“When it comes to the sports industry, so many people want to work in it. I just want to make sure that when my resume comes across the table, it’ll be something you haven’t seen before,” said Donté Mullins, a senior and communication studies major at the College of Communication and Information.
Mullins has an unflappable ambition to achieve his goals, even if that means sending out cold emails to 50 different sports agencies at the end of his sophomore year asking for a job or internship. That initiative and drive resulted in the communication studies major landing an interview with one of those agencies and ultimately becoming a player agent intern and signing four clients—the same number of players his boss at the agency signed that year.
Sports Executive Goals
Mullins is forging forward with his sights set on one day being a sports executive in basketball or football. In that vein, he has sought out every opportunity he could at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and beyond to learn about the sports industry, leadership, and business. This includes being selected as one of 10 students participating in the 2025 cohort of the Big Orange Combine and working behind the scenes at the Super Bowl LIX; serving as an assistant in Tennessee Football’s player development department; completing the Dartmouth Tuck Bridge Program in 2024, which allowed him to take Ivy-league courses from the school’s MBA faculty; and participating in UT’s Tennessee-Rwanda Leadership Experience (TRLE) study abroad program.
Mullins has already lined up his next big opportunity this coming month, which is participating in the selective Philadelphia Eagles’ Virtual Diversity Development Series to learn more about the NFL team and career paths of front office executives.
He’s completed all this all while gleaning everything he could from his courses in the School of Communication Studies, which he said has provided him with additional soft and hard skills to reach the high bar he has set for himself. He credits both his faith in God as well as hard work for getting him to where he is now.
“The entire reason I went here was to get these opportunities. I knew from the jump I wanted to go to a school that would get through me through the door, and everyone recognizes that Power T. If you’re willing to do the grunt work, you’ll be very prosperous,” Mullins said.
While he started out as a business major, Mullins felt pulled to take his education in a different direction and sought out communication studies as a major that could provide him with the flexibility and creativity he craved.
“It was a blessing to be around people who could understand what I wanted to do and empower me. Business is a little firmer, and there’s nothing wrong with that, it just didn’t work for me. I wanted the option to be more flexible,” he said.
Mullins brought with him personal experience in playing grassroots basketball in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he learned to spot players who had a lot of promise. He realized he had a particular talent for seeing talent, and he decided to pursue it as a career—though he said the sports agent movie Jerry McGuire also played a significant role in planting the seed for his ambitions. In addition, he said his family are naturally inclined to excel at communication, and his journalist brother encouraged him to look at the field as an avenue into becoming a sports executive.
He cut his teeth in communications via a more generalized internship the summer after his freshman year by working for CCI alumnus Justin Crawford (‘18), who was making podcasts for NBC at the time. There, Mullins learned about sales and marketing pitches, scheduling, and other
“Justin is amazing, he brought the best out of me through my internship, and I met him through a CCI gathering, it was dope how we met. That was a great experience and got my feet wet,” he said.
While he made the dean’s list his first year at UT, Mullins knew it would take more than good grades to accomplish his dreams, which is why he began sending out emails to every sports agency dealing with football or basketball that he could find. His efforts panned out when Olle H. at AMR Agency LLC sent an email back expressing dubious curiosity about the young man’s inquiry into an internship. Mullins said if Hansson gave him an interview that he knew he could convince the sports agent to give him a chance, and he did exactly that.
“I said, ‘If you give me a chance, I’ll sign more people than any of your agents now.’ It was a super bold statement, but I knew the game and people in the game. I was extremely hungry to get my chance to showcase what I could do. He was really impressed,” Mullins said.
He spent the first several months at AMR shadowing Hansson and learning everything he did as a player agent, from scouting, identifying, and recruiting potential basketball players to analyzing data and statistics from players’ games and creating scouting reports.
“That was what I did for an entire year; I started in May and ended the next May, and it was the best experience possible because at the end of the day my boss let me be me,” he said. “He said, ‘Go and sink or go and swim.’ and at the end of the year, I was able to sign four professional clients to the company, I got paid for it and well taken care of and I tip my hat to AMR every day.”
Making Gains at UT
Mullins’ performance earned him an invitation to stay on at the agency, but the student knew he needed to diversify his knowledge and skills. He applied to work with Tennessee Athletics and was offered a position working with UT football players and recruits. Working in a well-established SEC organization was a completely different role than being a player agent, and it gave the communication studies major insight into the everyday logistics and operations that happen behind the scenes of such an outfit.
His duties there included scouting, recruiting, and acclimating players to UT life as well as handling various small but essential tasks.
“My entire vision when I was with Tennessee Football was to make life easier for the coaching staff so they could only worry about on-the-field stuff,” he said.
Mullins was also involved in building the Readying Individuals Seeking to Evolve (RISE) program, which provided financial literacy education for players. RISE took players to Nashville to visit Fortune 500 companies and speak to successful individuals who found a place in business after they left their sports careers. Helping the players in this way was one Mullin’s favorite parts of the job, as is mentoring and leading students through the UT Success Academy.
“Being a minority on campus, especially a Black man, it’s hard. No one is going to feel sorry for you, and you’re going to have to work twice as hard. I like being able to mentor them, help them get internships in sports, journalism, engineering or whatever their calling is—I’m helping a mentee as we speak to work with The Daily Beacon —just making sure they have everything they need. When I was a mentee, my mentor gave me everything he had. It never stopped, no matter who I was with, I always wanted to give back, because someone did the same for me” Mullins said.
He cited two men at UT as being mentors and an inspiration to him: Director of Haslam Access and Community Clarence Vaughn and Associate Vice Chancellor for Assessment, Culture, and Education Tyvi Small. Both were involved in helping Mullins get accepted into the TRLE program, which takes student athletes and students adjacent to athletics to Rwanda to help them develop cultural competency and leadership skills. Mullins said during that trip was the first time he was exposed to NBA Africa and learned what has been done to develop and expand the league.
“Dr. Tyvi Small, Dr. Bryant and the other TRLE committee did a phenomenal job putting that program together, I was very blessed to be part of it. Being able to hear from those experiences that trip was something you couldn’t imagine,” he said.
Shooting for the stars
While he transferred from a business major to communication studies, Mullins knew he needed to round out his schooling with additional business education. He found that upon his acceptance into Dartmouth College’s Tuck Business Bridge Program, which is an intensive three-week program for liberal arts and STEM majors to gain business skills from top-ranked MBA faculty at the Ivy-league institution.
“It was extremely intense. It started during what would be our winter break but carried over into the first two weeks of our semester at UT. I knew it would be worth it, and it was,” he said. “Being able to understand the business with the sports, it’s everything. Coming into any space and being well-versed with the Ivy league skills to back that, I wanted to really separate myself.”
Which brings Mullins to his most recent unique experience: working at the Super Bowl LIX with nine other UT students through the Big Orange Combine.
“It’s very competitive. I was emailing the leadership of the Big Orange Combine since last summer, I really wanted to get it,” he said.
He worked gameday operations by helping with memorabilia for former NFL quarterback Drew Brees for most of the game, and while he didn’t get the chance to see the game itself, he did get to speak with Brees and other former NFL players Donovan McNabb and Zach Thomas to pick their brains for about five minutes each.
Mullins was rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles to win that game because he had just found out about his acceptance into the team’s Virtual Diversity Development Series, and a Super Bowl win would only make it an even more compelling opportunity. While he will complete that next step in his education post-graduation this May, Mullins said he is still looking at his career opportunities.
Mullins said he feels well-prepared for the next steps in his career after everything he’s experienced during his time at UT. And though going to class is less glamorous than going to the Super Bowl, Mullins said he learned lifelong lessons from School of Communication Studies Associate Professor John Haas’ capstone course.
“Dr. Haas is one of the most enlightened individuals I’ve ever met. He keeps it simple, he says, ‘You are a communication major, we study messages.’ I will never forget that in all of my four years,” he recounted. “One of the main things he taught us is we’re always studying the current state of the field and that was our capstone project. He wanted to take everything we’ve learned, all the research we did, all the speeches we gave, all the writing we did, he brought it all into one class and made you put it on display. That was one of my most interactive classes, but he made it fun.”
Mullins said he spent long nights emailing and texting Haas before that presentation, as he was determined to be the best version of himself. He also learned a lot from the associate professor about name, image, and likeness (NIL) and appreciated Haas’ input into that area of his future career.
Mullins takes everything he learns from one experience with him to the next, always learning and striving to excel. The future isn’t set in stone, but he knows there’s a wide-open world for him to discover.
“I’m still looking at all my opportunities right now. I’m looking at a plethora of different things, but I know whatever is next, God and my family will be with me and I’m going to continue to separate myself,” he said.