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Photo Courtesy: Carla Rosenberg
From the time when she was old enough to harbor professional goals, Lagardere’s Carla Rosenberg had a plan.
First, the lifelong tennis player and scholarship athlete at the University of Illinois would win Wimbledon. Then, after her playing days wound down, she would study medicine in the hopes of curing multiple sclerosis, the disease which her mother was diagnosed with in 1993 shortly after their family relocated from South Africa to suburban Dallas. Her career would take shape at the intersection of competition and compassion.
Wimbledon didn’t happen. Neither did med school. But she credits the ethos behind those goals as the driving force for her sports industry career as the founder of MatchPoint Agency, which works with athlete foundations and nonprofit organizations to both plan events and manage overall operations.
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“This is the way for me to stay involved in sports, and I love feeling good about giving back every event we do make an impact,” she says. “This is definitely an area that not only interests me but inspires me.”
Rosenberg cut her teeth on the team side, first for the Texas Rangers and later for the Dallas Stars. It was with the latter where she broke into community relations work by serving as the director for the Dallas Stars Foundation as well as a senior director for community marketing. She entered the agency world in 2010 and spent two years primarily focused on marketing and branding across stops at SCA Promotions and Zelo Public Relations.
But it wasn’t until August 2012 when her interests crystalized. She was happiest when she was working with charities, but she also the agency world. The solution, her family insisted, was to start her own shop. The first step was to come up with a name, so she headed to a place renowned for inspiration – Starbucks. Within five minutes, she came up with MatchPoint, a tie-in to her tennis career and, as she says, “the only point that matters.”
“Quickest decision I’ve ever had to make was the name,” she says with a laugh. “Everything else, not as easy and not as quick.”
Athletes’ philanthropic work can be as diverse as the players themselves, both in structure as well as cause. Some simply want to plan a single event. Others want a full-on foundation. Some have a passion project. Others prefer broad-based work. And all of them have a different way of handling it.
Fundamentally, Rosenberg’s job boils down to two components: Plan successful charity events and help foundations realize a profit. But no two clients have the same road map for getting there, which forces her to wear a wide variety of hats. She must be adept at speaking legalese with attorneys to form the foundation; understand the athlete’s brand well enough to handle the foundation’s marketing and public relations; network to raise funds; keep a trained eye on website design; and be meticulous enough to organize seven-figure events. She’s blended them all well enough to count the likes of former NBA MVP Dirk Nowitzki, women’s basketball legend Nancy Lieberman and all-time Dallas Stars win leader Marty Turco as clients.
“It’s not like we’re doing rocket science, but everything we do here is strategic and everything is custom,” she says. “There is no cookie cutter. Everyone is at a different stage in their career. Every charity at a different stage of their formation.”
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It’s a diffuse, complex skill set, which helps explain why charity agencies remain a relatively small niche. Yet Kern Egan, President, Americas at Lagardere Plus, believes it’s the sort of sphere that more athletes will begin to gravitate toward at a time when hands-on brand management is becoming more ubiquitous.
“When you’re going to raise your game in that space like you might do on the field or on the court, I think the days of it being your sibling or your spouse or an uncle managing that for you starts to become not as practical as somebody more professional in that space,” Egan says. “As athletes want to give back more, as they want to formalize that part of their brand more, they want more sophistication in and around how that’s managed.
“And there are very few people like Carla that can do that.”
Egan would know. He first befriended Rosenberg through Dallas Influencers in Sports and Entertainment, a professional networking group in Dallas, and wound up leasing her office space in Lagardere’s Uptown Dallas building. It afforded him an up-close view of her work. He ultimately was so impressed that he orchestrated a deal for Lagardere to acquire MatchPoint outright in 2018.
“You’ve got people that understand the nonprofit space. Then you have people that understand the events space. But to be at that intersection… is really special,” he says.
Turco, who now serves as the President of the Dallas Stars foundation, agrees. After years of working with Rosenberg as both a current and former player, he compares her breadth of high-level talents to those of a five-tool player in baseball.
“[As athletes], we think about our own reputation,” he says. “You attach Carla Rosenberg to yours, and it only enhances it.”
Now, with a year under her belt at Lagardere, Rosenberg has a fresh set of goals. Lagardere’s client roster opened up doors to a new list of clients to help and events to plan. But on a macro level, she’s channeling her old competitiveness from the tennis court into setting a new standard within her field.
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“I’ll put it out there: The ultimate goal is to take this group and really make our thumbprint and that we become like kind of the benchmark for other agencies in this field,” she says. “Like IMG, Wasserman, CAA, Octagon – I hope we can make a big enough impact that everyone’s looking at it like, ‘We want to do what they’re doing,’ or ‘We want to have the group they’ve having.’ I hope we can become that.”
At least one person is convinced she’s already there. Now that he’s on the charity side himself, Marty Turco can’t foresee any of Rosenberg’s competitors rallying past her.
“Anybody who wants to accomplish what she has, I wish them all the luck in the world,” he says.
