Rachel Levitsky is our newly hired Director of Marketing. Rachel has extensive experience in the sports field and is excited about the opportunity to grow our amazing facility!
Q: Where are you from?
A: I am from Washington State, a tiny town in the mountains called Leavenworth. It’s a little Bavarian-themed tourist trap; it is amazing. The actual population is about 2,000 but it is flooded with tourists for Oktoberfest and our Christmas lightings.
Q: Could you provide us with a summary of your education and career path thus far?
A: I was a Division III swimmer at Lewis and Clark, a small liberal arts school in Portland, OR. I interned for their athletic department during my senior year in sports information and administration, and that’s when I got the idea that sports could be a job. After graduation, I moved to Colorado Springs to take a job with the MLB Player’s Alumni Association. I started in public relations but branched out into social and digital media, as well as general communications. From there, I became a communications coordinator. After 3 years there, I decided that I wanted to further my sports education. I majored in biology and international relations in undergrad, so not at all related to what I am doing now. I looked at a bunch of different graduate programs and ended up at the University of Massachusetts in their Masters of Sport Management program (which is ranked #1!). It was only a nine-month program, so they really throw you right into the fire. It was fast, but I truly loved my experience. After my time there, I worked at Octagon for a year in experiential event marketing. It was fun, tough, and I learned a lot in that one year traveling around for Mastercard and Cisco. The northeast was a great place to spend some time, but very far from home. At that point, I reached back out to my contacts at the Alumni Association, who were like family, and they took me back on. I have spent the last two years there, and am now ready to grow more professionally. I wanted a challenge, and this new job will definitely be that. It’s a really good thing. My background spans communications, community relations, event marketing, and digital marketing. I hope to combine all of those things into my new role at Future Legends.
Q: Which sport has had the biggest impact on your life and why?
A: It would be impossible for me to not say swimming. I started at age five, started year-round swimming when I was eight, and then finished my career at age twenty-two. For seventeen years of my life, I was impacted by the sport. I was fortunate to have great coaches. Great coaches shape youth in such an impactful way. Also, the structure that sport gives to young peoples’ lives teaches one how to be a part of the team. Even though most races are individual, swimming gave me my community. It taught me to be a part of a team and to work together. Community is the biggest part of the sport, which is why I am excited to work at Future Legends. I was not the swimmer winning all of my races, but I was the team member cheering on every event. I love that sports gives you the ability to be a family, be there for everyone, and pick others up.
Q: What is your goal for Future Legends?
A: My initial goal is to build the Future Legends brand to be a household name for youth sports across the nation. Future Legends has the potential to be the preeminent national sports complex. I think that is an extremely attainable goal, and that we can get to there in the first couple of years. I haven’t officially started yet, so I’ll partake in more goal setting once I get there. My other goal would be to make Future Legends a community; a place that people want to come to spend time with their families, friends, and kids. We hope to build it into a positive experience for anyone who comes there.
Q: What excites you most about Future Legends?
A: The most exciting part for me is just the general scope and scale of the project. There is nothing like this that has been done before. Jeff likes to say it’s a unicorn, which is really is. I am excited to get to be a part of it from the ground up. I get to be one of the first team members. It’s just so exciting to have the opportunity to make a small mark on such a large and important project.
Q: Who is your sports hero and why?
A: As a swimmer, it would be hard not to say, Michael Phelps. He was such a formative person and gave so much to our sport. While at the MLB Alumni Association, I learned that athletes are just people like the rest of us and like to be treated that way. A personal hero that was an athlete is Brooks Robinson. I want to live my life like him. He makes people feel good and places value on who they are, not what they have done.
Written by Ashley Kavanagh