Connor Ross, a graduate of the BYU Marriott School of Business, has aspired to break records on the track since seventh grade, when he first set his sights on beating the 400-meter race record at his middle school. What started as a teenager’s goal to crush track records has since evolved into a career in collegiate sports management, where Ross’s drive to set new goals has propelled him every step of the way.
Ross’s experience on his middle school track team taught him that he thrived on personal challenges like beating the 400-meter record. “Track is a team and individual sport, so it helped a lot to be very, very goal driven. Once I had my mind set on something I wanted, that’s what really pushed me to do it,” he recalls.
He became the Nevada state champion of the 800-meter race in his junior and senior years, catching the attention of BYU track coaches, who offered him a spot on their team. Ross ran on the team each year that he attended BYU, earning the eighth-fastest indoor 800-meter time in school history while training more than 20 hours a week and traveling biweekly across the country to compete.
While Ross excelled on the track, he struggled to decide on a course of study until he discovered a sports management class in the experience design and management (ExDM) program. It wasn’t long before Ross was setting new goals for himself as a member of the ExDM program and the BYU Sports Business Club.
After graduating from BYU Marriott in 2019, armed with knowledge in business, sports management, and experience design frameworks, Ross pursued a dual graduate degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—one of the only schools to provide both an MBA and a MS in sport management. What’s more, the university offered him the opportunity to continue his running career on their track team.
Ross was excited to find that his background in experience design gave him a distinct edge in his program. In one of his first MBA classes, the professor introduced a framework of design thinking. While the concept was unfamiliar to most of his cohort, Ross had already studied it extensively in the ExDM program at BYU Marriott.
Initially, Ross set a goal to pursue a PhD and teach sports management at the university level. However, his plans changed when BYU’s head track coach called with an unexpected opportunity. Ross was offered the chance to transition from athlete to colleague as the BYU Track and Field director of operations, working alongside the coaches who had once mentored him and overseeing the athletes he had once trained with.
Ross’s journey continued as he became an athletic business manager at the University of Nevada, Reno, before taking on the role of associate athletic director and CFO at Northern Arizona University (NAU), where Ross manages the finances and budgets of the athletic department and ensures all spending aligns with university and NCAA policies. “It’s finding the best way to utilize the resources that we have to optimize the student athlete experience and help our teams win,” he explains.
Ross continues to set goals for success on the track, but this time, those goals extend beyond himself: “As an associate athletic director, I put myself in the place of a student athlete and think, What would I want? How would I want my experience to be? And that shapes our decisions on how we allocate our resources and what we’re choosing to do as a department,” he describes. “My favorite part of the job is seeing the success of student athletes. It’s really special.”
Reflecting on his career, Ross credits his success to the skills he honed as a runner, particularly goal setting. “Track really helped me refine the skill of setting a goal and then coming up with the action plan of what I need to do to achieve that goal,” he states. “Running is about learning to push yourself and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. In my career, I’ve learned to take on my challenges and keep pushing myself, because that’s how I know I’m growing toward achieving my goals.”
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Written by Kathryn Cragun
