Jay Grider Author & Sports Event Executive
Jay Grider is COO and Special Advisor to the Nashville Sports Council and the Liberty Mutual Music City Bowl. Over a 38 year sports career he has helped recruit and stage more than 200 events, generating over $1.5 billion in economic impact for Nashville, Tennessee.
As Nashville Sports Council COO, Jay Grider has spent nearly three decades convincing rights-holders that a city they had never seriously considered could handle their event and their reputation. The NCAA, the SEC, the NFL, the NHL and U.S. Figure Skating have all said yes. Each one made the next conversation easier.
How did Jay Grider get into sports?
It started with rejection letters. After graduating from Middle Tennessee State University, Jay sent resumes across professional sports and collected refusals including one from Larry Schmittou that he brought to his interview with Bill MacKay at Joe Davis Stadium and used as a reference. MacKay hired him anyway. The job paid $1,000 a month and involved selling tickets, pulling tarp, calling sponsors and cleaning up afterward.
That is still the best training this industry offers, and it shaped the sports event management career that followed. Jay returned to Nashville in 1997, when the Sports Council’s mission was largely a sentence on paper. What came next is most of modern Nashville sports history: the first Music City Bowl in December 1998, played through an ice storm; the SEC Tournament arriving in 2001; the 2016 NHL All-Star Game; and the 2019 NFL Draft, which drew 600,000 people downtown and helped Sports Business Journal name Nashville the number one sports city in America.
Ask him about any of it and he will name someone else first Larry Schmittou, Bill MacKay, John Rocco, Scott Ramsey, Gary Alexander. As a Music City Bowl executive he spent thirty years being the person who made sure the event worked, not the person on camera. Last Call is the first time he has told the story himself.
NEW RELEASE BY JAY GRIDER
