Pre-professional internships have become a compulsory element of undergraduate education in general, and in sport management specifically, over the past 20 years. These often low- or unpaid positions tend to be championed by program developers and internship coordinators as a means to enter the highly competitive sport industry whilst serving as a site to promote the opportunities current and future students in the department may have as a reason to enroll at an institution. For neoliberal institutions internships make sense in that they serve as an answer for the technocratic push for “experiential learning,” and cost the institution virtually nothing in overhead costs in return for tuition revenues. However, internships are not without critique as, at their worst, they can simply be viewed as modern versions of indentured servitude, and a means of decreasing entry-level jobs and compensation (e.g. Newman, 2014). While we acknowledge ongoing debates about the way(s) contemporary internships are used by institutions and the sport industry (often to find cheap labor and depress the market) this presentation will take a different tact – seek out where internships come from and how they have changed. By historicizing sport management internships our aim is to better understand how we got here and can better serve students in the future.