Carolyn Sawyer
Carolyn grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where she began swimming competitively at the age of ten and continued through high school. She began crewing and competing with her father on an Olympic-class sailboat at age twelve. When her family moved to Salt Lake City, she competed on her high school ski team. Her interest and drive to compete was strong in times when opportunities for women in sports were minimal. She graduated from Antioch College and earned her Masters Degree at John F. Kennedy University in Clinical Psychology. She has completed Executive Education courses at the Harvard School of Government and School of Education.
She completed extensive research in the neurophysiologic process of academic skills acquisition. Her specialty and focus is in the complex process of acquiring reading skills. She published an intensive phonics reading program long before phonics was emphasized in reading instruction as it is today. Using this program, she built a business that provided remedial reading instruction in the private sector with offices in Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Sacramento and Atlanta.
Charter School legislation created the opportunity to establish a full curriculum focusing on strategies that best support children learning. She founded Champion Schools in 1999.
Patrick McGee
Patrick has developed a comprehensive background during his 20-year career in the sports management and marketing industry. As Founder and President of ProVentures Group, he believes that sports marketing is not simply matching an athlete with a product and providing a production day. His accomplishments are evidence that these partnerships are much more comprehensive in nature and require the rare ability to create an integral package that crosses multiple platforms. Prior to opening his own company, he was Vice President of Marketing in the Athletics and Personalities Division at Octagon Worldwide and managed the company’s global athlete marketing efforts to develop new business, procure athletic and celebrity talent and further develop the company brand.
Over the course of his professional career he has marketed athletes by developing national partnerships with leading corporations including: Microsoft, McDonald’s, Blockbuster, America Online, Lycos and Shock Absorber. Patrick successfully developed marketing across platforms in the creation of the official Anna Kournikova Calendar and extended use of Anna’s time and footage from the shoot to create multiple marketing opportunities including a television special.
Patrick graduated from the University of Kentucky where he was a four-year tennis letterman with All-SEC honors. He was a writer and editor of Regional Sports Publications and a tennis and football agent for Advantage International. He was one of the first sports agents to travel to Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
His marketing expertise has garnered industry recognition, twice earning Sports Business Journal’s “Forty –Under-Forty” in 2002 & 2003. He has been called upon to speak at the Sport Media & Technology Summit, World Congress of Sports, and National Sports Marketing Networks.
True to his vision, Patrick’s company aligns people, personalities and companies with similar beliefs, structures business relationships with a long term strategic plan and vision to incentivize all parties to achieve success that is measures beyond financial gain.