Nearly three decades ago, two men who were already well on their way to becoming legends in the sport and entertainment management industry met while serving as lecturers at the International Association of Venue Managers school in West Virginia. Neither could know that their meeting was the first step toward a relationship that has created (and is still creating) career-defining opportunities for hundreds of students in the University of South Carolina’s David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management.

“Frank and I formed an early bond and mateship. Some years later he became a professor at USC. The rest is history," Craig Lovett recalls.

“Frank” was Frank Roach, who would later serve for 12 years as a senior lecturer in the David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management. 

Lovett would go on to serve in prominent roles for multiple Olympic Games before co-founding Incognitus, a global integrated event management company based in Australia that that has worked on events including seven Olympic Games, five Commonwealth Games, hundreds of Premier League and UEFA football events, more than 40 grand slam tennis tournaments, dozens of F1 grand prix races and countless others.

In 2006 Roach and David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management Internship Director Steve Taylor visited Australia together. That trip was Taylor’s first meeting with Lovett, and since then Lovett has offered world-class opportunities for students in the department. Gamecock sport and entertainment management majors have worked under Lovett at numerous events in the U.S. and abroad.

“It is hard to quantify how important Craig, and his organizations, have been to our program and the students. The experiences provided are real world and he, and Incognitus, trust the students to fulfill an important role,” Taylor says. “He doesn’t just speak to the importance of helping the next generation, he has lived it for as long as I have known him. I would not be the educator, or person, I am without Craig Lovett and the experiences he has shared with our students.”

Lovett says the more than 300 USC sport and entertainment management students he has hired as interns have been a benefit to Incognitus, but for him the focus is on helping them.

“For me the desire was to take students deep into real events and expose them to the ‘toil, pressures and wriggers’ of an industry that consumes those that work within,” he says. “Many have gone on to work with us in deployment, most some years after their internship period.”

There are, however, some who go on more quickly to full-time postgrad roles. Two sport and management students interned with Incognitus in Sydney for three months during the Spring 2026 semester. For sophomore Olivia Hardy, it was the latest proof of the doors open from Day One for students in her major. For senior Maddie Webster, it was the beginning of her career, as she has accepted an offer to return to Australia and work for the company full-time.

Webster is a native of Columbia, and as a high school student she was hesitant to choose her hometown university.

“I always knew I wanted to live outside of South Carolina. I love this place so much, but I know that there are so many other opportunities out there,” she says. “But then my mom took me to tour USC’s College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management. I connected with [HRSM Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management] Collin Crick, and one thing he told me that I've kind of held on to is ‘You're going to school in your hometown, but there are so many opportunities that we offer all over the world.’”

Webster has made the most of those opportunities. In her four years at USC, she worked at the 2023 PGA Championship, spent two seasons working with the Carolina Panthers and studied abroad in Brisbane for a semester before returning to Australia this year.

Hardy has wasted no time taking advantage of all the David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management has to offer. With her sophomore year just completed, she has already worked a PGA Championship, a Senior PGA Championship and Savannah Bananas games at large stadiums in South Carolina and Washington, D.C. as well as completing a summer internship with a wedding planning company.

A three-month trip to Australia was not on her radar, and while Webster had loved her study abroad experience there, she did not expect to return so soon. That all changed thanks to simple chats with faculty.

Hardy went to Steve Taylor’s office during the Fall 2025 semester to tell him she was interested in completing her 295 (the first of two internships required for sport and entertainment management students) in Spring 2026.

“I gave him what I was interested in doing with events and he said ‘Okay, like how about this opportunity to go to Australia?’ I was like, whoa, not expecting you to say that. But then I got in touch with the intern that did it last year, Myrtle Yates, and she told me all about her time with Incognitus. I wasn't necessarily planning to go abroad by sophomore year, but the chance came up and I couldn't say no and I'm so thankful I didn't.”

Around the same time, Webster saw the Australia opportunity come through via the daily emails Taylor sends all students in the department. She did not immediately apply, with her focus at the time on life after graduation.

“I was trying to figure out what my next steps were. I was in Professor Matt Dunn's office weekly talking about my career plans and he said ‘Hey, what about this opportunity in Australia?’ It seemed like a great opportunity. I thought, ‘I can go back to Australia, which I love that place so much, and it's only going to be for three months. I'll come back home and figure it out from there,’” she recalls, laughing as she now knows what she didn't know then: that it would turn to much more than three months.

Hardy and Webster were hired primarily to help Incognitus run the Sydney Royal Easter Show, the largest agricultural show and largest ticketed event in the Southern Hemisphere and one of Australia’s most iconic events.

“It’s like a state fair on a much larger scale,” Hardy says of the two-week show, which drew more than 800,000 people this year, “They have animals. They have two different carnivals. There's a bunch of food vendors, live music. They had everything.”

“Part of Incognitus’ role is they go in and they build almost everything. They get it to a point. that makes the show look like what it is when the customers arrive,” Webster explains. “We started out doing a lot of logistics planning. When I arrived on day one to the site, there was almost nothing there.”

Both were given a great deal of responsibility, with duties including recruiting and staffing, financial reporting and analysis, working with vendors, booking, on-site operations and much more.

“They didn't treat us like ‘just interns.’ We truly felt that we were employees of the company, which made us want to work even harder and do even better than if we just got thrown kind of a bunch of side work or ‘intern work,’” Hardy says. “My manager, Megan Clery, played a significant role in my experience in Australia. She was not just my manager, she was my role model, mentor, and quickly became a friend. Megan constantly challenged me and my learning, but there was never a time where I was not supported by her.”

Lovett says that way of treating interns is not an accident, but a core philosophy for him and his company, one he encourages other leaders to follow.

“Be prepared to invest the time to ensure that the students' learning is real and effective, and not just paper pushing or coffee making. Amending these kids into the industry will stay with them forever, so don’t make it a time wasting exercise. Treat them as valuable team members. Show them the full experience,” he says.

Both Hardy and Webster were able to put into practice the central tenet of a David and Nicole Tepper Department of Sport and Entertainment Management education: take lessons learned in the classroom and put them to practical use at the highest levels of the industry.

“A big aspect of my deployment which directly ties to my studies here was a lot of financial reporting, looking at the day-to-day financials and analyzing where we were spending money and where we could be saving. I realized like that's definitely something I want to continue throughout my career,” Webster says. “All the accounting and all the finance classes can be difficult at times, but they were so fundamental in me being able to be successful in my internship, being able to have that prior knowledge of what balance sheets looked like and how to analyze them. It was so incredibly helpful for me.”

Both Hardy and Webster made a great impression with the Incognitus team. For Hardy, it laid the foundation for future success. For Webster, with graduation on the horizon, the impact was more immediate than she ever expected.

“Maddie was well prepared before her arrival. Through the onboarding processes, discussions and interviews that we went through with Steve Taylor, her expectations were set. On arrival at the event, she was excited and enthusiastic and ready for the challenges of an eight-week deployment. Maddie was one of those stand outs that we see from time to time, prepared to stretch herself as this industry demands of those that really want it,” Lovett says.

Lovett is not one to let a star get away. He and his team approached Webster two months into her internship to discuss the possibility of her staying on after graduation and what her next year with Incognitus would look like.

“It definitely was a difficult decision for me. My entire life has been here in Columbia. Just about every single person I knew was from here and so to go to the other side of the world was a lot to think about,” she says. “But then I thought about the past months and everything that Incognitus has done for me and how they've really prepared me and given me all the tools to be successful, and so I decided to do it. This is just such an amazing opportunity and I'm so excited to see where this will take me.”

Webster and Hardy are not the first USC sport and entertainment management students to gain experience and find success through the partnership with Incognitus, and they will not be the last.

“Students who have been fortunate to work with Craig’s organizations over the years have gone on to be very successful in their careers (much more than the average student) and he continues these relationships long after the students leave,” Taylor says.