Alumni Feature
By John Wall
Juniata Graduate Jumps from Halftime Showman to Investment Expert
Casey Craig ’97 comes to the door wearing the uniform of high finance: the subtly powerful gray pinstripe suit, dazzling white shirt, blue-andgold tie, loafers shined to a sheen worthy of a military policeman.
Juniata
Of course, as a former two-sport athlete at Juniata and former employee of the Boston Celtics, this is a guy who is used to wearing some kind of uniform. Yet the familiarity and regimentation suggested in his clothing is not reflected in a career path that has been anything but uniform. Now living in Johnstown, Pa., where he attended high school and met his wife, Erin, Casey now covers the entire East Coast of the United States as a senior vice president for Putnam Investments, where he specializes as a 401(k) financial adviser for Fortune 500 companies. It wouldn’t surprise anyone to learn he took a lot of finance courses at Juniata—when he wasn’t playing basketball or swinging a bat for the baseball team. The bolt from the blue comes when he recounts how his athletic interests, coupled with some sage advice from his adviser Jim Lakso, now Juniata’s provost, inspired several vocational changes in direction worthy of the zigzagged parquet floor in the Boston Garden, a fabled basketball arena (more about that later). “Sports marketing was not the big new career field (it is today) when I was in school, there were just a few big state universities even offering it,” says Craig. “I decided to focus my POE on that and came to Jim with the idea and he was very supportive. By the first semester of my senior year I had an internship with the (minor league hockey team) Johnstown Chiefs.” 72
Nowadays the term sports marketing covers everything from three sausages racing around a baseball field to housewives wrestling in sumo suits to gymnasts in gorilla suits dunking basketballs off a trampoline. But back in the early ’90s, Casey’s interest in working the business side of sports was not an obvious choice. During his hockey internship, he worked with sponsors, advertising, television ads and game night entertainment. At the same time, the young marketer was immersed in Huntingdon community service with Big Brothers/Big Sisters. Based on an idea he saw at a University of West Virginia basketball game, Casey started a program to give the children in Big Brothers/Big Sisters (and their families) tickets to each Juniata home game. He found a sponsor, Huntingdon’s local Pizza Hut, and found that he liked the “selling” aspect of his ideas. “Back then we weren’t as successful as Greg Curley’s teams, so 25 to 50 extra spectators was a big deal,” he says. As graduation approached he had decisions to make; should he go straight into a job or go to graduate school? Should he get an MBA or go into sports marketing? Enter Jim Lakso. “He gave me a great perspective about how pursuing the sports aspect would focus me on a career path,” Casey recalls. “I rarely make a career decision (even now) without involving Jim.” The final decision came down to enrolling in the University of West Virginia’s sports administration master’s program—which, as luck would have it, included a job in the university’s sports marketing office. As he tackled college sports marketing in his two years at West Virginia, he was ready to enter the real world. For Casey, the real world in 1999 was Miami, Fla., where he was representative for Game Plan Inc., an athletic event management business that had him working with Florida International University, basketball star Alonzo Mourning’s charity and the Tampa Bay Firesticks, a women’s pro softball team.
Photo: (top left) curtsey of Photosxpress
Photography: J.D. Cavrich