Alumni Profiles
UF Law tax seminar leads to ESPN career
Kristi Dosh (JD 07) calls her new sports reporting job for ESPN a dream come true.
And it’s a dream born in an unlikely place: a UF Law tax law seminar.
During her third year, Dosh decided to take a tax law seminar with UF Law Professor Emeritus David Richardson because the class meshed well with her schedule and involved a final paper rather than an exam. She knew nothing of tax law or the Internal Revenue Code.
But what she did know was baseball.
So Dosh approached Richardson with an “out-of-the-box” idea for a paper. She wanted to write about luxury taxes and revenue sharing in Major League Baseball.
To her surprise, Richardson agreed, and the paper was a grand slam. The University of Denver Sports & Entertainment Law Journal published the paper.
“Her paper was actually a remarkable explanation of very complicated rules and regulations,” Richardson said. “For a student to have that talent is memorable in and of itself.”
“That’s sort of where things changed for me,” Dosh said.
The academic paper led to an expanded version in a book deal. Balancing Baseball: How Collective Bargaining Has Changed the Major Leagues is set to be published late this year or in 2013.
Making her a “legitimate expert on collective bargaining,” as Dosh said, her book allowed her to begin working in May 2010 as a sports analyst for SportsMoney and Comcast.
And she did it while practicing affordable housing and finance law at several Atlanta firms.
Writing and providing TV commentary was just for fun, Dosh said.
And the burgeoning website she created, businessofcollegesports. com, to fill the gap in college sports business reporting? That was just for fun, too.
By the time her agent mentioned her name to ESPN, the global sports powerhouse was already well aware of Dosh.
As she adjusts to her ESPN career, Dosh is still thankful for her law degree. Without it, and maybe a wacky idea for a tax law paper, she wouldn’t be where she is today, she said.
—Jared Misner (4JM)
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