Dream president Morgan Shaw Parker blazing path for women in sports careers

Atlanta Dream president and COO Morgan Shaw Parker is all about figuring it out.

Over the last six years, she’s helped the Dream maximize their reach in the community as the team has evolved.

With the help of her staff, Shaw Parker has worked out how to parlay the team’s on-court success into advancing the franchise as a whole. On the court, the Dream finished third at the end of the regular season before a surprising first-round exit in the WNBA playoffs. But Shaw Parker and her team flipped that into selling out the team’s half- and full-season tickets.

It’s the third consecutive season the Dream has sold out theirticket memberships.

For Shaw Parker, building Dream games into a premium experience for the team’s fans and Atlanta residents has come down to relying on the people she surrounds herself with.

“I’ll take a lesson that I learned from a pastor friend of mine. He said, ‘Be quick to listen and slow to speak,’” Shaw Parker told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And it is really something that has guided me.”

Shaw Parker, the oldest of five children, has had many similar lessons over the years that have aided her ascent as a woman in sports leadership.

Some of those began as a student at Cottey College, a private women’s college in Nevada, Missouri, where she said she helped to launch the school’s volleyball program.

The school did not have an athletics department when she attended, and that didn’t sit right with Shaw Parker, who played volleyball since the age of 9.

“So a couple of us in college just decided that we were going to figure it out ourselves, not knowing the intricacies to actually start an athletics program,” Shaw Parker said.

“But I will tell you, Cottey College has a thriving athletics program that started from the two years that I was at the school with volleyball being the first sport, which was exciting.”

Shaw Parker took that knowledge with her when she transferred to the University of Nebraska. That’s where she began to figure out what her future looked like when she began a marketing internship with the school’s athletic department. There, she helped with the marketing and promotion of 24 sports.

Her experience in helping to start the volleyball program at Cottey fostered the curiosity that drove her at Nebraska and the other stops she made in her career.

“What you’ll find about me is that when I was young, I always walked down the hall and wanted to learn what other people were doing,” she said. “Whether that was at the Kansas City Chiefs — I was a PR manager at the time, and I walked down the hall, and I wanted to learn about sales, and I wanted to learn about ticket sales. I wanted to learn about partnerships. I wanted to learn about broadcasting. And lo and behold, I actually got to learn how to cut tape in my spare time and how to be a broadcaster and a storyteller.”

Shaw Parker had no aspirations to become a broadcaster, but she wanted to take a holistic approach to developing her career.

After five years with the Chiefs, Shaw Parker moved to Nike as a media relations manager in 2005. She then worked her way up to director of North America communications by 2009.

In 2016, Shaw Parker returned to the NFL, becoming the Falcons’ vice president of football communications. That job quickly became vice president of the Arthur M. Blank Sports and Entertainment Media Group.

By the end of her tenure with the Falcons, Shaw Parker worked her way to chief marketing officer.

At every step along the way, Shaw Parker said she had a growth mindset, which she still has. She understands that as she progresses through her career, she will have moments of failure.

“But you’ve got to fail forward,” Shaw Parker said. “And you’ve got to be able to put those pieces together and figure out, ‘What did you do wrong? How did you learn, and how did you move forward?’ And, frankly, I think that’s been my mantra and my mindset throughout my entire career, is you’ve always got to be a student of the game.”

That’s why she builds her teams with diverse voices and perspectives, so that she never stops figuring it out.

It’s also why she looks to pass those lessons along to the next generation of women working in sports.