Brian Araujo – New Jersey Institute of Technology

A high school counselor in New Jersey once accidentally enrolled a sophomore in a junior/senior sports marketing class. The student was Brian Araujo, a teenager of Portuguese descent with a lifelong obsession with soccer. He could have been moved to another class. Instead, he stayed — and something clicked. Sitting among older students, absorbing the business side of the games he loved, Araujo found his direction. He has traced nearly every career decision back to that one unremarkable scheduling mix-up.

“That is where I made the decision to work in sports,” says Araujo, now the athletic operations and facilities manager at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. “It is a pretty cool way to get your outlook on your career. I always go back to that one moment. It was meant to be.”

Araujo earned a degree in sports management from William Paterson University of New Jersey before entering the workforce through the New York Giants ticket office and operational roles with Sky Blue FC, the NWSL club now known as Gotham FC. Professional soccer gave him early exposure to event management, revenue generation, and sponsorships — a compressed education in what it takes to run an organization. Following the challenges brought on by COVID-19 and its impact on the sports industry, Araujo continued developing his experience with the New York Red Bulls youth programs before joining NJIT in August 2021.

His entry into collegiate athletics came with an immediate trial by fire. Within two weeks of starting, his supervisor left the department, leaving Araujo to navigate the job largely on his own, with guidance from veteran staff members. But he figured it out.

“I was thinking, ‘What the heck am I going to do?'” he recalled. “The way I learned was by being put in the position to have to do it. I wouldn’t change that experience for anything.”

He was promoted to his current leadership role in January 2024. Today, Araujo oversees event management, facility operations, rentals, student employees, and capital improvement projects for all 19 Division I sports at NJIT, a public research university in Newark known for its polytechnic focus and a student body drawn heavily from engineering and design disciplines.

Managing more with less

Mid-major athletic departments operate in a fundamentally different financial reality than Power Four programs, and Araujo describes NJIT’s situation with clear-eyed candor. Budgets are tight, staffing is lean, and every decision carries weight. Minimum wage increases in New Jersey have added pressure to a student worker’s budget that already requires careful management.

“We’re getting pressure to make more and spend less,” he says. “How do we do more while saving more?”

That tension shapes how Araujo thinks about his team of roughly 70 to 80 student workers. Rather than simply adding headcount, he is exploring ways to give fewer employees greater responsibility — finding efficiencies while maintaining quality across every venue. He also leans heavily on a collaborative department culture where staff members across functions pitch in when needed. For younger employees, Araujo takes a mentorship approach rooted in the same hands-on method that shaped him: assign the task, provide details, let them figure it out, and be available when things get complicated.

The facilities arms race

Few forces have reshaped collegiate athletics more rapidly than NIL and revenue sharing, and their effects reach all the way to facilities managers. Recruits now arrive on campus with sharper eyes and higher expectations. Locker rooms, playing surfaces, and arena aesthetics are evaluated as seriously as coaching staffs and academic programs. For mid-major schools that cannot simply write large checks, creativity becomes the primary currency.

NJIT has responded by targeting specific upgrades with high visibility: refinished tennis courts, a resurfaced arena floor, locker room upgrades and a new turf field that Araujo considers the capital project he is most proud of. He reviewed CAD drawings, coordinated contractors, and managed the project largely independently, with guidance from the senior associate athletic director — an experience he believes gives him a professional edge over peers who have not had the same opportunities.

“Kids want to come to a school where there is the latest and greatest,” he says. “Over the past few years, we’ve done some big things.”

The department also invests in fan experience during basketball games to drive attendance and engagement. Every enhancement is weighed against available resources and the broader goal of attracting and retaining student-athletes at a school competing in an increasingly professionalized landscape.

Turning facilities into revenue engines

NJIT’s location in Newark gives it access to a metropolitan market that few mid-major programs can match, and Araujo has helped transform the university’s athletic venues into active revenue generators. The list of outside users reads like an unlikely cross-section of American life: Netflix productions, WWE tryouts, commercial photo shoots, youth sports leagues, NYU soccer home games, and civic events, including a Peruvian Presidential election that brought roughly 20,000 voters onto campus to cast ballots across hundreds of voting stations hosted inside NJIT’s facilities.

Each rental requires careful coordination to protect the venues used daily by student-athletes and campus recreation programs. Araujo sets strict operational expectations with outside renters, communicates clearly about limitations, and monitors facility conditions throughout each event. It is a balancing act that never fully resolves — revenue is necessary, but so is the integrity of the spaces his teams train and compete in every day.

The polytechnic environment at NJIT also gives Araujo access to tools unavailable at most institutions: 3D printers, water jet cutting systems, and emerging AI applications being piloted across campus. He has begun incorporating AI into administrative functions, including invoicing and content creation, looking for any edge that reduces time spent on routine tasks.

Araujo benchmarks constantly against peers across his conference and beyond, exchanging ideas with counterparts at other schools about shared challenges — wage pressures, rental management, facility upgrades on constrained budgets. The community of mid-major facilities professionals, he says, functions more like collaborators than competitors.

“We are all facing the same challenges, just at different levels,” he says. “There is a pride factor. I would put our arena up against any in our conference and even the nation.”

Nearly five years into his time at NJIT, Araujo still describes the job the way someone might describe a sport they genuinely love — unpredictable, demanding, occasionally exhausting, and deeply satisfying. He is quick to tell younger professionals that meaningful careers exist outside the Power Four, that hard work and adaptability matter more than institutional prestige. Araujo was once told that a career in athletics is a lifestyle rather than a job, and he lives this every day.

The scheduling mistake that put a sophomore in the wrong class set off a chain of events that led him here, to a career spent managing complexity and finding meaning in the everyday chaos of collegiate athletics. He no longer considers any of it an accident.