By Julia Parmley
Negotiating is often a tricky business. And when a $9 billion industry is on the line, it can get even trickier.
The National Football League and National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) are in the midst of hammering out a new collective bargaining agreement a few blocks away from GW at the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service at 2100 K St., NW.
Some of the issues on the table include establishing a rookie pay scale for new players, increasing benefits for current and retired players and adding two additional games during the regular season.
The 2011-12 season of the nation’s most popular sport now depends on the NFL and NFLPA’s ability—or inability— to negotiate. And few understand the art of the negotiation better than Ellen Zavian. She’s first female agent to represent NFL players. In addition to more than 40 NFL players, she’s also represented U.S. women’s national soccer and softball players, and professional skateboarders.
“If you look at history of most collective bargaining agreement negotiations, people tend to push to create leverage at deadlines—the closer you get to training camps or the start of the season,” she says. “And that’s what a negotiation comes down to: if you don’t have leverage, you create it or create a bluff and hope they don’t call it. But the NFL and NFLPA just aren’t there yet.”
An adjunct professor of sports law in GW’s School of Business, Ms. Zavian is a certified arbitrator focused on contract matters with the American Arbitration Association. She currently serves as associate general counsel for the Association of Corporate Counsel and served on the D.C. Bar’s Attorney-Client Arbitration Board and its Arts, Entertainment, Media and Sports Section Committee.
A “competitive and athletic” person by nature, Ms. Zavian says she didn’t seek out to work in sports and was actually considering pursuing international law before she landed an internship in the NFLPA’s agent certification department in the late 1980s.
“For my personality it was the right mix at the right time,” she says. “I had worked in different areas of sports and the business of sports since high school and a lot of my close friends in college at the University of Maryland went pro for football after graduation, so I’m sure that exposure influenced me to turn to the NFLPA. But nothing falls in your lap in sports!”
As an agent, Ms. Zavian negotiated “precedent-setting” contracts for NFL, soccer, softball and action sport athletes.
“I really didn’t consciously think about my gender when I became an agent,” she says. “I just decided to do it because it was in the best interest of my career and my clients.”
Also on Ms. Zavian’s resume: national coordinator for the NFL Players Association/John Hopkins Native Vision project, where she helped establish sports camps that addressed life issues facing the Native American population across the country, and commissioner for the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference, where she was tasked with getting the conference into the NCAA.
Ms. Zavian began teaching sports law at GW in 1996 and says she enjoys helping students “achieve their goals.” She advises students who are struggling to break into the sports industry to “intern, network and read.”
“Don’t just meet people once when you’re networking but follow up with them on a continuous and regular basis, because if you aren’t on their radar screen your name isn’t coming to the forefront,” she says. “Also read about what’s going on in industry and write about particular topics in the industry. There are many websites that look for sports content, and writing gives you the opportunity to support your resume with a published item and to network because you reach out to people to interview them.”
Ms. Zavian says she grew up in an active family—her parents coached local games and she participated in marathons and triathlons. But it was internships at the University of Maryland sports and recreation department and Maryland state race tracks, where she worked in sponsorship and marketing for popular events like Preakness, that really helped her home in on what eventually became her life’s work.
“There was no pinnacle moment when I knew I wanted to be in the sports field,” she says. “But I’m very competitive and athletic and I’m not shy around male athletes, I held my own and because of that the gender issue really never came to play in my mind.”
As for the current NFL and NFLPA negotiations, Ms. Zavian says she wouldn’t be surprised if talks continued into early summer up to the start of NFL training camps or if the NFLPA decertified.
“It’s very easy to come to terms when everyone is poor, but it becomes much more difficult when everyone is wealthier,” she says. “I think as you get richer, the negotiations naturally become fiercer. I think that’s true in any industry.”