WASHINGTON – Three former Hoya baseball players were named to the Sports Business Journal Forty Under 40 List as Tom Braun (B '05), Ted Oberwager (C '06) and Joseph Graziano III (C '07) all earned the honor. Braun earned the recognition in 2023 while Oberwager and Graziano were both tabbed in 2024. The trio were teammates during their time on the Hilltop and now all three have found themselves on the SBJ list.
Braun is currently the Senior Vice President, Soccer and Business Operations and Business Development, AEG Sports/LA Galaxy after being a 30th-round draft pick in the 2001 MLB Amateur Draft out of high school. Over the past two years, Braun has spearheaded the creation and growth of several ambitious event properties. The Coachella Valley Invitational, a spring training-style preseason competition for clubs at the AEG-operated Empire Polo Club (home of the Coachella music festival), has already become a
marquee event on the league's annual calendar after just two iterations. The first edition of the Soccer Champions Tour, a series of matches across the U.S. featuring top foreign clubs, sold more than 283,000 tickets last summer and led to a partnership with Sixth Street Partners that will see the scope of the event expand.
Oberwager is currently a partner at KKR & Co. A Philadelphia native who briefly played baseball at Georgetown, Oberwager joined KKR in 2008 and, aside from a break to acquire an MBA from Harvard Business School, has been there ever since. He's responsible for ensuring KKR's private equity arm is involved with some of the industry's biggest deals, beginning with a 2014 investment in FanDuel. "If we do our job right, we can get there a step before the next firm, whether that's in sports betting, emerging amateur sports, or working with Skydance and the content that surrounds what happens on the field," Oberwager said. Perhaps most notably, Oberwager oversaw KKR's 2016 investment alongside Endeavor and Silver Lake; the $4 billion deal was then a record valuation for a sports transaction. Oberwager said he's currently keeping a close eye on league-level media rights deals and the explosive growth in women's sports, but he's casting a broad net for KKR's future sports investments.
Graziano currently serves as the Senior Vice President, head of Global Event Strategy and Development at the National Basketball Association. Graziano, a Rhodes Scholar finalist out of Georgetown and the first Graziano to go to college, got offered a job at the NBA. He immediately flew to Mumbai, as the league brought the first pro sports event to India (a 2019 Pacers-Kings game) in an arena just for kids. Graziano has helped build NBA Experiences, NBA Con and the All-Star Game. His signature moment was probably the pandemic of 2020. "I was fortunate to be one of the small [group of] people that were told to figure out how to bring the league back, meeting every single day for 18 hours," he said. Graziano had to create "the bubble." He was the first to Orlando and the last to leave, while staying in touch with epidemiologists, health experts, caterers and anything it took to create an impromptu city.
Editor's Note: Following publication of the list, Tom Oberwager was promoted to President of Business Operations & Chief Operating Officer of the LA Galaxy
