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Olivia Nichols ’25 trekked more than 1,500 miles from her home state of Maine to go to college in a thriving sports metropolis.

Now a senior majoring in sport management, she has made a name for herself as the right-hand woman to the president of the Tampa Bay Sun FC, the city’s women’s professional soccer team.

Nichols, a soccer fan, established a working relationship with the team by volunteering at their promotional events, slowly making connections in all the right places.

Then, come last April, Nichols was in a time crunch. She needed a fall internship for her major, and fast.

Working up the guts, she cold-called the president of the “Sunchasers,” Christina Unkel, whom she’d not met in-person.

“I was lucky,” Nichols said, “because Unkel’s the type of person that (has) 1,000 emails, 300 text messages, that type of thing.”

The interview was like the negotiations Nichols wants to run as a future player agent or contract attorney.

After telling her now-boss about her aspirations in sports law, and her ideas about where she thought she could fit in on the team, they created a position just for her.

But there was another variable in Nichols’s internship: She wasn’t the only new kid on the block -- the club is in its first season, too.

So Nichols is not only learning about running a sports team, she’s learning how to make one from scratch. Nichols loves the “start-up business” feel, saying that there’s a lot of freedom in where she can take things.

“I have basically a front-row seat to the head of the team, in terms of the business side,” said Nichols.

As an executive assistant, Nichols directly helps with all the “ground-up” stuff like creating financial reports from scratch, looking at media impact, VIP lists and administrative duties for Unkel.

It’s part of a larger calling for Nichols: growing the game of women’s sports.

She said her work helps enable “hundreds of roster spots” for women to play professional soccer in the league.

“I think we're looking at the USL Super League as a way to break into the markets that aren't being utilized right now,” she said.

Nichols’ goal for the rest of season is to excite the hype for women’s sports in the Tampa Bay area. She’s looking forward to where the Sunchasers, the league and herself grow on and off the pitch.