How Kim Miale became a trailblazing NFL agent with a star-studded client list

Kim Miale isn’t just making her mark as one of the few women in the sports agency world. She’s making history, too. During the 2018 NFL Draft, her client Saquon Barkley went No. 2 overall to the New York Giants, the highest a player represented by a woman has ever been selected. But her work doesn’t stop there.

She’s also currently the agent for players like Pittsburgh’s JuJu Smith-Schuster, Dez Bryant, Ravens offensive tackle Ronnie Stanley, Seahawks running back C.J. Prosise, and Chargers defensive end Isaac Rochell. Roc Nation also represents the Rams’ Todd Gurley, and Jacksonville’s Leonard Fournette.

Roc Nation encourages agents to focus on a select few clients per draft class. Last year, it was Barkley, who went on to win the NFL’s offensive rookie of the year award following his 2,028-yard, 15-touchdown season. In her sixth year of working at Roc Nation, Miale will be representing Stanford running back Bryce Love.

“I took a sports law class,” Miale told SB Nation. “And the professor happened to be a woman who was an NFL agent. She had an open internship and was taking applications, and I was fortunate enough to get the internship and that’s what kind of started the process. I interned with her every semester I possibly could, even in summers.”

That NFL agent was Kristen Kuliga, who helped negotiate Doug Flutie’s contract with the San Diego Chargers, worth $33 million, in 2001. She is also the founder of K Sports & Entertainment, which recently merged with another agency to form Vanguard Sports, and represents several former and current NFL athletes.

But Miale didn’t get to just leave law school and become a sports agent right away.

Kuliga’s firm didn’t have the bandwidth to hire Miale, so instead, she started her law career clerking in Connecticut before taking a job as a litigation lawyer in Boston. Although the job wasn’t exactly her passion, she admits it was a way to help her pay off what she owed from law school. But when a close family member of hers died, it clicked — she had to pursue her passion and become a sports agent.

“I had an uncle who I was really, really close with,” Miale explains. “He always mentored me about taking the path less traveled, and really encouraged me to not be afraid to do something outside the norm or outside the box. He passed away and I was the executor of his estate, and it was kind of a lightbulb moment where I thought, ‘I don’t wanna stay in a career that I really don’t enjoy and I don’t love.’ So I decided to go and take the test to get certified as an agent.”

After getting certified, Miale began recruiting and representing local players in Boston for a couple years before landing a job as a consultant at the now-defunct Madison Avenue Sports and Entertainment while still working as a litigation attorney. The agency wanted to expand to represent football players and brought Miale on board to do just that. Although she represented some clients from bigger schools, the deals were mostly for guys who ended up getting cut before the season began. Then came her big break.

Shortly after Roc Nation was founded in 2013, the agency hired Miale as its first in-house football agent to represent Geno Smith. Miale negotiated Smith’s rookie deal with the New York Jets worth about $5 million.

Being at the right place at the right time has helped her land some of her other clients, too. In fact, she decided she wanted to represent Barkley in January 2017 while she was recruiting Smith-Schuster.

“I was at the Rose Bowl on the brink of signing JuJu,” Miale said. “And obviously Barkley lit up the field that night. I had known of him anyway, but being at the Rose Bowl and watching that game I just thought, ‘my God, this is the player I need to focus on for next season because I’ve never seen anything like it. He’s so transformative, he’s electric out there.’”

While Miale says she’s proud of every single one of her clients, what some of her guys do off the field has been great to watch.

“Barkley going No. 2 in the draft as a running back, highest running back drafted since 2006, and then getting rookie of the year,” Miale says about the most satisfying parts of her job. “Just watching him move to the next chapter so seamlessly and be so successful has been really, really rewarding. And then also, to see what he’s done off the field, supporting his niece who has a very rare disease called 22q. Doing what he can to raise awareness for such a rare disease has been really inspiring to watch for him and his family.”

The same goes for Smith-Schuster, who has done charity work with Meals on Wheels and recently donated $20,000 to the organization in December 2018.

“JuJu, he was a guy who should’ve been drafted much higher, and I think that that’s been proven now that the scouting reports were wrong on him,” Miale says about the Steelers’ 2017 second-round pick. “Watching him go to a place like Pittsburgh where it was just the perfect fit for him, where he could go and thrive has just been incredible to watch.

“He does great work off the field, too. He’s very involved with Meals on Wheels, which oftentimes the elderly is a group that’s not really given a lot of attention — not a lot of players work with the elderly. It’s most of the time [working with] kids and doing stuff like that. So for JuJu to go and do Meals on Wheels with Pittsburgh, he’s done incredible stuff. To watch that has been really rewarding.”

“What’s helped me is coming from a legal background in Boston, where quite frankly I was feeling the same kind of gender-type roles,” Miale says. “The vast majority of opposing counsel were men, the judges were men, so for me it wasn’t a huge transition going from that world to the sports world.”

As of 2018, according to the NFLPA, only about 5 percent of certified agents are women, but since 2010, the organization has seen a 50 percent increase. While Miale says she doesn’t worry too much about statistics to not lose sight of what’s important, she’s cognizant of it, and is encouraged by the change that appears to be taking place.

“I’m hopeful that more and more women see that this business is something that they can not only break into but thrive in,” Miale says. “I was fortunate enough to have someone like Kristen [Kuliga] who was a total trailblazer. She laid so much of the groundwork, and I’m happy that the extent of the work that I’m doing can do the same for young women.”

NFL agency isn’t the only field where women are breaking barriers. Sarah Thomas is the first and only woman to be a full-time referee in the league, and there are currently a handful of coaching assistants who are women, including the Bucs’ Lo Locust and Maral Javadifar, and the 49ers’ Katie Sowers.

“It’s incredible to see that the glass ceilings are just getting completely shattered,” Miale says. “I think there’s just going to be more and more of that. It’s always the first that’s the hardest. When you have women in those positions, it just becomes much easier going forward.”

“Interestingly enough, the first deal I did with Geno Smith, the chief negotiator with the Jets was a woman named Jackie Davidson, who happened to be another woman in her 30s. So it was the two of us negotiating that deal — 10 years prior she probably wouldn’t have seen anything like that.”

“It’s really encouraging to watch the change,” Miale continued. “The NFL historically has been slow in making changes in diversity, but I think they’ve come far.”

In recent years, we’ve seen more and more players standing up for themselves. From players kneeling during the national anthem to on-field celebrations, the league is starting to feel more and more like a product of the players themselves.

Big-name players are also doing so by demanding contractsthey believe they’re worth. Most notably, we saw this with Antonio Brown, Aaron Donald, Le’Veon Bell, and Khalil Mack.

Miale believes this is a positive step forward with the upcoming collective bargaining agreement set to expire after the 2020 season.

“I think guys are becoming more part of the process, which I think is great,” Miale says of players’ involvement in contract negotiations. “It’s their career, it’s their livelihood. Having them feel empowered, understanding their own worth and their own leverage and how to use it is a great thing. At the same time, agents and players still need to show how united we are, and what a united front we have.

“Because at this stage right now where we have a CBA that’s about to expire, standing together and showing that we’re a collective team is going to help in the negotiation process for the NFLPA and the players when they’re going up against the league.

“The league has kind of tried to play on that ‘maybe there’s a paradigm shift where players feel that there’s less of a need for agents,’ but I don’t really think that that’s the case. I think that they’re just more actively involved with their agents. And as an agent I love that, so I think that that’s a positive, and we can still work together to effectively promote change.”

Miale is a true role model, and whether she set out to be one or not, she’s doing a pretty damn good job of it so far. As far as advice for young women wanting to do what she does, she recommends staying both genuine and tough.

“Be resilient. You can have a thousand ‘nos’, but one ‘yes’ can change the entire trajectory of your career. And also be true to yourself. Trust your instincts, and your skills, and be confident no matter what.

“If you’re willing to put the time in, and make the sacrifices and work hard then you can accomplish whatever you set your goal as.”