Speaker Profile

Shira Springer is a Lecturer in Managerial Communication at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a journalist. Her teaching focuses on leadership communication, sports strategy and storytelling. Her features, columns and essays appear in a variety of publications, including the Sports Business Journal and The New York Times, and often address issues at the intersection of sports and culture, especially women’s sports and gender inequity.

Her essays also have appeared in The New York Times best seller Upon Further Review: The Greatest What-Ifs in Sports History (Hachette, 2018) and Our Boston: Writers Celebrate the City They Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Additionally, she’s co-authored business case studies on women’s sports, including "The National Women's Soccer League (A): Navigating Uncertainty, Building for the Future" (MIT Sloan School of Management, May 2021) and “The National Women’s Soccer League (B): Navigating a Crisis, Repairing a Culture” (April 2022).

Prior to MIT, she covered sports for The Boston Globe, multiple NPR programs, and NPR affiliate WBUR. As a Globe staff writer, Springer reported extensively on the Boston Marathon bombings and shared in the paper’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize for that coverage.

As a sports journalist, she’s covered all four major Boston professional teams, the NBA Finals, World Series, Super Bowl, Stanley Cup Final, and the Winter and Summer Olympics, and she served as the Globe’s Celtics beat writer for seven years. Her stories on the Celtics and the NBA, as well as the larger sports world, earned national recognition and awards for investigative journalism, breaking news and feature writing. Her radio storytelling won multiple awards for sports reporting and narrative sports features.

Springer previously taught at Boston University in the College of Communication. While with BU's Department of Journalism, she created and taught the courses Sports Storytelling and Sports, Gender and Justice.