A Fencer in the Front Office

Camille Dawson’s (MBA ‘26) life in sports and leadership.

In hindsight, it seems obvious that Camille Dawson (MBA ‘26) would become an athlete. Born the youngest of three girls into an athletically-minded family in Houston, Texas (both of her sisters were athletes at Stanford, and her mother is a nationally syndicated sports radio personality), sports and competition were a fundamental component of her upbringing. She recalls bonding over sports discussions with her mother, a competitive gymnast in her younger years, and was encouraged from an early age to get involved in athletics. However, it took a while for her to find her niche. She tried diving, dance, and several other sports in grade school but ultimately settled on archery, skeet, and fencing in high school.

With her focus set and preferences for deadly weapons well-established, she quickly started to excel as a fencer. She’d originally discovered the sport through her older sister, and what began as a promise made to her father to stick with the sport for at least a year turned into a passion. While she began her journey with the foil, the most restrictive style of competition, she ultimately settled on the épée, joining a gym in Houston that focused exclusively on the discipline. She enjoyed the fact that it wasn’t necessarily as intense as other sports, and as she improved, she began to think more about pursuing a career in college. Stanford seemed like an obvious choice; her sister was already a fencer for the Cardinals, which made her decision an easy one once the opportunity was presented to her. 

In Palo Alto, she stood out once again. Named a captain her junior season, she was part of a team that made it to the NCAA tournament. And while her senior season was largely lost to the COVID-19 pandemic, she looks back on the experience extremely fondly. She grew mightily as an athlete and person and built relationships that will last a lifetime. However, her experience wasn’t without its challenges. As a Management Science and Engineering major, balancing academics and athletics was difficult at times, and she often wondered if everything she was doing was worth it. To complicate things further, she’d been diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder in high school, which made a high-stress lifestyle even more difficult. While she found an opportunity to decompress as a member of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, her experience also instilled in her a commitment to building community and promoting holistic wellness that would ultimately change the trajectory of her entire life. 

As her career as an athlete wound down, Dawson knew she wanted to stay close to the world of sports. She’d taken classes in sports as part of her major and actively sought out opportunities in the notoriously difficult-to-crack field of professional sports. She eventually found one that returned her to the Lone Star State: after months of cold calls, zoom meetings, and applications, she joined the San Antonio Spurs in a Chief-of-Staff role to the team’s Chief Operating Officer. There, she was quickly promoted to a management role within the Partnerships organization. Her three years there corresponded with the “Wemby Boom” following the team’s acquisition of superstar Victor Wembanyama, which created excitement and brought national attention back to San Antonio. Professionally, she was excelling, advancing quickly through the organization by doing work that challenged her. She’d also met her now fiancé through her role with the Spurs. By every possible metric, things in her life were going well. 

However, she couldn’t help but feel like there was something else out there. Her boss at the time had gone to HBS and spoke very highly of his experience, and others pushed her to go back to school while she was young and had the flexibility to do so. Her longer-term career goals included a transition to football, which had been her first passion since watching the 2006 Rose Bowl with her mother, and business school seemed like a good way to do that. And though she applied to several schools across the country, she fell in love with HBS. Despite the distance from Central Texas and the life she’d built there, Dawson realized that this was an opportunity she simply couldn’t pass up and decided to move to New England away from her fiancé, who was extremely supportive of her decision, in order to pursue it. 

While she’s still figuring out her immediate next steps, her long-term goal is to become the Commissioner of the NFL. She hopes to serve as a change agent for a league whose fanbase is nearly half women but lacks meaningful outreach programs and has historically struggled with managing instances of sexual harassment and assault. In a league where, historically, the “bottom line speaks more than anything else,” she sees an opportunity in making the league a safer, better place for all of its stakeholders. Additionally, as player safety, primarily with regard to head injuries, becomes a bigger priority within the league, she hopes to be an advocate for player health to preserve the game for generations to come. 

In the meantime, however, she’s busy with leadership roles here on campus. Elected Section E President this year, she used her platform to promote “mental health equity” among her section-mates. Her experience as a high-performance athlete taught her that “balance, performance, and well-being” are possible to achieve simultaneously, and she made it her goal to facilitate an inclusive environment where everyone was able to achieve those ends. 

And while this role kept her busy as she immersed herself deeper into the HBS experience, she realized that there was more that she aspired to do and achieve. Wanting to help her classmates take full advantage of the limited time they have at HBS, she decided to throw her hat in the ring and run for Student Association Co-President. She and her running mate, Sabine, ran on a platform of a “stronger, more connected HBS” focused on empathy, inclusion, and transparency. After the results were tallied, it was announced that they’d earned the right to serve in the 2025-26 school year. She hopes to use her platform to serve as a wellness advocate and plans to do her best to ingrain a commitment to holistic well-being into campus culture. As if this weren’t enough for one person to juggle, she’s also in the midst of planning her wedding, as she and her fiancé have set a date for this December. 

Dawson hopes that her next destination is New York but doesn’t have any firm plans as of yet. If history is any indicator, however, she’ll get there in her own unique way. 

John Mahoney (MBA ’26) is a native of West Des Moines, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021 with a degree in Finance. While in college, he was a walk-on defensive back for the Fighting Irish and wrote a book about his experience, titled History Through The Headsets. Prior to coming to HBS, John worked in consulting and strategy in Minneapolis and Chicago.