Bazzano sees rugby as a future hit in American sports

Karyne (Bozarjian)Bazzano, a former Lynn English cheerleader, has seen the future of American sports and is convinced it is rugby.
Bazzano, president of Preston Marketing, is founder and CEO of American Rugby Sevens, which she projects will begin play in 2016 and gross $71 million, with multiple broadcasting formats and 16 teams across North America by 2020.
She?s so certain that she?s planked down $500,000 of her own money and spent countless hours enlisting an impressive list of sports and media professional to AR7?s management team. They include: Ed Goren (vice chairman of FOX sports) as commissioner, Jay Abraham (former COO of NASCAR Media) as chief revenue officer, three-time national champion rugby coach James Walker as director of rugby and former New England Patriots general manager Pat Sullivan as a much-consulted member of her advisory board.
But we digress from the Karyne Bazzano story and her roots in Lynn.
Now residing in downtown Boston, her family lived in a triple-decker on Essex Street before moving to a double-decker on Maple Street when she was in fourth grade. “I took my 11-year-old son for a drive past the apartment where I grew up and he thought I was joking,” said Bazzano, who also has a 7-year-old son.
She graduated from Lynn English in 1984, then from UMass-Amherst, where she also was a cheerleader. Her college major? Soviet Studies.
?I had big aspirations of becoming an attorney and involved in international law,” she said. “My grandfather is Armenian, so I had an affinity for all things Russian back then. Of course, the year I graduated was the year the (Berlin) Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell apart. So, I never did anything with it.”
Instead, Bazzano become a bartender, attempting to raise money to attend law school. Seeing opportunity on the marketing side of the liquor industry, she worked for Miller and Coors for nearly nine years. Tired of traveling, she turned to grassroots marketing, forming her own company, Preston Marketing, over which she presides today. Her leading clients include Anheuser Busch and Maybelline.
?We employ about 5,000 21- to 25-year-olds ? a lot of them pretty girls in bars handing out samples and key chains,” she said.
Bazzano is also an inventor with two products of note: a lime slicer called the WedgE, of which she says 35,000 have been sold, and a hinged cup which she says cures hiccups.
Two years ago, one of her clients, Source, a high-end water importer from Wales, was seeking to tie into a sport. Source?s decision to sponsor rugby in New York led Bazzano to a trip to the United Kingdom and Twickenham, considered the sport?s mecca.
?I wasn?t familiar with the sport,” Bazzano admitted. “I expected it to be slow. I thought it was played by the kids who couldn?t make the football team. But watching it for two days, it was the most exciting sport I?d ever seen. Not just that, but it was played by the most humble athletes. And the fans are taught etiquette — to passionately cheer for your team without ever disparaging the opponent. There were lots of colors (on jerseys) and lots of music ? anthems. I said: ?Why not pro rugby in the U.S.??”
Bazzano wasn?t enamored by just any rugby. It?s the 7-on-7 version of the sport ? which will be featured at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro ? which she found most entertaining and most marketable. She?s sure the 7-on-7 game is what coaxed Goren out of retirement.
?It?s the renegade version of the game,” she said. “Ed Goren said it?s the ultimate made-for-TV sport ? that he?d never seen anything more exciting to broadcast. It?s like a constant kickoff return or special-teams play in football. The ball is always in motion. There are no timeouts and each game lasts only 16 minutes including halftime.”
Bazzano?s proposed format will feature all four teams from a conference playing at one site in a six-match round robin. She expects the league to open in 2016 with Eastern and Western conferences ? the champi