Phil Martelli, former men's basketball coach for St. Joseph's University and the University of Michigan. The panel also included Jason O'Connell, head men’s basketball coach at Alvernia, and Mike Doyle, head men’s basketball coach at Delaware Valley University.

Thrilled with how the event was received, Blessing hopes to host additional panel discussions, including a female-focused panel to mark the 40th anniversary of National Woman in Sports Day in February.

Going forward, she is excited to learn more about her students to determine what lines of work they want to go into and how she can help make that happen. And she wants to continue to offer opportunities that allow students to make connections throughout the region, developing a pipeline of talent for sports organizations to tap into.

“Something that makes the sports industry innately valuable is the fact that the value is not going to diminish,” she said. “You want to watch sports live. If you don't watch it live, you're late. It's something that still holds our attention. I tell students, you may have to start out at a minor league team, but it doesn't matter because this industry is going to be here. It's something deeper than a game. It's a community. It's a passion that people have. And it's very rare to be in an industry where that passion for certain things will not go away.”