Brian BelardiAt Honda Center, between periods of an Anaheim Ducks game, a sponsorship runs on the boards, negotiated by Lauren Fitzpatrick (J.D. ’18), the team’s senior vice president and general counsel. Nearby, an Angels radio call carries a Chapman alum’s voice. Farther up the coast, a Dodgers call does the same from Los Angeles. And clear across the country, so does a Brewers call from Milwaukee.
Each of them worked inside sports as a student — at a symposium, on a broadcast, at a radio desk. The skills they honed at Chapman, and the network of connections they built, helped prepare them for careers in the pros.
Counsel On Ice
Fitzpatrick arrived at Chapman’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law without a clear plan for practicing law. A contracts course changed that. Beyond the classroom, she found something at Fowler Law harder to put on a resume: access.
She co-chaired the Sports and Entertainment Law Symposium during her 2L and 3L years with Matt Parlow, then dean of the law school and now Chapman’s 14th president. Parlow brought a background in sports law and built the symposium into a point of connection between students, athletes, and practitioners working in sports. One of the panelists Fitzpatrick met was the general counsel of The Players Tribune, a media company that posts athlete- written content. By her third year, Fitzpatrick secured an internship with that general counsel. That internship put her on her current path.
Sports law was historically an afterthought, “a little bit of the wild, wild West,” Fitzpatrick said. Today, legal counsel is increasingly brought into decisions before they are made, a shift reflected in Fitzpatrick’s role with the Ducks. She is involved in marketing pitches, sponsorship ideas, and hockey operations matters from the start.
Fitzpatrick grew up in Orange County. Her parents had Ducks season tickets from the franchise’s 1993 opening season. Now she is in the building for every home game, and somewhere on the boards between periods, a sponsorship she negotiated runs. “It’s cool to be able to say, ‘I worked on that’ — to see it all in real life,” she said.
From The Diamond To The Booth
Jeff Levering ’05 came to Chapman as a baseball player — the designated hitter on the 2003 NCAA Division III national championship team — and left with a broadcast career taking shape. Chapman’s program gave him a willingness to do whatever the job required.
“I wrapped cables, edited tapes, and was a stage manager,” Levering said, “and those are the roles that helped me become the play-by-play broadcaster I am today. I know what it takes as a teammate to get things done on a production.”
Twenty years later, he is the lead play-by-play voice of the Milwaukee Brewers. His path ran through minor league stops in Rancho Cucamonga, Springfield, Missouri, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, before he reached the Brewers radio booth in 2015. Eventually he moved into the lead television chair in the early 2020s. He is the first Chapman alum to be a lead announcer in any of the Big Four professional leagues.
A Historic Call
Stephen Nelson ’11 directed sports coverage on Chapman’s campus radio station and served as public-address announcer for Chapman athletics before he graduated a semester early. The experience accumulated. By the time he left, he had called more games than most people his age had attempted.
The career that followed took him through Bleacher Report, the Chicago Blackhawks, and Apple TV’s Friday Night Baseball before the Dodgers hired him in early 2023. At the time, he became the only Asian American play-by-play announcer working for a Major League Baseball team. Nelson is a fourth-generation Japanese American. In October 2024, on AM 570, he called the title-clinching out of the World Series.“That’s it! That’s a World Series win for L.A.!”
This season Nelson is scheduled to call more than 50 Dodgers home and road games on TV for SportsNetLA.
The Halo Effect
As a student, Trent Rush ’14 produced a weekly sports show for KESQ-TV in Palm Springs — writing it, filming it, editing it, and anchoring it himself. It was unglamorous work, and it was exactly the kind of experience that shapes a broadcaster.
Today he is one of the play-by-play announcers for Los Angeles Angels, along with Wayne Randazzo. He’s in his first season in that role, after spending the previous 11 seasons hosting the Angels’ pregame and postgame show on their flagship station KLAA AM 830. He also hosts Under the Halo, the team’s official podcast. His portfolio runs wider than Anaheim, with 15 Opening Days with the San Diego Padres, Big West Conference athletics on ESPN3, and Fox college football broadcasts alongside former NFL defensive back Will Blackmon.
“What Chapman taught me is that the real stories come from talking to the players and coaches,” Rush said, “and building those relationships to find the stories no one else can tell.”
