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Field note / 07Creative · Social · Comms
The AgencySell and Storytell · Emmy 2022
Starting a creative agency inside an athletic department
We merged three units into The Agency - UC Athletics' in-house creative studio. An Emmy and one College GameDay later, here's what I'd tell anyone building a team inside an institution.
3 min read· Jul 4, 2026·Updated Jul 20, 2026275 views
When I moved into UC Athletics in 2017, after nine years in the university's central administration, the department had a storytelling problem every athletic department had: the best moments were happening in our buildings, and the best tellings of them were happening somewhere else. Creative, social, and communications were three separate units, each doing good work, none operating at the scale of the opportunity.
So we merged them. The Agency consolidated those three units into one in-house studio - ten full-timers under a 'Sell and Storytell' approach, staffed and run like the outside shop we'd otherwise have hired.
The name was a statement of intent. Not "the communications office." Not "creative services." An agency - the kind you'd otherwise pay, expected to produce work at the level you'd otherwise pay for.
The conventional model outsources the big stuff: hire an agency for the brand campaign, a production company for the documentary, and keep in-house staff for the daily grind. The Agency inverted that. The people closest to the athletes, coaches, and buildings made the signature work - because access and trust are the raw materials of good storytelling, and in-house teams have a permanent supply of both.
The proof points came fast:
"Let It Fly: The Series" - a documentary series we produced in-house that won an Ohio Valley Regional Emmy in 2022.
ESPN College GameDay - when it came to campus in 2021, our team led creative and logistics for one of the biggest brand moments in program history.
A 3-million-photo asset library - we implemented Canto as the department's digital asset platform and put AI on top of it, turning hours of "who has that photo?" into seconds.
I'm proud of the trophies. I'm prouder that they were won by an internal team that didn't exist as a unit a couple of years earlier.
Name it like it matters. Institutions default to descriptive, deflating names. A name with ambition changes how the team sees itself and how the organization treats it. People said "send it to The Agency" differently than they'd have said "send it to communications."
Win something external, early. Internal credibility is slow and political. External validation - an award, a national moment, coverage - is fast and unarguable. Aim a portion of your best effort at work the outside world will judge.
Access is the moat. Anything an outside firm can do with your brand guidelines, an inside team can do with your brand guidelines plus the locker room, the coach's trust, and the 6 a.m. lift. Build the team where the access is.
The unit outlives the founder's job description. I've since moved into strategy - data, AI, the department's operating system. The Agency kept running without me hovering, which is the actual test of whether you built a team or just a project.
The bet - that an athletic department could run its own creative studio at professional grade - seems obvious now that everyone's doing it. Most good bets look that way afterward.
