When Joseph Ricco stepped onto the Forty Acres, he had a vision.
Ricco, a student in the Sport Management program, knew he someday wanted to work in the world of football. Upon arriving at UT Austin, he knew he was in the right place to make his dreams come true.
Like any sports connoisseur, he began his freshman year by making a playbook to get to the finish line. He analyzed the competition among students who shared his passion, sought mentorship from his Sport Management professors and more experienced students, and began training to become a more competitive player in the professional field.
By the end of his sophomore year, his efforts paid off as he walked onto the field with the Kansas City Chiefs as part of their 2024 summer training camp intern program.
“It is not like any other training camp,” Ricco said. “The amount of people who will show up to the Chiefs’ training camp – there were days where we had around 7,000 people there.”
According to Ricco, there is no incredible story as to how he got to this point. Rather, it was a month-long game of learning to make the right plays. Through the advice and experiences of older students, he realized early on the importance of internships, and how they were required for junior and senior year opportunities, so he became determined to create a path for himself that would prepare him for his dream career.
“Going into it, I knew I ultimately want to work in professional football or basketball, preferably football,” Ricco said. “So, if I could get something this summer, I thought that would help me a lot more with where I am at now.”
Ricco started gaining experience locally with the UT football team, while also balancing another sports internship and part-time job with his studies. He began looking up potential internship opportunities, set up job alerts that matched keywords on LinkedIn, sent batches of cover letters and resumes and did reverse job searches to connect with people who held roles that matched his interests.
By January, he realized the lack of responses meant he had to change up his strategy and make improvements.
“When I started, I didn’t even know what a cover letter was,” Ricco said. “I started going to McCombs a lot to do work there and other students would be interviewing for internships. I listened to what they did and what they were using.”
In February, he learned of the Chiefs’ summer training camp internship. “By this point I had refined my resume,” Ricco said. “It was the same general experiences that I had, I was just laying them out better and learning to write a cover letter.”
After submitting his information, along with recommendation letters he had collected by then, he received an invitation for an interview. Taking advantage of COE and UT’s career services, he prepared for his interview to set himself up for success.
“It’s just kind of learning to navigate those little things behind the scenes,” Ricco said. “Learning how to do that stuff is what gave me a leg up or like an equal chance in that process. Then, tying my experience and skills I got here to what they were looking for was a straightforward process.”
Thanks to support from the Talisman Family Endowed Excellence Fund in Sport Management, once he secured his internship, he had the resources to travel, stay and make his dreams a reality. He boarded a plane for a summer in St. Joseph, Missouri, where the Kansas City Chiefs hold their annual training camp on the grounds of Missouri Western State University. Every day, Ricco said the schedule was packed and planned up to 15-minute blocks of time.
At 5:45 a.m., he and the other interns would wake up to prepare for the day, walk 10 minutes from the dorms to the field and be ready to start by 6:50 a.m. Once they were assigned their responsibilities for the day, doors would open to the public at 8 a.m. and practice would begin by 9 a.m., lasting anywhere from one and a half to two and a half hours.
Meanwhile, he said interns would carry and organize things, escort visitors, transport media and families or help with other small tasks. By midday, practice would end, players would return to the locker room and interns would help ensure everything was wrapped up. Then, they would take lunch before returning to the field to set up for the next day.
“It is a month when you are trying to get an entire NFL roster of 60 to 70 players ready for an entire 18-weeklong season. They are trying to decide which players to keep and which players to cut so there is a lot happening,” Ricco said.
The best part, he said, was getting to meet new leaders, mentors and students who shared his passion for sport. “We all joked about like ‘I am going to hire you when I can do this or that,’” Ricco said.
Looking back on his experience, Ricco said it helped him further realize that he loves the sport and the business of it more than the idea of working with only one team. He said his classes and professors at UT, including Dr. Matthew Bowers and Dr. Thomas Hunt first helped him identify this dream and are now working with him to help him achieve it.
“I think the experience helped narrow the process for me on what I am interested in, what I want to learn more about and potentially work in versus what I might not be as interested in,” Ricco said.
Looking to the future, Ricco said he is already making connections in hopes of getting the next internship that will provide an inside look into the league perspective of sports. He said he is interested in a more structured environment where he can work on the administrative side of sports, such as contracts, transactions and player selection.
Someday, Ricco said he hopes to make an impact by helping to maximize business profit while minimizing consumer burdens and improving athlete safety.
“For me, putting together a team of players is like a puzzle with an infinite amount of answers,” Ricco said. “There might not be a single right answer but there are definitely better and worse answers, and that has fascinated me since I was a kid.”
After speaking with students from across the country, Ricco said he has become even more grateful for the atmosphere and opportunities that the College of Education offers. He is grateful for all of the guest speakers and professional development opportunities available inside and outside of class; as well as the far-reaching network of professionals and mentors the COE faculty will connect their students with.
“Everyone here is smart and has a strong sense of drive,” Ricco said. “I like the competitive environment here; I think it is a good level of competition that brings people up.”
