POSITION 01  ·  INTERNSHIP  ·  SEPTEMBER 2026 COHORT

TALENT PARTNERSHIPS INTERN

Business Development & Strategy · Tonbara Sports & Entertainment

TERM
September 14 – December 18, 2026 (14 weeks)

LOCATION
Hybrid

COMMITMENT
Full-time, 40 hours per week

COMPENSATION
For-credit academic placement, plus a $1,000/month stipend

REPORTS TO
Talent Partnerships lead, with direct exposure to agency leadership

APPLICATIONS CLOSE
Friday, August 21, 2026 — reviewed on a rolling basis

APPLY TO
hello@tonbarasports.com

ABOUT TONBARA

Tonbara Sports & Entertainment is a full-service athlete representation agency headquartered in Toronto, with offices in Miami, New York, and Los Angeles. We are licensed by FIFA, FIBA, the NBA, and the PWHLPA, and we represent athletes in soccer, basketball, hockey, football, track and field, and Olympic sports.

We call ourselves Career Architects because representation, done properly, is not transactional. Contracts are only one piece of it. The rest is positioning, brand, media, commercial partnerships, and the long arc of a career that outlasts the playing years. That is the work.

We are a small team. That is the point of this program — there is no layer of the business you are shielded from, and no work that disappears into a folder.

THE ROLE

You will join the team that builds and grows our talent relationships — sourcing the creators, athletes and personalities we want on our roster and helping shape what we offer them.

This is a business development role first. You will spend real time on outreach: building target lists, writing the first email, tracking who replied and — more usefully — why those who didn’t reply didn’t. But it is not a volume-dial job. Anyone can send a hundred emails. We want someone who can look at a pipeline and tell us what it says about who we should be going after next quarter.

You will be given a named segment of the pipeline and asked to own it. Your monthly readout goes to leadership. When you are wrong, you will be told; when you are right, it changes what we do.

By December, you will have run partnership conversations end to end and have a point of view on where our talent strategy should go in 2027.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

PIPELINE AND OUTREACH

  • Build and maintain the outbound pipeline: research and qualify talent, agents, and management companies that align with our roster thesis

    •Draft and send first-touch outreach, then own the follow-up cadence — including the unglamorous discipline of CRM hygiene

    •Track why conversations stall, not just that they stalled

IN THE ROOM

  • Sit in on partnership calls, take notes that matter, and draft recaps and follow-ups that go out afterward

    •Build the one-pagers, pitch decks and talent profiles used in live conversations — material that gets read by the people on the other side of the table

MARKET INTELLIGENCE

  • Track competitive activity: who is signing whom, which agencies are entering which verticals, and which deals are being announced

    •Turn that into something usable — a view, not a clipping file

OWNERSHIP

  • Own a monthly pipeline readout: what moved, what stalled, and what you would change

    •Document the process you are trained in. You will write the version of the playbook the next person uses

    •Run one self-directed project: a category, region, or talent vertical you think we are under-indexed in — researched, argued, and pitched back to leadership

WHAT YOU’LL GET OUT OF IT

  • Direct exposure to how talent deals actually get sourced, structured and closed — not a sanitized version of it

  • Named ownership of a pipeline segment. This is not shadowing

  • A senior-level audience for your work. Your readouts go to leadership, not into a folder

  • A reference and a portfolio piece grounded in real outcomes you can point to and explain

  • A working understanding of the representation business from inside a small team, where you see every part of it

WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR

  • Enrolled in a program in business, marketing, communications, sport management, or a similar field — though we care more about how you think than what you studied

    • Comfortable writing a cold email that a stranger actually answers

    • Organized enough that nothing falls out of the pipeline

    • Genuinely interested in the creator, sports, or entertainment economy — you follow it without being asked to

    • Able to hold your own opinion in a room with people more senior than you and to change it when someone gives you a better one

NICE TO HAVE

  • Experience with a CRM — monday.com, HubSpot, Notion or Airtable

  • Prior business development or sales exposure in any industry

  • An existing network in creator or sports media

ELIGIBILITY

These are for-credit placements. To be eligible, you must be able to register this placement for academic credit through an approved co-op or internship program at your college or university. We will complete your school’s paperwork and adhere to its timelines — tell us your registration deadline in your application, and we will build around it.

You must be legally entitled to work in Canada for the duration of the term. This is a remote-first role based in Ontario; there is no relocation requirement or support.

HOW TO APPLY

Send your resume and a short note to hello@tonbarasports.com

Subject line: “Talent Partnerships Intern — [Your Name]”

In the note, answer one question in under 200 words:

THE QUESTION

Name one piece of talent you think we should sign, and why.

We read this before the resume. There is no correct answer and no hidden preference — we are reading for how you build an argument, not who you pick

Please also confirm your program and your school’s placement registration deadline so we can work to it.
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis and close on Friday, August 21, 2026. We may make an offer before the deadline, so earlier is better.

ACCESSIBILITY AND EQUAL OPPORTUNITY

Tonbara Sports & Entertainment is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, family status, or disability.

Accommodation is available on request at every stage of the recruitment and selection process, in accordance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. If you need an accommodation to apply or interview, please mention it in your email and we will arrange it. You do not need to disclose the reason.