John Celestand won an NBA championship, but he didn’t spend the rest of his life coasting on it. He didn’t lock himself into a forever career in front of the camera, either. After nearly a decade covering college basketball for ESPN+ and ESPNU, he looked at where he was headed and realized he didn’t like the destination.
The pay was weak. The path up didn’t exist. So he walked away from being on air and stepped into public media, program management, and funding strategy. Today, he runs funding services at the Knight x LMA BloomLab, supporting Black-owned local news outlets across the country.
He Left the Microphone Before It Became a Trap
Moving into media wasn’t his biggest decision. Leaving it was.
Celestand put in ten years on air, nine of them with ESPN. Walking out meant ditching his contacts, his regular tournament gigs, and the visible brand he’d built from scratch. That takes guts. But he could see where things were heading.
“I had been doing it for 10 years, and I felt like I hit a glass ceiling,” he admitted. Beyond that, sports broadcasting alone just wasn’t paying the bills.
Instead of sitting around waiting for a magically better network offer, he rebuilt his career path. He moved through roles at Rutgers, Goodwill Industries, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. At CPB, he directed a project across 11 public media stations, then helped manage another that touched 15. By 2022, he landed at BloomLab.
By 2026, his funding division had helped five pilot clients submit over $5 million in grant proposals. They brought in nearly $300,000 in under nine months, with plenty more applications still in play.
Three Rules Guided his Transition.
First, leave when the ceiling is structural. You have to learn the difference between a temporary bump in the road and a system that is fundamentally broken. One passes. The other keeps you underpaid and stuck. Recognizing this, Celestand stopped waiting on ESPN. He took his media background and pivoted hard into organizational leadership.
Second, pick leverage over visibility. Sometimes the smartest move means stepping out of the spotlight so your work can power multiple organizations at once. Getting to back Black-owned news outlets was, as he put it, “too hard for me to pass up.” At BloomLab, he traded talking to an audience for building real infrastructure—grant proposals, donor pushes, listener feedback systems, and funder networks.
Third, treat your relationships like actual infrastructure. A network is useless if you don’t engage with it. Show up. Stay active. Let those connections lead somewhere real. His ties to the Villanova alumni network led him straight to LMA executive Nancy Lane, which opened the door to his role at BloomLab. As Celestand noted, it proved to be “tangible evidence that connecting with people and connecting with the alumni association…has worked for me.”
The Ten-Year Bet That Didn’t Scale
Looking back, his decade in broadcasting wasn’t a total wash. He worked on respected platforms and reached big audiences. He just couldn’t turn that screen time into long-term stability.
The real trap wasn’t the industry itself. It was letting the glamor of television distract from two critical metrics: his actual income and his odds of promotion.
His solution was simple. Stop measuring success in airtime. Start building transferable skills like grant writing, business strategy, program management, and community engagement. That shift turned a sports media resume into a heavy-hitting leadership portfolio.
The Network Behind the Work
Today, a massive network supports this work. The Knight Foundation backed BloomLab with an initial $3.2 million, LMA provided the operational platform and publisher connections, and Villanova brought the talent.
His current portfolio includes 25 Black-owned publications, including The Philadelphia Tribune, The AFRO, The Washington Informer, and the New York Amsterdam News.
This positioning gives him direct insight into publisher economics, local foundations, funding pipelines, and the daily grind of running a small newsroom.
Run a Ceiling Audit
Look at your current trajectory and ask where you’ll realistically be two years from now. What are you earning? What transferable skills are you actually building?
If the honest answer is “not much”—no money, no growth, no leverage—stop chasing prestige. Look sideways. Move toward a role where your experience lets you control actual outcomes, budgets, and systems.