Will McIntosh

One blessing in the career of Will McIntosh ’02 has been to work with sports and technology visionaries and then execute their imagined paths forward.

As he sees it, in quoting a proverb, "Vision without execution is hallucination,” meaning that it takes action to make a vision happen.

Carrying out those visions has helped McIntosh advance quickly during his 15 years inside Comcast and NBCUniversal. For the past two and a half years, he has served as president of NBC Sports Next & Fandango, leading the direct-to-customer digital businesses for Comcast’s sports and entertainment portfolio.

Currently residing in New Canaan, Connecticut, McIntosh fills his days with travel or online calls to employees who work in different time zones as far away as the United Kingdom and California.

“We’re the market leader in everything we do,” McIntosh said of his division that now has 1,700 employees and has services in 20 countries.

As Comcast prepares to spin off some of its sports, entertainment and news assets to become a new publicly traded company by year’s end, McIntosh is looking to create new partnerships. “Our businesses are expected to be a big growth driver in the new entity,” he said.

How it Began

Growing up in Cheraw, a town of some 4,000 people, McIntosh enjoyed visiting his older brother, Matt McIntosh `00, who majored in business at Winthrop. As the valedictorian of his high school class, McIntosh followed his brother to Winthrop and then their sister, Shelby McIntosh Garner `02 joined them.

Though he majored in business with an emphasis in financial management, McIntosh said that as a techie, he was drawn to computer information system courses. Those were the years when the internet was really taking off, and he used email for the first time in college.

McIntosh saw himself as an introvert and credits Winthrop in helping him learn to build meaningful relationships. “It forced me to become an extrovert,” he said as he took leadership roles in his fraternity, Pi Kappa Alpha. “The evolution of my personality and coming out of my shell helped me put myself out there and become a leader in a variety of ways.”

McIntosh met his wife, Hollis, at Clemson through a fraternity friend, also her brother, and he met one of his best friends, Todd Triplett ’02, who works with him as the leader of the golf division, GolfNow.

Making His Move

After graduation, McIntosh took a job with a family friend who understood that the internet would transform marketing for small- and medium-size companies. McIntosh called their company a digital agency where they helped hotels, golf courses and real estate companies embrace the internet for the first time by building websites and creating marketing databases.

They were one of the first companies to help golfers reserve tee-times online. “That led to the creation of a small version of what is GolfNow,” said McIntosh, who started playing golf in his mid-20s. Within four years they partnered with Comcast’s Golf Channel and then sold it to them a few years later.

“So, as a 29-year-old, I helped negotiate and sell a company that I helped create,” McIntosh said, adding that he eventually became its leader.

Once he started with Comcast, McIntosh looked for new ventures. He was the primary driver of more than 20 mergers and acquisitions. His group identified youth and recreational sports as an opportunity, and bought a Minnesota company, Sports Engine, which provides a technology platform for leagues to run their business and for parents to manage their child’s sports participation. Now they provide software and mobile applications for more than 45,000 sports organizations and 16 million coaches, parents and youth athletes.

His work in the sports industry has earned him a spot in Sports Business Journal’s “Forty Under 40” as a top young talent in sports business.

During the pandemic, when movie theatres suffered huge losses, McIntosh saw an opportunity as another Comcast-owned business unit, Fandango Media, was in a state of transition. Through his relationships with other leaders within Comcast and NBCUniversal, he was provided the opportunity to extend his responsibilities to encompass the entertainment leadership team of Fandango, Rotten Tomatoes and Vudu (recently renamed Fandango at Home). Since then, he has led that organization to renewed success as the negative impacts of the pandemic have subsided.

It turned out to be another example of where recognizing opportunities and turning them into reality has proven to be a successful McIntosh venture. Now, with his vision fixed firmly on the future, McIntosh is ready to tackle the new growth and partnership endeavors expected to come Comcast's way later this year.