Hannah Valente L’22 is now one of the youngest people in the United States certified by the National Basketball Players Association to represent its members.
If you want to get a head start in a career representing professional athletes, there may be no better model to copy than Elon Law student Hannah Valente L’22.
Valente, 23, has set her sights on earning a law degree and advising basketball players ever since a high school back injury redirected her interests from competing on the court to the business of the game itself.
As of this month, the president of Elon Law’s Sports and Entertainment Law Society is a step closer to that goal.
Valente recently joined the ranks of player agents certified by the National Basketball Players Association, making the New Jersey native one of the youngest people in the nation allowed to represent athletes in NBA contract negotiations.
“Once I learned about the role of a sports agent, and what a ‘day in the life’ looked like, I was hooked,” said Valente, a graduate of Providence College in the Big East Conference where she was a manager for the Division One men’s basketball team.
Earning her player agent certification was no fait accompli. For the past few years, the National Basketball Players Association has required prospective agents to pass an exam that measures their knowledge of a complex collective bargaining agreement between the union and the league.
Valente spent her winter break studying for the January 2022 exam. She also consulted with Elon Law alumnus Jordan Thompson L’Dec.’17, an agent with Element Sports Group in Atlanta, who encouraged her to seek certification before graduation.
Had she waited, her desire to seek certification would have conflicted with plans to study for the bar exam. That’s no longer a concern.
“There’s a whole other side about the business of basketball that I never knew existed,” Valente said of her experience. “This process is a big financial investment, especially for someone just starting out.”
While the NBPA doesn’t release demographic information on its agents, a spokeswoman confirmed that about 750 people are certified to represent players, and that Valente is among the youngest in the nation.
Her success is no surprise to Frederick Agnostakis. The athletic director for Loyola School in New York City, where Valente attended high school and got her first taste of basketball management, praised his former student’s attention to detail and her conscientious approach to the game.
“Hannah had instinctive insight in analyzing basketball and took meticulous stats,” he said. “She made my coaching easier in terms of who should play and how the team should adjust at halftime. … She had total respect from the team and the coaching staff.”
Outside of her studies, Valente also contributes as an editor to Conduct Detrimental, a sporting news website and podcast.
Mindy Cyr, Elon Law’s director of academic success programs in the Office of Academic Success, praises Valente for her focus on a career goal and her willingness to mentor classmates as an Academic Fellow.
“She has a laser focus on what she wants to do, and her steps and choices to get to this point have been methodical,” Cyr said. “Hannah has that spark in her eye that shows her passion for this area of law, she’s great with time management, and now she’s helping her peers navigate their own first years. She’s just such a delightful person.”
Valente said she credits her success to many people in her life: her parents and two younger sisters, Agnostakis and Providence men’s basketball coach Ed Cooley, her professors, and the many women who broke down gender barriers in sports.
Next up? Valente will complete her Elon Law residency-in-practice this spring by working full time in the Athletics Compliance Office at High Point University where she will assist the university in “educating, developing policies and procedures, monitoring, and enforcing the rules and regulations of High Point University, the Big South Conference and the NCAA.”
Then she’ll turn her sights to graduation in December, the bar exam next February, and securing her first job in the legal profession – ideally, Valente said, with a sports agency where she’ll begin to build a client base of star NBA players.