BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — On Sunday, May 8, ESPN broadcast the 2022 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Women’s Water Polo Championship game pitting No. 1 Stanford University versus No. 2 the University of Southern California live from the University of Michigan’s Canham Natatorium.
An achievement for the sport? Yes. The lone water polo connection in the story? Hardly.
The man who made the decision to acquire broadcast rights for ESPN was Dan Margulis, the senior director of programming and acquisitions, who has a connection to the sport of water polo as he was a collegiate club athlete at Amherst College.
A 1992 graduate of Amherst with a degree in English, Margulis served as sports director of the school’s radio station, WAMH, where he also handled play-by-play for Amherst football and basketball, and hosted a Sunday night talk show. While at Amherst, he played water polo and was co-captain of the team. In 1993, he received his master’s degree in sports management from the University of Massachusetts.
As part of his role, Margulis oversees ESPN’s relationship with the NCAA, and managing negotiations for rights agreements and content acquisitions for college and high school sports programming across all ESPN linear and digital platforms. He leads strategy for college and high school sports content on ESPN’s direct-to-consumer platform, ESPN+, and manages scheduling for all high school sports, as well as ESPN’s NCAA coverage, both regular season and postseason.
He was elevated to his current role in 2017. Margulis has previously held the roles of senior director of content strategy and scheduling and senior director of college sports programming, overseeing the scheduling strategy for all studio and event programming associated with the launch of SEC Network, as well as more than 1,000 hours of original content and 800 events annually on ESPNU.
Margulis first joined ESPN as an intern in the programming department. In 1994, he was named programming associate and held various programming positions for the next five years. He moved to ABC Sports in 1999 to handle the broadcast schedules of college football, Little League, figure skating, the NHL and soccer as the director of sports programming.
From 2001 to 2003, Margulis worked as director of programming at the YES Network where he was instrumental in scheduling and developing original programming around the network’s launch. In 2003, he was hired by the National Football League’s NFL Network as director of programming and acquisitions from 2003-06 to assist in the launch of their new network and oversee the programming schedule. He returned to ESPN in 2006.
