The Art of Athlete Storytelling: Lessons from My Internship & Capstone

Hello friends!

Welcome back to another post. Today we're talking about some of my favorite lessons from working with Intrusive Sports Agency as an intern for this past semester. We'll talk about my research, branding and storytelling, and finish up with some lessons from that time. Let's get into it!

Introduction: More Than Highlights

Ever since I did an interview with athletes in 2022 with some of my best friends, who at the time were playing D3 basketball, I've fallen in love with the idea of storytelling and giving a voice to athletes. We often just see their performance, which is never a full picture of who they are and why they do what they do.

Sports media often focuses on performance, but connection comes from humanity and the stories we tell.

In a social-first sports landscape, it is more vital than ever to find out the most effective ways that athletes can tell their story online in order to connect with their fans and audiences in a way that feels authentic to them. This concept became the foundation for why I picked my internship location and why I chose my topic for research.

What It Means to "Highlight" Athletes

When we think of highlighting athletes, I would assume the first thing you think of are stats, graphics, game moments, and their achievements on the field/court. The issue is that this only portrays one side of the athlete and it might not be enough to garner engagement and connection on social media.

Don't get me wrong, highlights are important. These numbers define entire seasons, the performances of their teams, and can be very valuable in telling a portion of their story. There is still so much value with the role of visuals, performance metrics, and on-field/court success.

What It Means to "Humanize" Athletes

On the other hand, we have humanizing our athletes. Humanizing basically just means showing the person, the human, behind the performance. We do this by looking at things like their routines, emotions, growth, setbacks, and more importantly: their personality. These are things you can't get from graphics with numbers displaying a player's performance after their game.

Research has shown that audiences connect more deeply with human-centered content rather than a brand just trying to sell them products or promoting their athletes. With the new era of NIL and social media, athletes now have a very cheap way to build their brand online and to tell their story.

Applying These Concepts During My Internship

For the past six months I have worked with Deshaun Harris, the CEO of Intrusive Sports Agency (ISA). During my time with them, I acted as the Creative Strategy and Talent Branding Intern and was able to help them in creating content to help share the story of their athletes and clients.

My key responsibilities, as described in the internship paperwork that I submitted for this class, included the following:

• Creating and editing visual content for athlete campaigns and agency materials

• Supporting social media plans and scheduling across accounts

• Contributing to the design of pitch decks and materials

• Assisting in maintaining agency digital assets (web and social content)

• Conducting trend research to identify alignment opportunities

• Participating in strategy calls

• Shadowing athlete onboarding, partnership calls, and internal discussions

We honestly had a shorter time than we intended to complete all of these. However, I am grateful as I was still able to participate in the different meetings, connect with athletes, and work on projects of which I am very proud (see Appendices for project examples). During this internship process, we used a platform called Notion to help organize all the tasks and responsibilities that I had. Tasks were assigned there and constant communication was maintained through emails and messages. For content creation, I use Photoshop as my main platform to ensure I was creating high-quality graphics, and it also comes with a handy tool for sending files to review directly to whoever you desire, which made the approval process a whole lot more seamless.

Here are some examples of content that we created together:

My Capstone Project: Researching Athlete Storytelling

In case you didn't know, the main purpose of doing this internship was to ensure that I would come up with a capstone project. My goal was to research the effectiveness of behind-the-scenes and more vulnerable content being shared by athletes in connecting them with their fans and audience members.

My time with them allowed me to gain further knowledge about the athlete experience and the types of content that they felt were the most comfortable creating. As social media has become a powerful tool for athlete branding, my goal was to create a practical guide that could be used by athletes and brands alike to help them create content that connects them with their audience in a way that feels more authentic. After they shared with me their social media platform access, I was able to check in daily to see how different posts were performing and the types of content that served our goals best.

The research backed up my hypothesis: daily, more vulnerable content performs better than simple, highlights content. Not daily in the sense of consistency, but "daily" in the sense of it being casual content instead of highly-planned content on social media. People want connection, and more authentic content seems to translate better in terms of engagement on social media.

The good news is that I've passed both the written and presentation components. I also graduated on the 17th of December 2025, how exciting!

Key Lessons I'm Taking Forward

Here are some simple lessons I'll be taking with me:

1. Storytelling builds trust, not just engagement

2. Consistency matters more than perfection

3. Small moments often carry the most meaning

4. Athletes don't need to overshare to be human

If one day I'm able to publish the paper, I'd love to share it here for further information on the actual data.

Why Does Any of This Matter?

The reason why any of this matters is because we're lacking practical, data-driven guides for marketers and athletes that contain the most effective ways they can share their content to connect with their audience. Athletes are now able to build their own brand online and this requires some type of guidance in terms of what to post and how. The truth is that more human-centered storytelling benefits everyone who is involved.

Here are some of the recommendations I had after my research project:

• Integrating behind-the-scenes content as a core pillar in your content strategy.

• Providing creative support for athletes (filming, editing, and even ready-to-go templates they can use).

• Offering strategic training and drawing content calendars to provide further guidance.

• Developing systems that help in reducing athlete workload and removes the gap between motivation and execution.

Closing: A Full-Circle Moment

Needless to say: I had so much fun. The actual writing was a pain, to be honest, but the process itself was really enjoyable and I feel like I learned so much. My goal is to continue sharing athlete stories in order to highlight their performance and honor their humanity.

Excited for the next steps!