For the first time, the SDSU Fowler College of Business Sports MBA program won its own case competition. The 8th annual SDSU International Sports MBA Case Competition has invited teams from MBA programs around the world to compete for almost a decade. This past year, teams came from MBA programs at schools such as Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, the University of Oxford, the University of Michigan, UCLA and USC. But this time, the winning team of four graduate students came from SDSU.
The Case Competition gave teams 24 hours to come up with a growth strategy for Xoloitzcuintles de Caliente (Xolos), a professional soccer team in Tijuana. Xolos was the reigning champion of Mexico’s first division, and MBA students were challenged to present ideas to strengthen its brand name in the southwestern U.S. and to develop a plan to manage the expansion of its home stadium—the Estadio Caliente.
Each team then had only 20 minutes to present their ideas to a panel of judges. The judging panel was made up of three executives from Xolos along with a sportswriter from UT San Diego, Mark Zeigler and Jorge Arangure, a freelance sportswriter.
Scott Minto, Director of the SDSU Sports MBA program explained the competition in a press release: “Here at the SDSU Sports MBA program, our goals are to train future sports business executives and serve the local sports community. The Xolos were a perfect partner for this competition because their situation allowed us to achieve both of these objectives. Managing the growth of a brand after a championship provided a great challenge for the assembled MBA students, and we were thrilled to provide a member of our community with such valuable top-level consulting expertise.”
The winning SDSU team came up with the idea for a Xolosmobile, which would act as a merchandise truck similar to a food truck. The goal of the truck would be to help the sport’s team reach fans in their neighborhoods by selling jerseys, scarves, and other Xolos apparel.
Ryan Kaltenback, Micah Porter, Christian Jensen, and Johnny Du made up the winning team of SDSU MBA students. And when talking about the competition, team captain Kaltenbach said: “The case competition was something I’d been looking forward to for a long time. Winning against such a talented competition was the cherry on top of my entire Sports MBA experience. I’m grateful to have been a part of the team that finally broke through. It’s not something I’ll ever forget.”