By Sam Adams
Rico Cabrera â97 likes helping people get better.
That basic concept, a guiding idea for his career, has done little to narrow his field of specialty. A self-described “management consultant,” Cabrera has worked with underground musicians, started a college basketball summer league and launched a major channel on a social networking site. He has focused on using new technologies in the pursuit of exposing his clients to the world.
One of Cabreraâs most recent ventures is “Ricoâs Get Better League.” Cabrera directed this NCAA-sanctioned college basketball summer league, and has eight teams made up of college players, Playing in the league this past year were former Wolverine basketball players Zane Ma â08, John Sebastian â07, and Jon Jaques â06.
Cabrera recently signed a deal with LiveVideo, a hybrid multimedia and social networking site, to post games on their website on a “Get Better” channel devoted to the league.
Cabrera can trace his path towards management all the way back to elementary school. He attended the Los Angeles Open Charter School, where students are drawn from diverse backgrounds and a focus is placed on technology.
“Being drilled and taught to use it at a very high level at a young age completely changed my mind set, and so I saw technology as a language,” Cabrera said.
He continued along this career path as a student at Harvard-Westlake, where he was a member of the varsity basketball teams that won back-to-back state championships in 1996 and 1997.
After Harvard-Westlake, Cabrera spent a postgraduate year at Worcester Academy, and then graduated from Colgate University, where he spent nearly two years on the basketball team.
The reason he is able to succeed in the field of management, Cabrera believes, is because he can connect with people quickly.
Cabrera had owned an internet management company, but when the dot-com bubble burst, he moved towards the field of personal management, including the fields of coaching, talent management and music. Though these fields may seem very different, they appear quite similar to Cabrera.
“The personalities in these fields are pretty similar,” he said. All sorts of media are becoming more integrated.”
And that, at its core, is what Cabrera does. He stands at the crossroads between sports and music, between traditional television and web media. No matter the format, if Cabrera can help someone get better, thatâs exactly what heâll do.
