Elevate Acquires College-Focused Search Firm Bowlsby Sports Advisors

Elevate announced Thursday that it has acquired Bowlsby Sports Advisors, the five-year-old search firm run by Kyle Bowlsby, son of the former Big 12 commissioner.

The acquisition was completed in November, according to the companies, and brings Bowlsby’s firm under the Elevate corporate umbrella and branding.

As part of the deal, Kyle Bowlsby assumes the title of senior partner for Elevate. The announcement comes almost a year after the company launched its hiring division, Elevate Talent, with the acquisition of U.K.-based executive search firm SRI.

Founded in 2019, Bowlsby Sports Advisors has been a smaller competitor in the college sports headhunting market dominated by firms like TurnkeyZRG, Parker Executive Search and DHR International. Bowlsby, however, has developed a niche by working with non-Power 4 schools or finding candidates for less high-profile (and lower-paying) athletic department roles.

According to public records, over the past year Bowlsby conducted a $10,000 search for Robert Morris’ senior women’s administrator; a $30,000 search for the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s CEO; and strategic plans for the athletic departments of Incarnate Word ($20,000) and Azusa Pacific ($65,000).

Nevertheless, Elevate presents its purchase of Bowlsby as a strategic move to vie for the biggest projects in the intercollegiate space.

“We don’t take an acquisition lightly,” Jonathan Marks, chief business officer of Elevate Campus, said in an embargoed Zoom interview earlier this week. “We are making this acquisition to build the best collegiate search agency in the world. We know it is going to take time.”

Elevate was launched in 2018 as a partnership between the San Francisco 49ers, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment and CAA; its current investor group now includes Arctos and Velocity Capital Management. In addition to its clients in pro sports, the consultancy also boasts relationships with more than 70 athletic departments as well as two Division I conferences–the Big East and ACC– providing them advisory services that range from ticketing to “experiential design.”

Kyle Bowlsby said his father, Bob, who resigned as Big 12 commissioner in April 2022 and recently served as vice president of his son’s firm, will not join Elevate as part of the acquisition. However, Bowlsby Sports Advisors’ other VP, Kaity McKittrick, is making the jump.

After leaving the Big 12, the elder Bowlsby served a six-month stint as interim athletic director at Northern Iowa, which simultaneously engaged Kyle Bowlsby in a $45,000 contract to find a permanent replacement.

Prior to launching Bowlsby Sports Advisors, the younger Bowlsby spent four years at Korn Ferry, where he handled searches for pro and college sports clients. Bowlsby said working at Elevate will only fatten his rolodex, allowing him to pitch schools on a wider, more diverse range of prospective candidates.

“If you look at Elevate’s front office, it’s made of an elite group of individuals that works all around the sports business,” he said over Zoom. “If a college client wants to go outside the box, we can do that, and if they want to go more traditional, we can.”

Kyle Bowlsby stated that he will continue to pursue the kinds of lower-profile projects that built his business, while increasingly seeking out opportunities to compete with the industry’s big dogs for the “high-level searches.”

“I think it is a mix of both,” he said. “We want to continue to be at the ground level of search business, because that is how you get to know the next wave of talent.”

Bowlsby continued: “The college leader space has a pressing need for elite talent given the rapid changes in the industry. So when I look at Elevate, they are positioned at the forefront of revenue generation, and that offers us a unique advantage.”

With athletic directors increasingly consumed by revenue generation, schools are relying more and more on outside firms to help fill holes up and down their staff directories, from Olympic sports coaches to even more esoteric positions. For example, Bowlsby notes he was recently commissioned by William & Mary to assist in the hiring of its athletic department’s director of mental health and performance—an emerging focus in college athletics.

(This story has been updated in the first paragraph to accurately reflect Elevate’s name. This story has also been updated in the eighth paragraph to clarify its current investment group.)