Risky moves paid off for Eastside Golf’s head of marketing

This story is the latest in our series on women leaders in sports and sports marketing. Read the rest of the profiles here.

Annette Parker had been a runner her whole life. Then, during her sophomore year of college at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she suffered an injury to her left knee that spelled the end of her competitive running career.

When she was feeling particularly down on her luck, her mom suggested she take some golf lessons—a suggestion that foreshadowed her near two-decade career in golf. “I asked her, ‘Why?’” Parker told Marketing Brew. “‘It’s boring,’ is what I said.”

Parker didn’t immediately take her mom’s advice, but the following year, when Parker was serving as the athletic director at a camp in Missouri and had to staff its driving range, she figured she might as well learn the ropes.

“Golf came as an interruption,” she said, “and I was open enough to pivot.”

Parker has now spent more than 15 years in the golf business, and at the start of this year, she took on the role of head of marketing at Eastside Golf, a golf apparel and accessories brand that’s part of a broader push to modernize a sport that hasn’t always been the most accessible.

“I was very intentional about going after golf once I made an assessment of the industry, because I didn’t see anyone who looked like me, and I was like, ‘I can’t be the only one who loves it like this, and if I am, then I should try to get more people to love it,’” she said. “The space was so white, so male-dominated. They were overdue for some change.”

Teeing off

Parker had long planned for a career in sports marketing. She studied the subject during her undergraduate days, then went on to earn a Master’s degree in sports administration from Northwestern University. After grad school, she landed an internship at the PGA Tour, but she took a break from golf to work in ad sales, a common starting point for execs she looked up to at the time, she said.

About six years later, she moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where she got a job as a sports marketing exec at CAA under Billy McGriff, the agency’s longtime co-head of golf. Parker recalled landing the gig only after making the move when she connected with McGriff on LinkedIn and asked for an informational interview—and brought her résumé along just in case.

“While I’m a planner, I tend to take very risky moves professionally,” she said. “I moved to Florida, packed my stuff up. I had an apartment, and that’s all I had. I didn’t have a car. I didn’t have a job.”

That wasn’t the first time Parker forced a change she wanted to see. In her teenage years, when her high school didn’t have a track team, Parker said she and her twin sister convinced the school to make one, which soon became a winning program to boot.

“It’s not to say that everything I put my mind to, it happens, but I get what I want because I am very strategic about work,” Parker said.

Hazard

Unexpected change as a result of hard work became something of a theme in Parker’s career, and the opportunity at Eastside Golf was no exception. She first came across the brand while engaging in the activity most of the world spent the majority of 2020 doing: doomscrolling.

Parker was still working at CAA, and while she said she “loved every minute of it,” 2020 was a hard time in her life. Shortly after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in May of that year, Parker, like many others, “was pretty much at a breaking point,” she said.

“I got into golf to make a change,” Parker said. “I wanted to affect the environment and bring more people in, more women, more color. I looked around, and I just didn’t think I had achieved that goal, and it wasn’t for my lack of trying.”

It was around that time that Parker came across Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl A. Cooper, the co-founders of Eastside Golf, on Instagram. Seeing Ajanaku, who played collegiate golf at Morehouse College, and Cooper, a PGA-certified instructor, representing young, Black people in the golf space inspired Parker, she said, and that September, Parker got connected with Ajanaku and Cooper through mutual friends. They officially signed with CAA the following March, Parker said.

Eastside Golf had already gained some fame in 2020, when NBA star Chris Paul wore their merch on the night of the NBA boycott in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake, but Parker became “like an agent for the business,” Cooper told Marketing Brew, introducing the Eastside Golf founders to execs at CAA and across industries to help grow the brand even further. Cooper and Ajanaku spent years talking to Parker about joining them full-time, she said, but it wasn’t until last year that she seriously considered it.

“What I knew I was doing was a lot more reaching across the table to help Eastside, because my seat was good, but I could get better leverage if I just [went] to the other side of the table,” she said. “There was a natural evolution.”

Follow through

In 2024, Parker was in a rough patch in her personal life, which resulted in her reevaluating her career again, she said. She was approaching 10 years at CAA, and the job felt like part of her identity, she said, much like track had when she was younger. But, like in her college days, she ultimately decided to lean into the turning point and pivot, finally agreeing to go in-house for Eastside Golf.

Parker admits that she can be a risk-taker professionally and personally; she’s not one to arrive at the airport hours early, she said, often showing up at her gate just as the plane doors are closing. But once she’s on board, she’s built for turbulence. At Eastside Golf, “the brand is very strong,” Parker said, but “the business is catching up” to that brand still.

“One of the things that we do really well is ideas, but I think the biggest thing is having someone to execute them,” Cooper said. “Good CMOs, to me, aren’t really the ideas people. Great CMOs are ones that can understand our brand, can understand the audience, and figure out ways to connect them.”

To help strengthen the business in the short-term, Parker said she’s focused on tapping into her media experience to help solidify the brand identity, establish detailed audience demographics and psychographics, and figure out how to best target them, including diversifying Eastside Golf’s media mix. In the long term, she said the brand is looking toward a Series A funding round and establishing a brick-and-mortar presence.

“There’s not many opportunities I will get to go and help build something from the ground up for something that I’ve been so passionate about,” Parker said, later adding that “we’ve got a really solid leadership team to think strategically about how we’re going to grow this company.”