NEWS AND EVENTS

Tandem adds marketing work for agent’s MLB clients

Tandem Sports & Entertainment, the firm formed a year ago by attorney and NBA agent Jim Tanner, has expanded to handle marketing services for baseball players, including Seattle Mariners pitcher Chris Young.

MLB agent and attorney Jon Fetterolf, who worked at Williams & Connolly before joining law firm Zuckerman Spaeder last year, has formed a partnership with Tandem in which the agency will handle all off-the-field work for his baseball clients.

Those clients include Washington Nationals pitcher Ross Ohlendorf, Atlanta Braves reliever David Hale, Colorado Rockies utility player Matt McBride and San Diego Padres infielder Chris Nelson, who was just designated for assignment. Fetterolf, who also works as litigator and attorney representing agents, players and high-profile individuals, specializes in contract work for his clients. He will remain at Zuckerman Spaeder but will outsource marketing and off-the-field work for his clients to Tanner and a team at Tandem.

He and Tanner worked together for more than 10 years at Williams & Connolly, and both said that relationship was the reason for the deal.

At Tandem, the players will be represented by a team that will include Terese Whitehead, senior vice president of marketing and brand development; Meredith Geisler, senior vice president of communications; and Helen Dooley, senior vice president of talent representation and general counsel.

Dooley and Whitehead worked at Williams & Connolly and Geisler was outside public relations to Williams & Connolly’s sports division before moving with Tanner to his new agency last year.

“I’m a lawyer,” Fetterolf said. “I am a litigator. I am not a marketing person. I am not a PR person, so I felt I needed to provide those services that are necessary to my clients. Rather than to start from the ground up and hire all those people, these are people I know and like. Our players like them. They are people with great integrity.”

Neither Tanner nor Fetterolf disclosed the financial terms of the partnership.

Tanner formed Tandem last October after working at Williams & Connolly since 1997. Tanner represents 31 basketball players in the NBA and WNBA and on teams globally.