Most sports real estate conversations start the same way: the venue anchors the district, and the district delivers the return. Mike Carney is building from the opposite direction.

Mike is the head of On Deck Partners, the minor league baseball platform established inside Avenue Capital Group's sports fund, which came to market in December with its first two club acquisitions in Visalia and Montgomery and has since added Wilmington. He's explicit that On Deck is not a real estate developer. The thesis is that in a small or mid-sized market, the ballpark already functions as the community's central entertainment hub and anything built around it should be designed to reinforce that hub, not compete with it. Residential is the early area of interest, including player housing, a recurring ask from both municipalities and major league affiliates.

Before On Deck, Mike spent ten years with the Washington Nationals, arriving in 2015 from a data engineering and consulting background and eventually leading business operations. He walks Adam through what actually changed on the data side across that decade: a club that started with ticketing data used only to run a ticketing business, a centralized platform MLB built in partnership with Google, and the customer data and marketing automation work that mostly landed post-pandemic. He also gets specific about what worked with fans targeted surprise-and-delight credits, a Kids Eat Free program he's now looking at for the minor league clubs and his read on the trade fans will make: they'll share data when they feel they're getting value back.

The conversation covers the harder parts too. Managing the business through a rebuild with no control over the on-field product. Planning around winning streaks and quiet stretches rather than projected win totals. Zip-tying seats and re-manifesting the ballpark coming out of the shutdown, which Mike names as one of his fondest memories with his team. And on leadership, a position he returns to repeatedly: transparency up and down, and no surprises in either direction.

On AI, Mike draws a sharp line. Because minor league front offices are already running lean, he argues this is a growth play rather than a headcount play — which means AI has to eventually touch fans, and that's exactly where he's slowing down. On Deck is leaning in on internal workflows and creative production, and holding back on anything that puts a non-human between the club and a customer in communities built on relationships.

00:00 Welcome and introductions

00:40 On Deck Partners, and ten years with the Nationals

01:59 NASA, consulting, and the move into sports data

03:57 What data looked like at the Nationals in 2015

06:21 How fans actually want to be marketed to

08:19 Winning on the field vs. working the business side

10:27 COVID: revenue to zero, and the return

12:32 Zip-tying seats and working the concessions register

12:57 Managing the business through a rebuild

15:29 Getting alignment up and down the organization

17:12 Leadership: the decisions get harder

18:58 A decade of change in data and technology

20:42 Leaving the Nationals for On Deck Partners

23:44 Avenue Capital, the sports fund, and the thesis

26:02 Why multi-club ownership changes the math

28:38 The real estate and mixed-use thesis

30:59 Real estate that feeds the ballpark, not the reverse

33:02 Programming mix, residential, and player housing

34:10 Institutional capital in minor league baseball

36:01 AI as a growth play, not a headcount play

38:55 Where On Deck is using AI today

40:31 What AI-powered growth looks like at the ballpark

42:06 Closing thoughts

Steve Lefton has spent twenty-nine years at what he jokingly calls "the largest firm you've never heard of." Kimley-Horn is eleven thousand people across a hundred and sixty offices — engineers, planners, landscape architects and environmental scientists who handle nearly everything on a project except the architecture. As Executive Chair, and previously as president and CEO during a stretch in which the firm doubled in size, Lefton has watched sports venues transform from standalone buildings into full districts that have to work three hundred and sixty-five days a year.

He joins Caroline to trace that shift from the ground up. The conversation moves from his early redevelopment work in post-Hurricane Andrew Miami, to why the districts that succeed feel like organic neighborhoods rather than projects, to the scale problem hiding in plain sight: a New York City block runs about three acres, and these developments can span sixteen to a hundred blocks. That math, he argues, makes public partnership unavoidable.

Along the way: what a Kimley-Horn employee is doing beside a police officer on game day with an earpiece in, how the firm moved 2.8 million fans during the World Cup, where Lefton draws the line on AI in a profession of licensed professionals, and why a Commanders project on the RFK site is personal.

00:00 Welcome

00:52 What sports mean to him: family, coaching, and a son playing college lacrosse

03:37 Cornell, landscape architecture, and the "spaces in between"

06:05 Leading Kimley-Horn: doubling the firm in seven years

07:37 Two projects that shaped him: the Miami River Corridor and Midtown Miami

10:36 "The largest firm you've never heard of" — and how the sports practice grew

14:11 Public-private partnerships and playing the honest broker

16:33 Beyond the deal: moving 2.8 million fans at the World Cup

19:54 AI as amplifier: agents on the team and moving up the value chain

22:52 Where he's cautious: faster isn't better, and what a licensed profession can't outsource

25:04 Game day traffic ops: the earpiece, the command center, "go green north"

29:20 What makes a district work: organic neighborhoods, art and science, silo delivery

34:17 Mobility, not transportation — and creating value 365 days a year

36:36 Local insight at national scale, and why the Battery is still the gold standard

37:37 Full circle: Formula One, the Commanders, and RFK with his dad

41:34 Leadership and humility: "you're not that important"

George Barrios walked away from a signed offer to run Univision in July 2020, called his former WWE co-CEO Michelle Wilson the next morning, and told her he'd rather build something with her instead. In his second appearance on The ROAR Podcast, he walks Adam Grossman through everything that decision produced: taking Bowlero public via SPAC at the peak of the frothiest IPO market in decades, returning to WWE to architect the merger with UFC that created TKO, and closing this past April on Global Sports Group — a holding company built with CVC around minority stakes in LaLiga, Ligue 1, the WTA, FIVB, and three rugby properties. Leagues and federations only. No teams, by design.

Along the way, George unpacks the lesson a former boss gave him at thirty-one — that running a business for the short term is easy, running it for the long term is easy, and doing both at once is the actual job — and the three questions he believes any management team should be able to answer clearly enough for a six-year-old. Then the conversation turns to AI, and the two of them stop agreeing. George argues that a company's alpha lives in its workflow and its data, and that handing that to a vendor under an AI-as-a-service model is a mistake he wouldn't make: build the harness around the model yourself, own the code. Adam pushes back hard from a data governance and partnership angle. Neither one gives ground. Which, as George notes at the close, is about right for a guy whose book is called Sometimes Wrong, But Never in Doubt.

00:00 Round Two

00:31 The Book: Sometimes Wrong, But Never in Doubt

01:29 From Operator to Investor

04:07 The July 2020 Phone Call

06:15 Back to WWE and the Road to TKO

08:58 Taking Bowlero Public

11:38 Why Bowlero — and Why Not the Flying Taxis

13:28 Three Hundred SPAC Sponsors

14:38 The Hardest Thing in Business

17:00 What the Public Markets Expose

20:51 Three Questions, Explained to a Six-Year-Old

23:09 A Detour Through Richard Feynman

24:50 How Global Sports Group Came Together

27:59 Why Sports Wins the Re-Architected Value Chain

30:24 Human Provenance and the Next Three Billion Fans

32:53 Leagues and Federations, Not Teams

35:18 "Nine Times Out of Ten, It's an Email List"

36:27 Not the First Inning — Batting Practice

37:43 Moving the Needle Without Control

40:23 The Chief Electricity Officer

43:29 Why He Wouldn't Sign Up for AI-as-a-Service

46:47 Build the Harness, Not the Model

47:48 Where Adam Disagrees

51:50 Willing to Be Wrong

Renee Washington's résumé reads like four careers stacked on top of each other — broadcaster, host, speaker, founder, and soon-to-be author. But the through line traces back to a two-year window at Lehigh in 2014, when she was coaching college soccer, finishing a master's in educational leadership, and deciding whether to return to professional soccer. The NWSL had just completed its first season. The money wasn't a living. A three-time All-American at La Salle and a Hall of Famer, she wasn't asking whether she was good enough to keep playing — she was asking whether she could afford to. In this conversation with Caroline Valvardi, Renee walks through what she found on the other side of that decision: the distinction between Renee the soccer player and Renee the person, and a career built deliberately so that no single job title could take the whole thing down with it.

The conversation moves from that transition into what it actually costs to bet on yourself. Renee is candid about launching Renee Washington Media and Consulting with no spouse's salary as a backstop, running a team of roughly a dozen interns while the revenue side is still being built, and rolling out the business in phases rather than all at once. She and Caroline get into the role faith plays when timing is outside your control, how technology and AI let her sustain a genuinely multi-hyphenate operation across time zones, and what broadcasters actually see on the data side — real-time demographics, peak tune-in windows, even ball-tracking data out of this summer's World Cup. And then the counterweight: Renee likes the data but refuses to live and die by it. Impressions are measurable; reaching people who don't already look like your existing audience is the harder thing to chase, and it's the one she's actually chasing.

01:54 Welcome to The ROAR Podcast

02:09 The Summer That Didn't Stop

04:46 A Path That Was Never Linear

08:35 What Nobody Prepares You For: Life After the Game

12:49 Betting on Yourself

17:55 Faith, Control, and Trusting the Timing

23:50 Technology, AI, and Running a Team Across Time Zones

28:05 Social Listening, KPIs, and What Broadcasters Actually See

31:58 Reach Over Impressions: Why She Won't Live and Die by the Data 35:42 Best Advice Received

39:16 Closing Thoughts

Alex Heriard-Dubreuil didn't set out to work in sports. He trained as a civil engineer in Paris, joined Merrill Lynch in the late nineties to invest in real estate across Europe, and spent a decade in London watching an asset class transform from a passive, collect-the-rent business into an actively managed one. In 2008 he moved to the real estate arm of the Arnault family office — the family behind LVMH — where he spent the next seventeen years, thirteen of them based in Hong Kong, building luxury-anchored mixed-use districts across Asia, North America, and Europe. What that platform taught him is the throughline of his entire career: real estate stops being about cash flow the moment you start paying attention to who actually uses the building.

In this conversation with host Adam Grossman, Alex explains what mixed-use development genuinely means — and why it is not simply stacking an office on a hotel on a retail box. He walks through the metrics that decide whether a project pencils, from development yield margin to cap rates to the inflation and construction-cost pressures that kill otherwise sound deals. He makes the case for sports and entertainment real estate as an emerging asset class in its own right, explains why downtown revitalization has become the central North American opportunity, and describes the work of aligning team owners, city governments, developers, and capital around a single long-term vision. And he closes with the standard he applies to every deal: a project should still be thriving in thirty years, and it should deliver two returns — one to investors, and one to the community it sits in.

00:00 Welcome and introductions

00:59 Paris, civil engineering, and a first job at Merrill Lynch

03:17 Seventeen years with LVMH: Hong Kong, luxury, and mixed-use

06:14 Why real estate: a tangible asset and a people business

08:10 When real estate was passive

10:41 What "mixed-use" actually means

12:39 The metrics: development yield, cap rates

15:20 Geopolitics, curiosity, and the case for a global career

18:48 Has cross-border investing gotten easier in twenty-seven years?

21:18 What you can only learn on the ground

23:20 Asia after 2008: building for the luxury consumer

26:55 Retail's evolution and the speed of change in China

31:11 Thematic investing: tailwinds, data centers, and differentiation

33:47 Why Seregh — sports, entertainment, and an emerging asset class

37:10 Aligning team owners, cities, and capital

41:01 Stakeholders who want in but need a guide

46:53 What makes a good investment: two returns, not one

49:04 Closing thoughts

This week on ROAR we're re-running one of our favorite conversations of the season — our sit-down with Jason Wright. If you missed it the first time, it's essential listening on where women's sports, real estate, and revenue actually intersect.

Most people still frame women's sports as a movement. Jason Wright runs a fund built on the opposite premise — that it's one of the most under-researched and undervalued asset classes in sports. In this episode, hosts Caroline Valvardi and Adam Grossman trace Wright's path from seven years as an NFL running back, through a labor lockout that became his first lesson in sports business, to McKinsey, the President's chair of the Washington Commanders, and now Project Level, the women's sports fund he launched with Melody Hobson at Ariel Investments.

The conversation lands squarely where ROAR lives: the intersection of sports, real estate, and revenue. Wright breaks down the thesis driving Project Level — the modernization of men's sports that women's leagues can now draft on, two decades of family spending on girls' youth sports, and the "net-new fan" who never bought a men's ticket. From there the group digs into the economics of purpose-built women's stadiums, using naming rights to lower the cost of capital, and mixed-use districts that can out-earn the team next door. There's also a Northwestern reunion baked in: three Wildcats, two of them from the class of 2004, with Adam stepping into a dual host-and-guest role.

01:16 From NFL running back to franchise president

04:56 What Northwestern athletics taught them

09:36 NIL, the transfer portal & the leadership question 1

6:06 Why women's sports: the Ariel model & Melody Hobson

20:41 The thesis: three tailwinds & the "net-new fan"

26:52 Data, AI & closing the capability gap

34:28 Inside the LP base & diversifying the asset class

40:23 Purpose-built women's stadiums: the value case

45:11 Mixed-use districts & when real estate out-earns the team

48:44 The public-funding case for women's venues

49:59 What's next: leagues, youth sports & sleeper bets

When Thayer Lavielle set out to build a research practice around women as fans, athletes, and executives, the problem wasn't interpreting the data. It was that the data didn't exist. She describes searching for insight on women as insurance buyers and turning up a single study from 2003. Six years after launching The Collective in the wake of the U.S. women's national team's World Cup win, that gap has been filled with dozens of proprietary reports, a think tank spanning thirty academic researchers, and — by the organization's own accounting — close to a billion dollars in unlocked investment in women's sport, a figure Thayer suspects is conservative.

In this conversation with host Caroline Valvardi, Thayer traces a career that ran through Paris, a New York newsroom, a French beauty conglomerate, and a NASCAR partnership before it ever touched sports strategy. She unpacks what a 15,000-respondent study across twelve countries revealed about the invisible logistical load women carry when booking live entertainment, why women athletes generate roughly twice the engagement of their male counterparts despite smaller followings, and how a decade of proprietary data is changing what AI can actually do for an agency. She also makes the case that the research itself is the flywheel: more data creates more conversation, more conversation attracts more capital, and more capital funds the next round of proof.

• 00:00 — Welcome and guest introduction
• 00:18 — WNBA All-Star Weekend in Chicago
• 01:20 — All-Star as a convening moment for all of women's sports
• 02:15 — The research gap in women's sports science
• 06:36 — Into PR, then L'Oréal — and the boss who named her gift
• 07:50 — Lancôme: under-qualified, oversized, and figuring it out
• 08:50 — Brands, talent, and the origins of The Collective
• 10:24 — French and religion,
• 12:23 — Launching The Collective in 2019
• 13:20 — Women drive the economy — so why is there no data?
• 14:10 — One insurance study from 2003
• 15:09 — Building the think tank: ten universities to thirty professors
• 15:50 — Reports as a credibility spine
• 17:07 — Has demand for the research actually increased?
• 18:40 — The flywheel
• 20:18 — Nearly a billion dollars unlocked
• 21:45 — AI as thought partner
• 23:30 — A decade of proprietary data meets query
• 24:00 — Double-checking and gut-checking everything
• 24:45 — The live music study
• 25:15 — Cultural nuance from Hong Kong to Singapore to Toledo
• 26:20 — 83% of women do the booking
• 26:45 — Two and a half hours a day of unseen labor
• 28:45 — From cable TV to social
• 29:14 — Connection, comparison, and what we haven't cracked
• 30:34 — Athletes as creators, NIL, and playing to different strengths
• 32:05 — The RBC study
• 32:50 — How the pandemic became a proving ground
• 33:30 — The virtual draft from Kathy Engelbert's living room
• 34:33 — Five new leagues in one year
• 35:41 — Reflecting on a career

We're revisiting one of the conversations from The ROAR Podcast that has held up best in the months since it aired — Caroline Valvardi's interview with Everett Sands, Founder and CEO of Lendistry.

Lendistry is a mission-driven capital deployer that partners with Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Visa, Walmart, and government agencies (including LA County during the wildfire recovery) to move capital into small businesses and underserved communities. And over the last several years, they've built one of the most deliberate women's sports partnership portfolios in the country: the LA Sparks, Gotham FC, the Chicago Sky, and the Atlanta Dream.

In this Best Of episode, Everett walks through why he compares the WNBA today to Formula 1 before Drive to Survive, how Lendistry uses transaction data — down to what hour a small business owner is uploading loan documents — to decide where to show up, and what it looks like to design mixed-use sports and entertainment districts so independent operators can actually compete inside them rather than exist beside them. The conversation also gets into the $85 trillion baby boomer wealth transfer, the growing share of new businesses started by women, the short window athletes have to convert peak earnings into long-term wealth, and Everett's own leadership philosophy — built around a North Star, technology as an equalizer, and a competitive streak he traces back to sports.

• 00:00 — Intro
• 01:30 — Everett's Career Journey
• 04:00 — What Lendistry Does
• 06:30 — Origins of the Women's Sports Strategy
• 09:00 — The WNBA as Pre-Drive to Survive Formula 1
• 11:00 — Investment vs. Philanthropy:
• 13:00 — Building the Partnership Portfolio
• 16:00 — Sports & Entertainment Districts
• 19:00 — The Data Layer
• 22:00 — The $85 Trillion Wealth Transfer
• 25:00 — Athletes as Entrepreneurs
• 28:00 — Business Spotlights
• 31:00 — Leadership Philosophy
• 34:00 — Close

For the first time, co-hosts Adam and Caroline record together — and they do it on location in Chicago at the WNBA All-Star Media & Innovation Summit, sitting courtside on Home Court, the new basketball facility at the Obama Presidential Center. It's a fitting backdrop: a purpose-built venue on a huge piece of developed land, capturing exactly where this show lives — the intersection of sports, real estate, and revenue. That word, purpose-built, becomes the thread through the whole conversation, because the story of women's sports right now isn't only about growth; it's about designing for it from the ground up.

Adam and Caroline dig into why "pink it and shrink it" is the wrong playbook, and what it actually takes to build products, performance centers, and content made for women's sports rather than borrowed from the men's game. They get into the data behind the business case, why AI is still underinvested on the business side, what fans really want from athlete-creators (hint: not always the biggest names), and how you actually budget across talent, production, and research. Caroline brings the fan-and-communications lens, Adam brings the data-and-revenue one, and the line they keep returning to ties it together: this was never charity — it's good business, and the data can finally prove it.

• 00:00 — Cold open: what this episode is really about
• 01:37 — Why this is the first combined episode, live on Home Court
• 02:41 — Obama Center's long road from vision to venue
• 03:49 — Why the WNBA Summit: the topics worth showing up for
• 04:44 — Caroline's take: four All-Stars in
• 05:17 — The data case and the science gap
• 06:04 — "Pink it and shrink it": why purpose-built beats scaled-down
• 07:08 — Playing, fandom, and a male-dominated industry
• 07:53 — Empowerment as business case
• 08:24 — Women in leadership and the coaching
• 09:31 — BOA Construction and the women who built Home Court
• 10:15 — Purpose-built performance centers
• 13:00 — AI and data: the business case,
• 16:00 — Athletes as creators
• 19:00 — Produced vs. organic
• 23:00 — Beyond the Summit: All-Star week
• 26:00 — Chicago in the summer

Seth Rubinroit talked his way into NBA Summer League media credentials before he was old enough to drive — becoming, by his own account, one of the first credentialed reporters under 18 to cover the event. That early hustle, and the lesson underneath it, has defined a career that runs from a scrappy USC basketball website to a leadership role in audio and digital strategy at NBCUniversal. In this episode, Adam Grossman traces that arc with Seth: the Magic Johnson interview that taught him to earn someone's time, the "everything is sales" instinct that carried him from college sponsorships to pitching NBC executives, and the London 2012 logging internship that got a peacock in his title for good.

The back half gets into the business. Seth breaks down how he sold audio to NBC leadership on reach rather than revenue, why the arrival of video rewrote the entire economic model of podcasting, and how the smartest shows super-serve a specific audience instead of chasing high-profile talent. He and Adam dig into the data behind launching a 30-plus-show slate, whether there's a real audience for sports business content, how AI tools like Riverside and WSC are quietly reshaping production, and what teaching at USC ahead of LA28 has taught him about how the next generation actually consumes content.

• 00:00 — Welcome
• 00:47 — Credentialed at 12: the NBA Summer League origin story
• 05:08 — The Magic Johnson interview and the lesson that stuck
• 08:56 — Beating the gatekeepers: distribution before social media
• 10:18 — USC, a business degree, and the #1 USC basketball site
• 15:50 — "Everything is sales": the skill that carried his career
• 18:32 — The London 2012 logging internship
• 20:35 — Universal Sports Network to the NBC Olympic team
• 22:39 — Pitching audio: selling reach over revenue
• 24:59 — When video changed the revenue math
• 29:46 — Building a 30-show slate: audience over talent
• 35:16 — AI in production: Riverside, WSC, and freeing up the humans
• 41:07 — Teaching at USC, LA28

GUEST BIO 

Seth Rubinroit leads audio and digital strategy at NBCUniversal, where he oversees more than thirty shows. He began his career as a teenage sports journalist, reporting alongside his brother Sam and becoming one of the first credentialed media members under 18 to cover the NBA Summer League, with bylines in outlets like Sports Illustrated for Kids and Time for Kids. A graduate of USC's Marshall School of Business, he founded what became the most-read USC basketball website while in college. He began his professional career at Universal Sports Network before joining NBC, where he worked the London, Rio, and Pyeongchang Olympics and went on to build the company's podcast slate. He has served on the board of the Podcast Academy, helped launch the CNBC Sport Podcast, and teaches a course on multiplatform Olympic and Paralympic storytelling at USC. He is also a judge for the Sports Business Journal Awards.