John
Waldron

Sports has always been my passion since a young age, and even though I only learned about the sports management major in high school, I've been planning on working in the sports field in some capacity since I was a child. Growing up in Tampa, my father taught me to root for the home town teams: the NFL's Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the MLB's Tampa Bay Rays, and the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning. It wasn't long before the roles were reversed and I was educating my dad on the sports we were watching. My dream is to work for a sports team from Tampa, but I will never turn down a chance to work for any sports team, no matter the city it is located.

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I am Puerto Rican on my mother's side, I was born in Tampa but my mother was born on the island in Ponce, Puerto Rico. My hispanic heritage is a large part of identity, and I understand Spanish completely, as my grandma raised me as a child and only spoke Spanish to me. In fact, my first word was agua, which is "water" in Spanish.

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I am looking to work more on the player development and roster side of the sports world. I have been fascinated by the recent changes to the sports that I love to watch, as there has been a switch from "trusting your gut" and other old beliefs to the acceptance of analytics and the adherence to statistics in the building of a team. I believe someone needs to find a happy medium between trusting that "gut feeling" and only making choices based on the numbers. Neither of the two approaches are infallible and I believe there is a way to find a perfect marriage between the old and new ideologies to find a way to make the perfect roster moves for a team.