My Career Part 1

After a long row of years as an agent, I have now well over 200 negotiated deals on my resume. I have spent countless hours on sale and service of clients.

Many people ask me how I got started and that sounds exciting. Well being a hockey agent is nothing like the movie Jerry McGuire. I've decided to write a bit of history review from the day I started to present time.

My career actually started when I was attending a hockey game with my hometown team Rødovre in Denmark, where one my best friends was up in the red area, as "our" team was playing really bad. He said; "Damn, I wish somebody would just sell some good players to Rødovre". My friend however didn't realise he had just kicked me in the behind and started a journey for me. This was back in 2001-2002 season, so I spent the start of the year 2002 researching what was needed in order to make a hockey agency. After six months time, I opened my hockey agency, called Schwartz Hockey Management.

(Funny site: Try searching the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for Schwartz Hockey and you'll see how many different websites I have had).

From 1st of June 2002 to 31st of December 2007, I was the managing director of SHM as we shortened the company. I quickly got a German partner in the company, a fellow called Oliver Janz. He was gonna cover the Central European markets, so I could focus more on Scandinavia. So at the start of 2003 we was getting known as the rookies in the market. I am sure a lot of teams took advantage of us being new and really wanted the sales. So we lowered prices on players in order to get in and then if our clients played as we expected, a payraise wasn't hard to get.

In 2003 Oliver and I got contacted by a man called Stan Karbowiak from Canada. He wanted to help us in North America, a place we hadn't spent any time on. Stan got a job in SHM and the three of us made a good impact on the European market selling lots of players. We aimed at minor leagues in North America and the secondary leagues in Europe.

I had one of my first sales in Lubomir Pisar, which was a young and very talented goalie. He had just finished playing in WJC U20 and was at age 20 a regular goalie in the strong Slovak Extraliga. He was playing in Martin, and I remember speaking to two other players, that told me that Lubos was the real deal, a had a huge talent. Lubos was actually splitting the time between the pipes with Peter Budaj (now in Colorado NHL), and if hadn't been for an injury my bet would have been Lubos in NHL.

Anyways he was interested in a deal with my agency and I got him to Aalborg in the Danish Elite in the next season 2003-04. He played impressively and was a very cheap alternative for them. I will not say his salary, however he was one of the worst paid imports in the whole league. After his season in Aalborg, I got him a really good deal in Frederikshavn, where Lubos after a couple of seasons wanted to be on his own.

In total we sold around 10 players in the first season, and then spent a lot of time getting in touch with many many more players. So in 2003-04 we was close to 80 clients and sold a little of 50 clients that year. In 2004-05 we had a good year and our name was very solid in Europe. Teams and players knew they could trust us and we got the job done, so sales increased to 55. The following year was the best I have ever had, sales was now up at around 75 clients.

However all good things must have an end. We started to have some internal problems in SHM, that led to Stan  leaving the company in 2006. After that Oliver got seriously ill and had troubles leaving his apartment, let alone work on the agency. Our name lost a lot of credibility and when I was approached by another agent called Flemming Jensen, I saw no other alternative than to leave Oliver. It was a tough deicision but a decision I had to make in order to save myself and if I wanted to continue as agent.

More will follow in part 2.