Manuka Sports Event Management is led by Julianna Barbieri and Hugh Piggin, a team with 10+ years experience working on major sports events from Super Bowls to Olympics as well as hands on experience in thousands of miles of ocean racing from fully crewed to short-handed trans-oceanic races and record attempts.

Their wide variety of understanding of both sailing and sports event management makes Manuka the perfect fit to successfully bring professional sailing on this level to the United States.

Hugh Piggin
Professional Sailor and Principal Owner, Manuka Sports Event Management LLC

Prior to forming Manuka Sports Event Management, LLC, Hugh has spent his entire life sailing, which has given him the foundation and extreme understanding of how large-scale professional sailing events are run.

Hugh’s personal motivation for starting Manuka comes from his many years of working with short-handed sailing programs. In that time he experienced the amazing success grand prix races have in Europe and how much need there is for something in the United States that would allow the sport to grow.

Hugh grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and started sailing at age eight. Sailing soon became a sporting passion for him as he represented his intermediate and high schools at a national level. While undertaking his Bachelors degree in psychology and geography at Auckland University, Hugh continued competing and progressed to sailing with more aggressive crews and larger boats in national competitions and off-shore races.

Hugh has over 100,000 logged miles, 7 Transatlantic crossings, 4 Newport-Bermuda races (including a class win), a Transatlantic record attempt, a Cross Channel record (UK-France return), Two Northern Ocean Racing Trophy titles and numerous regattas in the United States, Caribbean and Europe.

Julianna Barbieri
Principal Owner, Manuka Sports Event Management LLC

Julianna is an Emmy Award winning production executive with over ten years of live sporting event based experience working for the top sports television companies in the US. Her experience in live sports production has given her the first hand experience needed to organize and manage large-scale events.

Julianna began her career with ABC Sports in the promotion and advertising department editing promos and writing scripts. After two years she went to work on the Salt Lake Olympic Games and that started a long stint freelancing in remote production where she worked on a variety of live events including college football, golf, auto racing, basketball and Monday Night Football.

In 2006, Julianna was hired by CBS Sports to rebrand the graphics package for all sports events, which included Super Bowl XLI. She has led the graphics department at CBS Sports since that time and most recently redesigned and re-launched the animation package at Super Bowl XLIV. Julianna has worked multiple Super Bowls, BCS Bowl Games, NCAA Final Fours, British Opens, US Tennis Opens, the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics and countless other football, IRL, golf and basketball games.

Julianna holds a BS in Television Production from Ithaca College and an MS in Sports Business from New York University.