Max Esh ’99 remembers Gaynor not only as a place where he made his best friends and found his love of basketball but also as the place where he was finally able to “learn at my own pace and grow as an individual.” Esh is currently living out his dream of working in sports as a Senior Specialist for Premium Sales & Service at the New York Yankees. Max credits Gaynor with helping him to get to the career he loves today, saying that “Being learning disabled could have been a hardship but, with Gaynor’s specific focus on students like myself, Gaynor was a key component in molding me into the person I am today.”
Growing up, Esh wanted to play basketball and be like Michael Jordan. Although he had a feeling that making it as an NBA player was probably out of the question, he learned from other successful people to not say “I can’t do that,” but rather ask, “How can I do that?” By asking himself that question in that way, he was able to visualize himself working with a sports team. He didn’t yet know in what capacity, but he knew he would get there somehow.
With grand goals of working in the field of professional sports and with the challenges of having a learning difference, Esh knew that he would have to work much harder to “close the gap” and achieve his dreams. After Gaynor, Esh attended The Windward School for 7th, 8th, and 9th grades and then went on to join many of his Gaynor peers at York Preparatory School, where he graduated high school. Drawn to the sunshine, Esh decided to attend college at the University of Arizona where he majored in Sociology and minored in Business.
After graduation from Arizona, Esh worked three part-time jobs in order to figure out how to find the right job in sports. He worked as an assistant basketball coach at York Preparatory, as a server and busser throughout New York City, and for the Knicks, working in the Field Marketing department and coaching at basketball camps – anything that would bring himself closer to his goal. After applying for every job posting he saw, Esh got his big break when he got a call back for a seasonal evening sales position with the New York Yankees. After spending a summer working two day jobs and cold calling for Yankees at night, Esh impressed the team at the Yankees so much that he was the only person that summer promoted to a full-time role in Inside Sales. Since then, Esh has been promoted multiple times and is now the highest level of sales associate with the Yankees.
Esh loves his job because it is something new every day, “One day I could be in the city meeting with the top CEO’s from the largest companies in the country and the next day visiting my clients at a Yankees game.”
Although Esh has achieved his goals, he isn’t stopping there. He plans to get his real estate license and is getting married in the summer of 2018. And of course, top off a banner year with what is hopefully the Yankees’ twenty-eighth championship win!