After two years of preparation, Baker University will launch a Master of Science in sports management program this month.

Ron Christian, Baker assistant professor of sports administration, said when classes start Jan. 26 in the 36-credit-hour program, it will mark the successful conclusion of a process to develop the program that started in October 2013, two months after he arrived on the Baker campus.

From the due diligence undertaken during that time, Christian is confident the program will successfully attract students from a pool of high school athletic directors, recreation department employees, small college athletic department personnel and individuals with professional teams looking to boost their careers. Christian is a doctoral student in the Kansas University sports management program and said he had witnessed many students from those backgrounds commute from the Kansas City area to Lawrence for KU’s master program.

“They seem to be the profile of students we could draw,” he said. “We have everything in the area from high school administrators to NFL teams. It’s really a high-growth area.”

Christian also was confident the program will be popular as a transitional career for people in human resources, marketing and business jobs. He expects the first class to have an enrollment this spring from 12 to 15 students.

“We can accommodate 20 to 25 per class,” he said. “If enrollment grows to exceed that, we could offer two sections of the same class.”

Unlike the new nursing master’s program that Baker also is introducing this month, which will be offered exclusively online, sports management students will complete courses at Baker’s Overland Park campus. That route was chosen so that students could meet and build contacts with professionals in the business and identify internships that will be an important part of the program.

?”For this discipline, it serves the student so much better to have the face-to-face of the classroom,” Christian said. “It’s hard to make internship connections through email or Skype. We have such a wide range of organizations we can tap into for guest speakers, including those from the Royals, Chiefs and NAIA headquarters.”

At some schools, the sports management master’s programs are offered through physical education departments, but the Baker master’s program, like its undergraduate program, will be aligned with the school’s business department.

“We found in feedback, those are the skills employers are looking for,” Christian said.

One focus of the program will be on how sports organizations can make effective use of the information they collect from online sales of tickets, merchandise or through monitoring social media and responses at sporting events.

“We’ll look at analytics and how to collect and dissect data in a meaningful way,” he said. “It’s interesting that KU is on the cutting edge in that. They are one of the few athletic departments with a full-time analytics position dedicated to tracking fans’ experience, what makes them happy, what keeps them coming back and what merchandise they buy.”

Baker Provost Brian Posler said although he didn’t anticipate an announcement soon, the school continued to study other master’s level programs in logistics and “big data.”

To learn more about the new program online, visit bakeru.edu/spgs-prospective2/degrees-and-programs.