After an injury derailed his dream of playing professional football, Keyavion Thurman (BA Business Administration ’28) is channeling his love of the game into a career in professional sports.
As a high school junior, Keyavion Thurman (BA Business Administration ’28) received a Division I football scholarship and dreamed of playing professionally. Then he tore his ACL.
The injury coincided with the start of the pandemic, which disrupted school sports during his senior year — a critical period for college football recruiting — and forced Thurman to reconsider his future.
“I knew that I wasn’t going to the NFL,” he says. “So, I thought, ‘Let me find something else I love.'”
For student-athletes who hope to compete professionally, letting go of that dream can make it difficult to imagine what comes next. Thurman, however, knew he wanted to remain in sports. He set a new goal: becoming a general manager in the NFL or NBA.
Football is, in Thurman’s words, the love of his life. But that wasn’t always the case.
“I was probably 8 years old when I told my mom I didn’t want to play football — I wanted to play basketball,” he says.
When his mother signed him up for football during one particularly long summer break, Thurman was initially upset.
“But I’m so glad she did because I grew to love the game,” he says.
Knowing that careers in professional sports are highly competitive, Thurman began building the connections and real-world experience he would need to reach his goal. He has since completed internships with the Milwaukee Bucks, Sports Business Ventures, Pro Athlete Community, the Nike Tournament of Champions, and, most recently, the Las Vegas Raiders.
As a community relations intern with the Raiders this summer, Thurman gained insight into an important but often overlooked side of the sports industry. The experience also strengthened his confidence that he belongs in professional sports.
“Working directly on community initiatives, youth football programs, player engagement events, and organizational projects helped me better understand the responsibilities and expectations of these roles,” Thurman says. “I feel more prepared and confident pursuing full-time opportunities with professional sports organizations.”
Thurman supported efforts benefiting the Las Vegas community, from responding to fan mail to helping package hundreds of thousands of meals for families in need. He also managed projects from beginning to end, including an initiative to assemble five gift kits valued at $1,300 for a local Henderson Police Department area command, and two personalized kits for a cadet and officer who were avid Raiders fans.
Along the way, Thurman connected with members of the team’s football operations staff to learn more about player scouting. He also sharpened his planning, coordination, and relationship-building skills and saw how even a relatively small departmental initiative could have a meaningful impact on fans and community members.
One of the biggest surprises for Thurman was how useful the skills he had learned in the classroom could be. In particular, the Excel knowledge he gained in CIS 105: Computer Applications and Information Technology proved invaluable.
Before his internship, Thurman had assumed he would never use many of the advanced Excel skills covered in the course, especially in the sports industry.
“I quickly learned how wrong I was after starting my internship with the Raiders,” Thurman says.
His most intensive project involved organizing, cataloging, and migrating thousands of community relations records from Excel to Salesforce.
His comfort working with those large amounts of information — and understanding how to organize the data — made the process significantly more manageable.
“It was one of those moments when I could directly see something I learned at ASU being applied in a professional sports environment,” he says.
Studying through ASU Online has allowed Thurman to earn his degree while pursuing career-building opportunities on his own schedule. Online learning has also helped him develop habits that served him well during his internship, including managing his workload, staying organized, working independently, and meeting deadlines.
“I was expected to take ownership of my responsibilities, manage multiple tasks, and make sure my work was completed accurately and on time,” he says. “In that sense, my experience as an ASU Online student helped prepare me for the independence and accountability expected in a professional sports environment.”
Thurman sees each internship as an important step toward a successful career in sports, not only because of the skills and invaluable experience he has gained but also because of the network of industry professionals he has built. His advice to other students is to put themselves out there, invest in relationships, and pursue opportunities even when they don’t feel completely ready.
He also encourages students to take every experience seriously, even when its relevance to their future isn’t immediately apparent.
“There are classes I’ve taken at ASU that I didn’t think I would ever use, only to find myself applying those skills in an NFL organization,” Thurman says. “My experiences with the Milwaukee Bucks and Las Vegas Raiders showed me that you don’t have to have everything figured out before taking the next step. Sometimes the experience itself is what gives you the confidence and clarity to figure out where you want to go next.”
