Ben Magnotta, a 21-year-old Abington Heights graduate, has landed a position in Ivy League sports, working at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire.
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Ben Magnotta’s varied work experience in sports has landed the 2023 Abington Heights graduate in the athletic department at Dartmouth University as Event Management and Operations Coordinator.
Magnotta began his new position at the Ivy League school in New Hampshire in August.
The recent Ithaca College graduate left his mark on Abington Heights sports, working with the school’s sports teams along with gaining experience in local media while still an underclassman in high school.
Combining freelance media work, internships and his own entrepreneurial efforts, Magnotta has quickly built a wide base of event and production-related skills. He has also aggressively pursued opportunities that led to him gaining experience in college athletics while filling various roles at Cornell, Duke, Maryland, North Carolina, Penn and Syracuse.
Magnotta’s journey started during the COVID era when Abington Heights and other schools were seeking ways to continue sporting events without encouraging large crowds.
“In the beginning of high school, I was into the TV producing studio side and when the pandemic hit, we started broadcasting events for the school,” Magnotta said. “I took a lead when we had to livestream the games with the previous AD, Randy Hanyon. In that capacity, I started filling in some on game operations.”
Magnotta started doing some of his own sports coverage on social media and parlayed that into working with local media outlets, including steady assignments with NEPAFootball.com and the now-defunct NEPASportsNation.com.
When Enrico Mastroianni replaced Hanyon as athletic director, Magnotta worked with him on expanding the Abington Heights athletic department’s presence on social media.
That developed into a practicum where Magnotta spent class time working with the athletic director in a scenario that is now offered to select other students.
“I really just became attached to it with the start of the pandemic from broadcasting and helping out the AD,” he said. “I wanted to learn more about how operations went. That’s really where I found my niche of coordinating all the elements involved.”
Magnotta pushed the limits of his available time, combining those interests with a dual enrollment at Lackawanna College, allowing him to use Advancement Placement classes at school and his strong academic performance to get a head start on college credits.
The result was Magnotta earning his degree in under three years, spending only four semesters on campus at Ithaca.
Early in his college days, Magnotta landed a role in fan services at the Super Bowl in Las Vegas. And, he kept finding ways to get assignments at various NCAA Division I events.
“I leveraged a lot of internships at different places to keep building my resume and trying to get higher-level experience, such as Cornell bringing me back, and that translated to working at Duke last spring,” Magnotta said.
As an intern at Duke in the first half of his year, Magnotta worked with athletic facilities, game operations and championship events. He coordinated band and cheer logistics for the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament; served as lead liaison for umpire hospitality during the NCAA Softball Durham Regional; and led student-athlete and team hospitality for NCAA Baseball Regional and Super Regional tournament operations at North Carolina.
Along the way, he created Magnotta Media LLC, which operated four social media sports-news outlets. Magnotta, who has since sold his interests in NEPA Hoops, used his sites, which included nepalacrosse.com and palaxnews.com, to create and promote high school all-star games in basketball and lacrosse.
From his various endeavors, Magnotta has emerged a wide range of knowledge and skills in the cross section of event management and social media, creating more possibilities for the future in a constantly changing sports landscape.
Magnotta said he “aspires to keep building this base of knowledge” with his goals including working with facilities and logistics of higher-level championship events in Division I college sports.
