Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

A group of LaGrange College sports management students got the trip of a lifetime over the summer. Professor Clay Bolton and members of the sports management class/club were treated to a royal hands-on education as they hit the British Isles for two weeks.

“It was a lot of planning and a lot of work to get it to come together,” Bolton said. 

The itinerary was a full slate. They packed a lot into those 12 days, from the British Open to Wimbledon and so much more.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip for them to be able to get a behind-the-scenes look at English rugby. We went toTwiggingham Stadium, which is the home of England’s Rugby League. The chance to go to Stanford Bridge and the home of Chelsea and their football club, and to learn about their history, to learn about what it’s like to experience the business side of soccer and rugby to you know, have a chance to visit some Olympic venues from the 2012 Olympics,” said Clay Bolton, professor of Sports Management at LaGrange College. 

It was a chance for the students to see a different side of sports and sporting culture. It was also a chance for these students to experience a new culture in general. 

“I was hesitant to go on this trip. I had never been overseas and I had no idea what to expect,” student Tayshawn Pendleton said. “Parker Lovett was instrumental in convincing me to go, and I am so glad I did. It was an experience of a lifetime.”

Lovett, a student at LaGrange College and the president of the Sports Management Club on campus was instrumental in the journey happening. From recruiting students to go, to giving them the confidence to get outside their comfort zone and of course, documenting the entire trip.

“’I’m currently the president of our sports management club, and so a lot of the planning was me and Dr. Bolton, and then, obviously the administration, but we had a lot of stuff planned out, Lovett said. Then, it felt like, as the trip went on, things just went better than expected every day.”

The students got the opportunity to experience such a wide variety of different sporting events that it was hard for everybody to quantify what the most memorable parts of the experience were. One of the experiences that was nearly unanimously praised was the fact that the class got to see Tiger Woods at the British Open. This was just the tip of the iceberg of what they got to experience.

“I got to check off three bucket list items on this trip that I honestly didn’t know if I would ever experience those in my lifetime, I’m 55 and have dreamed of going to Wimbledon since I was a kid and grew up as a junior tennis player,” Bolton said. 

“I have two favorite parts of the trip. Both are experiences that I will never forget,” student Jorge Fragoso Jr. said. “The first was watching England play in the Euro semi-finals. Some of us were able to go to a local pub in London and watch the game with some of the locals. England ended up winning the game and the place went crazy.”

“The other was an experience that I never thought I would have been able to go to,” Fragoso added. “One of the days we were able to get tickets to the Wimbledon championships. We ended up having tickets on the fourth row on Court 1.”

This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience for these individuals. Bolton hopes that in the coming years, they will have the funds to do another trip of this sort, but it is far from a guarantee.

“Our sports management club, in conjunction with our sports management program, is probably looking at maybe ‘26 or ‘27 maybe to go do something International again, not sure what that might be. It might be the Winter Olympics in Italy. It may be going to the Australian Open, the first tennis major of the year, down in down in Sydney,” Bolton said. “We don’t know yet, but these trips take a lot of planning.”

It was not all fun and games. It was a chance to go outside the boundaries of a classroom and get some real-world experience in the realm of sports.

“It was a chance for them to learn about sport and the business of sport, because, after all, that’s what this class is. It’s a sports management class. I’m a sports management professor, so this was a chance for them to learn about the passion in the industry and a different way of looking at sports in the US,” Bolton said. “This was a cultural sports trip, but it was also a behind-the-scenes look at sports.”

“A lot of us have just been sitting in classrooms in LaGrange, Georgia for two or three years, hearing about stadiums, hearing about international sports,” Lovett added. “Instead of just pictures and words in a book we got to actually go out there and experience it.”