Where the game takes you

Just four years after graduating from Western Washington University, Ben Bagley has packed up his Subaru and moved across the country three times — from Texas to Michigan to New York — building a career in professional sports communications along the way.

Now, the 2022 journalism-public relations alum works in public relations and basketball communications for the Brooklyn Nets, combining his passions for storytelling, statistics and sports.

One lesson has become clear early in his career.

“One of the things that I always say with sports is that you can’t always choose where your job is,” Bagley said. “The sports are in a certain city.”

Bagley, an honors student who also minored in statistics, knew he wanted to work in basketball. With limited professional basketball opportunities near home, he was willing to relocate wherever the right opportunity took him.

“There’s a lot of packing up my Subaru and moving across the country and hoping for the best,” he said.

Each move took Bagley somewhere he had never been before. He rented apartments online, arrived without knowing the city and figured things out as he went. While the moves meant leaving family and friends in Washington behind, they also gave him opportunities he knew he couldn’t pass up.

Raised in Ferndale, Washington, Bagley said he always wanted to experience life beyond his hometown. After graduation, he aggressively pursued jobs throughout the sports industry. His first opportunity was an eight-month internship with the Amarillo Sod Poodles in Texas. When that ended, another opportunity opened with the Detroit Pistons.

Bagley told himself it would be stupid to turn down and opportunity to work in the NBA. “So, I was willing to get in my car and move again.”

Although his career path now seems like a natural fit, Bagley didn’t begin college with a plan to work in sports communications.

When he arrived at Western, he was a theater major.

Bagley views his life as having two halves, with one half loving theater, music and choir. “The other half was I loved playing all the sports, and I was always just a huge dork about it.”

As he progressed through the program, he realized theater was something he loved as a hobby rather than a career. At the same time, a General University Requirement course sparked an unexpected zest for math. Combined with his love of writing, that discovery pointed him in a new direction.

“I wanted to just restart, basically; I wanted to stop my theater degree,” Bagley said. “I realized that I love math a lot more than I thought I did.”

Bagley said math was interesting to him because it could offer more storytelling aspects in sports than any other industry. Sports, Bagley said, is one of the only entertainment outlets where someone can quantify the performers by numbers and statistics – and that can tell a story.

Where this all came together for Bagley, he said, is when he started working with Western Athletics. There, Bagley said he realized that broadcasting was like a mixture of sports and theatre. Through broadcasting, Bagley said that he found he could best tell stories when he has statistics to outline those stories.

“I just fell in love with being the guy that dug up the stats to give to the broadcasters, and I chose that route,” he said.

Although he no longer works in broadcasting, Bagley said his theater background still serves him well.

Sports public relations is built on relationships, he said. Success depends on earning the trust of players, coaches, front-office staff and media members — often very different groups with different needs.

“We have to be able to connect with the players and coaches and connect with media members,” Bagley said. “And oftentimes, those are very, very different kinds of people.”

Bagley said that he needs to help establish trust with the players, coaches and front office. That way, they all know that Bagley and his team are going to help them tell a good story and navigate their relationships with members of the media.

At his current job, Bagley said that he and his PR colleagues are really the storytellers of the Nets as a basketball team. They work with writers to try and tell stories about the team. Sometimes, writers come to Bagley and his other coworkers with ideas for stories, as well.

Then, it’s on Bagley and his circle to talk to the player and the coach, pitch to them and make sure they want to do the story. Other times, it’s Bagley and his coworkers who actively pitch stories to writers. This can mean finding out interesting things about members of the team while off the court, then pitching them as stories.

That, Bagley said, is where statistics can come into play. Bagley will do statistical research, find something out, and then connect it to a writer. After that, Bagley connects the writer to the player.

One of Bagley’s big daily tasks while on the job right now is writing the Nets’ daily game notes. These detail everything interesting and relevant about the team. Broadcasters use these game notes pretty heavily.

It’s the offseason right now, which is when Bagley said he turns to more “team historian”-type stuff. For one, Bagley writes the Nets’ media guide. This is a full, comprehensive history of all the Nets’ records and roster, as well as other big things happening with the team. Bagley oversees keeping this media guide up to date.

Then, when major events like draft picks happen, Bagley writes press releases and sends them out to the correct media. Bagley said he organizes all the Nets’ press conferences and media availability with their general manager, their head coach and the new player.

“So basically, anytime a player or coach is in the news, I have something to do with it, essentially,” Bagley said.

All this hustle and bustle come just a few years after Bagley moved away from his hometown, Ferndale, and his not-so-far college town, Bellingham, for the very first time. Despite the challenges, Bagley said that there’s been a lot of learning to live on his own. He said that it’s been a whirlwind of learning different cities and cultures, and that home is always there when he wants to go back.