John Sponsler (’99) grew up wanting to play second base for the Texas Rangers. As he got older and realized his athletic talent wasn't going to take him to the pros, Sponsler pivoted to pursue a career in broadcasting that would keep him close to sports.

He majored in broadcast journalism and covered events for the NT Daily and KNTU. That’s where he fell in love with the behind-the-scenes work of sports coverage.

Sponsler became a production intern for the Dallas Stars the season after they won the Stanley Cup in 1999. After graduation, he went to work at Sportsradio 1310 The Ticket full time but continued to work for the team on a contractual basis for a few years before he was hired on full time as the associate producer. That role afforded him the opportunity to travel with the team for more than 20 years of game broadcasts until this year. Now, because of advancements in technology, Stars productions for road games are called “cloud productions.” He and several other crew members monitor the away games from a remote studio in Frisco and work every home game in the bowels of the American Airlines Center.

He now oversees both the television and radio broadcasts for Stars games, working closely with on-air talent and the crew in the production truck. Over the years, he’s also been given opportunities to do freelance work covering six Olympic Games since the 2014 Games in Sochi, Russia — gymnastics in the summer and snowboarding in the winter. The homegrown kid from The Colony also has had the chance to work Rangers and Dallas Mavericks games, as well as other sports at the high school, collegiate and pro levels. The work certainly keeps Sponsler busy, but he doesn’t mind.

“I view it as an activity with a paycheck. I don't really have a job,” Sponsler says. “I know that sounds kind of weird to say, but I truly love coming to work every day and I don't view it as a grind or a hard job. It's a very fun job. Every game offers something different.”

Jessica Nemergut (’01) is responsible for the employee experience at the Stars.

“That runs the gamut,” Nemergut says. “Everything from the corporate culture to office aesthetics to health benefits to employee morale events to performance management. People and culture is a consolidation of all of that. It all wraps up into one employee experience.”

Nemergut has had a winding career path that’s seen her work in retail, marketing and mental health after getting her master’s in family therapy from Texas Woman’s University.

She joined the Dallas Stars as a business operations assistant in 2016 and moved over to human resources in 2018. She sees her position with the Stars as the perfect way to put all of her experiences to good use.

“I know a little bit about a lot of things. This is kind of the culmination of all of my different administrative, psychological and organizational experiences,” Nemergut says.

She maintains deep connections to UNT, working closely with Bob Heere and the sport entertainment management program in the G. Brint Ryan College of Business. She has spoken to classes about how to get a job or internship, the realities of managing a workforce and what it’s like to work in sports. She also has collaborated on class projects and brought in UNT students to fill internships, some of which have evolved into full-time employment.

And she’s now a UNT parent. She and her husband, Jerid (’04), are the parents of a freshman majoring in music education.

“We were just so thrilled that she chose UNT, not only because we went there, but because it's such a great music school.”

Jordan Foreman (’07) has known he wanted to work in sports since he was 12 years old. That summer his family took a tour of Fenway Park in Boston and he fell in love in the press box.

“‘People get to sit here with this view and write about baseball? And they get paid to do that? I want to do that.’ And from then on, I wanted to be a sportswriter.”

As a transfer student, Foreman landed a job shooting video for the UNT athletics department before he even had his first class. He found the email for video coordinator Rex Proctor and offered to volunteer — right when there was a job opening that day. He shot football practice the week before classes started.

“Now we're 23 years later — just cold emailing a random person led to a career.”

After graduation, Foreman briefly worked for Louisiana Tech before returning to UNT in 2009. He left to work for Conference USA in 2014 before joining the Stars in 2021.

Foreman oversees all video production for the hockey club, everything from hype videos that play in the arena to behind-the-scenes social content to online post-game recaps. His love of hockey started with a simple quack.

“I was in that generation growing up in the mid- to late-’90s where, after The Mighty Ducks came out, every little town in the South that had a 5,000-seat arena wound up with a minor league hockey team,” Foreman says. “I worked for a minor league hockey team in my hometown my senior year of high school doing on-ice promotions. I always loved hockey. I never thought I would work in hockey all these years later, but here I am!”

Alicia Sidey (’12) has always felt at home on the ice, having grown up as a competitive figure skater. She originally came to UNT to study journalism and worked for the NT Daily before changing her major to strategic communications with an advertising focus.

Sidey first attempted to work for the Stars while she was a student at UNT, interviewing for a job in ticket sales. She didn’t get the job and ended up working as an insurance claims adjuster after graduation.

Sidey finally got her skate in the door in 2017 when she joined the Dallas Stars Ice Girls — the team that helps keep the playing surface clear of snow during TV timeouts, performs dances during intermissions and makes appearances at community events.

Two years into her tenure as an Ice Girl, she landed a job as merchandise coordinator, and she was recently promoted to assistant general manager over ice sports at the new Children’s Health StarCenter Multisport facility in Northlake. She’ll help oversee day-to-day operations of the facility and ensure every guest has a great experience, among other duties.

“The most exciting parts of this position is that I am back on the ice,” Sidey says. “I’m directly responsible for overseeing the ice programming, instruction and staff development. Being trusted to guide skaters at every level and shape their on‑ice experience is incredibly fulfilling for me.”

Although she hung up her Ice Girl skates in 2023, one of her fondest memories is when the team hosted the NHL’s annual outdoor Winter Classic at the Cotton Bowl in 2020.

“Being a part of the Winter Classic was a highlight for sure. Getting to be at the Cotton Bowl and skate outdoors, that's like a dream come true.”

Jonathan Maniet (’18) started at UNT as a new media art major with dreams of working in movie animation. Halfway through his sophomore year, he switched to converged broadcast media, a decision informed by memories of attending Stars games with his brothers.

“Seeing the Stars arena show is really what made me want to do this just because of the amount of fun that you have in the arena,” Maniet says. “How cool would it be to make the intro videos for the team skating out or looking down on the ice calling the shots, directing the game?”

And now he does just that. His office hours consist mostly of video content creation, working with the team’s sponsorship and marketing departments to make sure all the content is created for each game.

A typical gameday for Maniet starts around 9 a.m., when he heads to the Stars’ corporate offices in Frisco to print game scripts and load the video board content his team creates onto hard drives. By noon, he’s at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, loading the content and building out the show on the arena’s video playback system. Around 2:30 p.m., the production crew runs through a rehearsal of all the hype animations, sponsorship ads and highlight videos that will play throughout the game. From puck drop through the end of the game, Maniet is either assisting in the control room or occasionally directing the game, making sure the script plays out as planned on the arena’s video boards. After the final whistle, he packs up the hard drives and helps clean up the control room to make sure it’s ready for the next event on the AAC’s calendar.

It can be an exhausting schedule, but Maniet says it’s worth it to give fans the same joy he got from going to Stars games with his brothers.

“You want to make sure you give the fans the best experience that you can.”

Rylee Sepulveda (’22, ’24 M.B.A.) played “every sport” growing up and knew she wanted a career in sports from an early age. A social media ad for the sport entertainment management program sparked her interest in UNT.

She cultivated a broad array of sports industry experience through internships and part-time jobs with the Denton Diablos, FC Dallas and the Cowboys — in merchandising, partnership marketing, fan engagement and more.

She was open to any avenue of working in sports, but got her first taste of charitable work with a full-time job with FC Dallas in 2023. Sepulveda joined the Stars Foundation in the fall of 2024 and now hopes to further her career in foundation work.

She supports the foundation’s fundraising events, like the Stars’ annual Casino Night, Hall of Fame Gala and Golf Tournament. She also coordinates donations of tickets and merchandise to other nonprofits in the area.

One of her proudest accomplishments is helping coordinate the Texas Sports for Healing Fund auction that brought together 39 local and national professional sports organizations to raise over $100,000 for victims of last summer’s devastating flood in the Texas Hill Country. She says giving back is the best part of the job.

“I'm very blessed to be able to say I get paid to do great things out in the community. My favorite thing that's very rewarding is our Military Salute program. At a few games a season we honor a local veteran. The most rewarding part is, when they do a live hit (showing the person on the video board), the whole arena stands up and cheers. It’s one of my favorite programs that I work on, because when that whole crowd is cheering for that veteran, it's pretty surreal.”