Nick Kurtz – Pepperdine University

If Nick Kurtz looks familiar, it is because he might be. Somewhere between a Bosch Tools commercial, a two-year run as spokesperson for Skil Power Tools, and shooting pool with Charlize Theron in a Budweiser ad, Kurtz became one of those faces people swear they know but can’t quite place. He found out just how far that reach traveled while standing in line at the Louvre during his honeymoon in Paris, when a family from Phoenix stopped him, certain they recognized him from a commercial that had run in their hometown. It is a strange kind of fame, the recognizable stranger, and it is not a bad description of the path that eventually led Kurtz to Pepperdine University, where he now serves as assistant athletic director for facilities, events and capital projects.

That path runs through soundstages, construction sites and now, an 830-acre campus perched above the Pacific in Malibu, California, where Pepperdine competes as a member of the West Coast Conference. Kurtz oversees athletic facilities, event operations, capital projects and revenue-generating rentals for a department that, like the university itself, prizes small class sizes and a sweeping, ocean-view setting as much as it does competitive success—Pepperdine won the D1-AAA Directors Cup this year as the most successful non-football institution. It is a setting that comes with a cost. Nearly every project Kurtz touches, whether it is a scoreboard or a stadium, must clear the same maze of coastal review that governs anything visible from the water, and that reality has made patience the most valuable skill in his unlikely résumé.

“We have an incredible group of experts in our Planning Operations & Construction department that are the driving forces in making these difficult projects happen,” Kurtz explains. “I take one of many seats at a crowded table of exceptional team members.”

It started in Iowa

Kurtz grew up in Storm Lake, Iowa, a blue-collar community where the expected career paths ran through farming, law enforcement, education or coaching. He found something different at the University of Iowa, where a theater arts degree drew him toward acting, even as nearly three years working in the athletic department taught him the mechanics of facilities and event management. To pay his way after college, he spent three years as a project manager for a contractor and construction company, absorbing lessons in renovation, building systems and scheduling that had nothing to do with the stage and everything to do with his future.

The construction job, arranged through a childhood friend, was the best-paying work Kurtz could find at the time and was steady, but he always understood it was temporary. In 2011, his wife, Amanda, accepted an entry-level position that evolved into a leadership role at Pepperdine, and the family moved to Southern California so he could chase acting full time.

“That leap of faith is by far the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” Kurtz says. ”But my wife is the hardest-working person I know, and without her none of this is possible.”

The gamble paid off in fragments and flourishes.

His first taste of the spotlight came soon after moving to Los Angeles when he was the big winner on an episode of Wheel of Fortune, reveling in a trip to the Dominican Republic and using his winnings to buy his wife’s wedding ring. Soon to follow were tens of thousands of appearances on American television promoting major brands like Walmart, Panera Bread, and Toyota, as well as bit parts in television shows like History Channel’s “Vikings.”

Slowly but surely, Kurtz became a working actor in Hollywood, and he remains a member of SAG-AFTRA to this day.

“It’s a chapter in my life I’m immensely proud of,” he says.

But Hollywood is a city built on rejection, and Kurtz absorbed plenty of it along the way.

Kurtz has lived through more rejection than almost anyone working two different fields at once, he says, and he has failed spectacularly in entertainment more than once.

“I keep going back to it,” Kurtz says.

Back to the sidelines

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down productions across Los Angeles, and the writers’ and actors’ strikes that followed kept the industry unsettled for years afterward, Kurtz found himself circling back to the campus that had already reshaped his family’s life. Simply put, he had been joking with Pepperdine’s former athletic director at the time about his old construction background, and the joke turned into an offer.

Kurtz told the athletic director he’d be willing to help, and the opportunity came together from there.

“This has been an opportunity to give back to a place that changed our life,” Kurtz says.

Kurtz joined Pepperdine in March 2022 and moved into his current role in August 2025, inheriting a portfolio that touches nearly every physical corner of Waves athletics. He manages facilities, oversees game-day operations, represents athletics during capital construction, and increasingly turns his old industry connections into new department revenue. Drawing on relationships built over more than a decade in entertainment, Kurtz restructured Pepperdine’s filming operation and nearly tripled rental revenue within his first ten months on the job, creating a funding stream that now helps cover salaries, locker room renovations and future improvements. Productions use Pepperdine’s campus for commercials, promotions, photo shoots and entertainment programming, with the department providing everything from hospitality to transportation.

Building against the tide

Malibu’s geography, so central to Pepperdine’s identity, is also the single greatest obstacle to expanding it. Coastal development at the Malibu campus is subject to the jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission pursuant to a Long-Range Development Plan and Specific Plan for Development established in 1987 by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. . This layer of review that can turn even a modest scoreboard upgrade into a multiyear process.

Kurtz says so many restrictions tied to the campus’s proximity to the ocean that longtime staff and newcomers alike are routinely caught off guard by what requires approval.

“There is no precedent for anything that we do,” Kurtz says.

Land is scarce, costs run far above national norms, and ordinances restrict potential improvements across campus; Kurtz and his colleagues have learned to build around what already exists rather than fight for what does not. The department’s new arena, set to open in December after more than a decade of planning before ground was even broken, and its recently completed state-of-the-art golf clubhouse both required that same incremental, space-conscious approach.

“Before the new arena, it was a parking lot next to a dorm,” Kurtz says. “It is a monumental achievement given the constraints and took an incredible group of people to make [the arena] happen. It will change Pepperdine forever.”

After everything, Kurtz says he is still stunned by how often the rules surprise him, even years in.

“It recently took over a year to get a flagpole installed at the soccer stadium,” he says.

The front porch

None of it, Kurtz says, discourages him. The same instinct that sent him back into audition rooms after rejection now carries him through years-long approval processes.

“You just get back up and do it again, in acting and in this role,” Kurtz says.

He describes athletics as the front porch of Pepperdine, the public-facing showcase that shapes how recruits, families and visitors experience the university, and he believes stronger facilities and production capabilities strengthen recruiting, branding and the daily experience of Waves student-athletes. That belief has only deepened as Pepperdine has notched high-profile wins, from a nationally ranked baseball stadium to marquee moments in golf, even while the department leans on donor support more than ever before, accomplished by the most ambitious fundraising initiative in the university’s history.

Kurtz’s wife, Amanda, now serves as senior associate athletic director and senior woman administrator at Pepperdine, making the university a shared inheritance for the family in more ways than one. Kurtz still thinks about acting nearly every day, and he has not entirely closed that chapter. But between the ocean views, the long hours and a job that lets him repurpose every strange turn in his résumé, he has settled into something that feels less like a fallback and more like a fit.

Kurtz says he made it, he did it, and that it is so rewarding to know that.

“Trust the process,” Kurtz says.