EUGENE–The James H. Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business and Fudan University’s School of Management in Shanghai, China, have announced jointly their receipt of a grant from NIKE Asia Pacific to fund a three-year faculty exchange.

The grant will allow business professors from Fudan University to study the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center’s nationally acclaimed program and will allow professors from the Warsaw center to teach sports marketing to Master of Business Administration students in Shanghai.

"China features the largest population in the world yet its sports marketing industry is truly in its infancy," says Rick Burton, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center.

"The students at Fudan are incredibly bright," he adds, "and they have a huge desire for the knowledge necessary to assist their country in developing winning Olympic bids and creating other sports marketing opportunities."

Steve Miller, NIKE’s director of global sports marketing and an adjunct faculty member in the Warsaw center, says NIKE recognized the growing need for well-educated sports marketing executives who understand domestic and international business.

"It only made sense to bring the best graduate sports marketing program in America together with the best business school in China to educate the sports marketing leaders of the future," he says.

"This is an important step for the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center," says Phil Romero, dean of the Charles H. Lundquist College of Business. "It brings a larger global perspective to MBA students enrolled at the Lundquist College of Business and it allows our professors to share their knowledge and expertise with students and faculty at Fudan University."

The Lundquist College of Business joins a prestigious group of international graduate business schools engaged in faculty exchange programs with Fudan’s School of Management. Among these are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dartmouth College; the University of Chicago; Cambridge University, England; Munich University, Germany; Osaka University, Japan; the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia; and the School of Business for the National University, Singapore.

The University of Oregon’s Warsaw Sports Marketing Center is the first sports business program in the nation housed in a college of business. Its advisory board is comprised of senior executives from ESPN, ABC Sports, U.S. Soccer, IBM, NBC Sports, NIKE, The Women’s Sports Foundation, Turner Broadcasting, Peter Jacobsen Productions and the United States Basketball Academy.

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