Craig Esherick

Craig Esherick is an Associate Professor in the Sport Management program at George Mason University, where the 2020 Fall Semester will be his thirteenth year. He is the Associate Director of the Center for Sport Management, the Academic Program Coordinator for the Sport Management program and also the Internship Coordinator.

Professor Esherick was a scholarship basketball player at Georgetown University while earning an undergraduate finance degree from the business school.

He attended the Georgetown University Law Center and was a graduate assistant basketball coach for two of those years. After graduating from law school and passing the DC Bar Exam, Professor Esherick became a full-time assistant coach at Georgetown for the men’s basketball team. His tenure as an assistant lasted 17 and a half years and included a stint as the assistant basketball coach for the USA Olympic Team that won a bronze medal in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. He became the head basketball coach in 1999 at Georgetown University and held that position long enough to win 103 games. He worked briefly for AOL’s new online radio venture from 2004 until 2005, where he commented on-air about college basketball news and wrote articles for the AOL Sports website. Craig took a job with a startup television network in New York in May of 2005; that network, CSTV, has now become CBS College Sports. Esherick came to Mason from NYU, where he taught in their Graduate Sports Management program for two years.

Craig has written or edited several books, articles and book reviews on a variety of topics in the sports industry. These works can be found in the History of Sport Encyclopedia, Sports Management and Marketing Encyclopedia, Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics, History and Sport, Leadership in Sport, Cultures of Peace, The Journal of Sport for Development and the International Journal of Sport Management and Marketing. Esherick’s book titles include the third, fourth and fifth editions of Media Relations in Sport, Case Studies in Sport Diplomacy and Fundamentals of Sport Management.

Esherick has served on several Arlington and Fairfax County, Virginia boards and committees. He has worked with the US Department of State on many grants and sport diplomacy projects from 2009 to 2019. Craig provides expert commentary for news outlets, television and radio during college basketball season, primarily working for the Mid Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), Learfield and the Stadium/Sinclair network.